Tonight we welcomed roughly 150 healthcare professionals from hospitals across the country to the sixth annual Symposium. In the spirit of this year’s theme, Think Together – Move Forward, we’re inviting this year’s attendees to collectively think about the “a-ha” moments they experience during the week’s sessions and to share them – whether through social media, networking sessions with fellow attendees, or simply jotting down really, really good notes for themselves in a Symposium program guide. To get things started, we’re sharing a few of our own.
Read on for three a-ha moments we gleaned from tonight’s special presenters.
Employee engagement drives customer engagement.
Rose Glenn, chief marketing officer at Henry Ford Health System, told us how her Detroit hospital network put competition aside in order to bring its customer and employee communities together. Henry Ford partnered with its biggest competitor in order to incent employees to move to midtown Detroit and invest in the health of the community by subsidizing $20,000 of each employee home purchase. And she told us how employees at all levels, from nurses to executives, routinely instigate internal education campaigns that ultimately lead to improved patient outcomes. Check out “I Wanna Wash My Hands” as an example.
Re-imagination is our future.
CPM Healthgrades president John Hallick opened up the evening with a tangible parallel for what re-imagination means for healthcare. Monona Terrace, the iconic structure designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright that serves as our Symposium home base this week, never saw the light of day during Wright’s lifetime, he said. It wasn’t until 60 years after Wright designed it that local engineers would re-imagine the building’s structure and kick aside numerous county rejections to construct a building that now hosts 600 conventions and generates $36 million in local economic activity a year. Hunh!
Healthgrades CEO Roger Holstein brought re-imagination closer to home in his keynote address by explaining how we access, consume and communicate healthcare information is changing, and we need only look as far as the tech industry for we’ll move foward. Skype, Twitter, Flipboard, Jive and Yelp have all re-imagined aspects of communication by building platforms around their customers’ needs first, not their own. Each of these technologies could be adapted for the healthcare industry, where delivering the right message to the right person through the right medium literally saves lives.
Marketing professionals should be in the center of all efforts to improve the health of the population.
Holstein believes marketers possess the ability to develop personalized communications that not only educate the audience about an issue, but motivate people to take actions that will lead to a positive health outcome; and only a marketing team will know how to leverage all of the communication channels necessary to reach, educate and influence consumers and physicians.
Likewise, Henry Ford Health System placed its patient satisfaction and outcomes initiatives in the hands of its marketing team when it merged customer engagement with patient engagement under Rose Glenn’s supervision. In Glenn’s perspective, this shift made perfect sense; after all, marketers have the skillset for listening to patient issues and the knowledge of what to do to effect change.
With only one day behind us, there’s so much more to go at 2012 HealthShare Symposium. We’ll do our part to chronicle what we learn here on the CPM Healthgrades Blog, and we hope our attendees will begin sharing a-ha monents of their own!
