Hats off to the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHMD) for putting together an A+ event in Orlando last week filled with substantive presentations and fantastic keynote speakers.
One of the clear themes that emerged from the conference was the need for PR and Marketing practitioners to understand and use data to drive organizational change and decisionmaking. Rick Foster, MD, Sr. Executive for the South Carolina Hospital Association, spoke about his use of data with communities and healthcare providers to reduce healthcare disparities – the Health Equity issue – and how data help them effectively target communities and even neighborhoods with programs to meet their specific health needs.
John Berg, VP of System Marketing for the SCL Health System, urged professionals to go beyond the counting of Facebook “likes” and “shares” in their measurement efforts. “What the President and CFO want to know is, ‘How many new patients did this campaign generate, what was the estimated revenue and how does that compare to our control group?’.
Ty Kennon of Mercy Health Systems, explained “if our department can’t measure it, we don’t do it.” His was the only department to get a budget increase this fiscal year, based on the ROI (Return on Investment) metrics they provided to upper management.
Gail Winslow, Associate Director, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and I presented on “Using Data to Drive Behaviors & Make Effective Decisions”. Gail suggests practitioners begin with a “data audit” to determine what data the organization has already and what additional data might be needed to drive organizational decisionmaking.
In her role as Director of Marketing at Concord Orthopaedics, Gail looked at CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data, state hospital association surveys, new patient data, surgical volume data, customer satisfaction survey results, referral data and conducted a zip code analysis as well as an analysis of payor mix. This led to her recommendation to open a 2nd Day Surgery Center and a 3rd practice location. The 3rd practice location reached its performance goal in the first 9 months of operation and the 2nd Day Surgery Center outperformed expectations at the half-year mark.
In her current role at the UMass Medical School, Gail led the conversion from an outdated legacy data system to Salesforce in an effort to automate data collection that would ultimately show the profitability of business units, build capacity for staff recruitment and allow for trends analysis.
A clear message to practitioners: don’t be afraid of data! If you don’t know how to analyze, curate and translate it now, make that your next professional development goal. If you would like help in evaluating your current measurement program, contact Robin Schell or Stacey Smith at Jackson Jackson & Wagner: rschell@jjwpr.com or ssmith@jjwpr.com, or, for more information on her programs contact Gail Winslow at gail.winslow@umassmed.edu. More about JJ&W at www.jjwpr.com