Healthcare By The Slice

It’s hard to argue that the world needs another blog, but I am wading into the crowded pool.  My intent is to provide useful, practical and (on good days) stimulating information for those who care about health care marketing can use to perform at a higher level.

And to minimize boredom on the bad days, my pledge is always to wrap it up in 399 words or less.

I would not commit to this column if I did not think I had something to say.  I’ve been involved in marketing and promoting health care services since the Nixon administration and, for better or worse, I’m still at it.  I’ve seen the good, bad and the silly.  I’ve made mistakes and learned from them.  I’ve got, as old guys like to say, experience.

But I’m not yet old and neither are my ideas.  Thankfully, people still value what I say enough to pay me for my time.  In this blog, however, I plan to give away as much as I can in little fruitful slices.

One of the symptoms of a lot of years on a job is that one develops philosophies.  When it comes to marketing health services, I’ve developed some guiding beliefs I think serve the industry well:

• The patient—the consumer—is the ultimate point of it all.  Forget the patient and you are lost.
• Health care is big, confusing, scary and frustrating.  Our job is to make it feel small, understandable, comforting and simple.
• For most of what we sell, consumers have to be sick to buy it.  No one is more vulnerable than a sick patient.  We have the power to abuse them, but not the right.
• If we are going to spend precious health care resources on advertising and promotion, we had better say something meaningful.

So my blog will cover the relationships between health care providers and patients, the systemic challenges that confront health care marketers in the quest to do the right thing well, and our efforts—good and bad—to advertise, promote, communicate, educate, sell and generate return on investment.

That’s the plan.  Click on my RSS feed for new installments.  Write me if you want to debate or discuss.  If anything I write strikes you as helpful, I would love to know.