Category: Health Care

Mayo Clinic High Employer Choice for Grads

BusinessWeek has an article about an annual survey of college graduates in which they are asked to name their ideal employer. Mayo Clinic ranked 14th, and here’s what the magazine said about my employer:

Arguably the most respected health-care institution in the country, the Mayo Clinic attracts patients from around the world. They have included the late King Hussein of Jordan and President Ronald Reagan.

Here’s the full article, and here’s a list of the top 25 (without having to go through the slide show.) Google, Disney and Apple were the top three.
It’s nice that grads think highly of Mayo Clinic; even more telling is that an employee-based survey put Mayo in the top 100, too.

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American Idol it’s not…

…but a Mayo Clinic physician, Janet Vittone, M.D., has been named one of five finalists in an ABCNewsNow.com/Prevention magazine contest called “Picture of Health” for women over age 40 who have overcome an illness or otherwise inspired members of their community to make healthy choices. See the ABCNewsNow interview here.

Voting is on-line, and as of this moment there have been a total of 1,978 votes cast, which is probably about 8 seconds worth of voting in American Idol.

Dr. Vittone had previously been featured on Mayo Clinic’s web site. The Rochester Post-Bulletin also did a story today on the contest and her participation.
This contest demonstrates several trends shaping media:

User-generated content, as each contestant uploaded a one-minute video during the first two months of 2007. Reportedly several hundred women entered or were entered by their loved ones. All of that content was free to ABC and to Prevention, and they used it to sell advertising.

Audience involvement, with people voting for their favorites. This is a little different from other contests like American Idol, because in essence you have five women who have either beaten a disease or engaged a community in health behaviors. There’s no Sanjaya in the bunch. Which saintly woman do you choose?

Partnerships for cross-promotion. Prevention and ABCNewsNow.com are building traffic and interest for each other, and with the announcement of finalists on Good Morning America, they got a nice additional cross-promotion.

Lots of web video that wouldn’t make air. When you go to the contest site you have options to see at least three videos of each contestant (each of which has a SlimFast ad). The whole Good Morning America introduction segment was about three minutes. But because you don’t need to appeal to a mass audience on the web, you can provide more in-depth video for those who are interested. (I would suggest, though, that ABC might want to reconsider whether playing the same ad before each video is a good idea. I would watch more of them if I didn’t have to see the “Hippy Hippy Shake” ad for a full 30 seconds each time. I likely would be more favorably disposed toward the advertiser, too, if every one-minute video wasn’t preceded by a 30-second ad.)

It will be interesting to follow this and see how many people are participating.

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Leveraging the Internet in Health Care

This morning Jane Jacobs and I are presenting a Mayo Clinic case study at a half-day workshop entitled, “New Media Requires New Strategies: A Marketer’s Primer.” Our co-presenters include Kathy Divis of Greystone.net and David Bennett of the Medical University of South Carolina.

Kathy gave the overview of trends in healthcare and the internet in general, from the rise in broadband penetration to the consequent explosion of on-line video and the various Web 2.0 applications.

She cited a Harris poll that said about 75 percent of people are interested in asking questions that don’t require a visit, schedule/cancel appointments, refill prescriptions and receive test/lab results, and more than a third are willing to pay for the ability to do this (an average of about $10/month).

About 40 percent of rural Americans have high speed access at home. The number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the planet.

She said the healthcare industry will have no choice but to engage and develop social media if it is interested in helpoing people find accurate and helpful information online, and that social media may shift control of healthcare brands to the masses, and those who ignore it are placing their organizations at risk.
Here’s and example of a health care video on YouTube

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=x2M3o0FB0SI]

…and another one

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=q7MssseGxO0]

The issue she raised is there is no control over who shares your page on YouTube, and by that I think she means the “Related” videos.

Clinical wizards and marketing avatars are multi-media files that combine text, audio, video and/or animation with interactivity and decision logic to educate the user about a specific condition or marketing campaign.

Kathy’s best estimate is there are over 700 health and fitness podcasts currently available, and now about 12 percent of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast.

Only three people in the audience have personal blogs. She made a good point that whether a hospital sponsors a blog or not, that doesn’t stop people from blogging about you. She cited High Point Regional Health System as one with patient blogs.

Next Kathy went into RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Wikis, and Tagging. See for example the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. The great thing about tagging and social bookmarking is it indicates that real human beings have looked at content and assigned it a relevant keyword, so searching based on tags gives results based on what users have found helpful, not what some site architect mapped out.

David went into depth on clinical wizards, and one in particular that they did for heart risk. They used targeted Google adwords to promote geographically, and in one year had more than 6,000 people take the assessment, of whom 4,000 signed up for eNewsletters, 2,300 individuals were identified as “at risk” and 123 (extremely conservatively estimated) scheduled appointments. He thinks it was likely 3x that amount. Total investment was about $40,000 per year, for likely 10x the revenue.

He next moved into podcasting and gave some price ranges for ways of approaching it, from bare bones to in-house studio to outside-produced content. Rmail is a way to get podcasts by email instead of RSS, which can help since people are more comfortable with email than RSS. They do about 20 audio podcast segments a week. They develop for a local TV program, and then use different versions for the web, cutting into multiple segments.
They use a Content Delivery Network CDN for delivery of all their online video (Akamai). They have put about 100 videos on YouTube. Here’s one:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=d4S6k3OEIkg]

They use text messaging with an interesting application for weight loss, in which they send a daily reminder to people who sign up, asking them to text back their weight that day, which is tracked and plotted over time.
Jane and I discussed our definition of new media (anything that doesn’t require an FCC license) and how we are incorporating resources, such as our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge syndicated products, that we have produced for traditional media into these new channels. We have podcasts available from mayoclinic.org and on iTunes, and a Flash presentation on Mayo Clinic’s history. More recently we have begun using Flash for Medically Speaking web video, in which various experts who treat patients with a given condition share perspective on symptoms, diagnosis and treatment. In February, we launched a cell phone service in conjunction with Digital Cyclone, to provide health information and news videos to people on the go.

Here’s a video we used for pitching the launch to journalists:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=1YkDSjclEws]

John Eudes of Greystone.net illustrated decision support wizards with examples from Rush University Medical Center’s Sleep Center (a company called Jellyvision produced it.) One problem is you can’t back up and another is you can’t jump ahead to make an appointment. A breast cancer risk self-assessment wizard from Central Health systems is improved because it has an interactive navigation box at the bottom that solves some of these problems. Emmi Solutions does an on-line informed consent program, and John showed the coronary artery bypass graft version. The purpose is to improve the patient experience and help with risk management. Patients have expressed satisfaction with the system and say they feel more informed and more confident.

John concluded with a strategy overview, with options ranging from purchasing syndicated content, repurposing what you’re already doing and custom content creation for the web. Mayo is doing the second and third options, but with a focus on the repurposing end and producing custom content at the same time as we are producing the mass media content.

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And Now, A Word from Our Competitors

The late-morning session featured James Blazar and Marilyn Wilker from Cleveland Clinic. Their presentation was entitled “Branding as a Key Strategy for Success in Healthcare.”

Cleveland Clinic’s brand position is “Complete Confidence.” A brand is a promise. A pact between an organization and its audience. Strong brands uphold the promise at every customer interaction. An organization has a responsibility to fulfull this promise or risk the consequences (e.g. Firestone). A brand influences business systems, processes and policies. An example was Hampton Inn, where they gave a night’s stay free to someone kept awake by a youth softball team.

Brands matter because they provide meaningful differentiation, create a preference and reinforce an experience. If it can work for water, it should work for healthcare.

Cleveland Clinic’s re-branding was initiated by a change in leadership, growth of organization, marketplace changes and a new strategic plan. Their goal was to close the gap between their brand’s power and those of Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins. They mentioned that Toby Cosgrove, their CEO, stopped doing surgery in December 2006. They bought the naming rights to the Cleveland Cavaliers’ practice facilities, which are called Cleveland Clinic Courts, because LeBron James is the second-most recognizable athlete in China.
Mr. Blazar described the Brand Driver Workshop process they undertook, which led to their choice of Complete Confidence as their brand platform.

Complete Confidence is the opposite of the fear people feel when faced with life-threatening illness. Brand characteristics they emphasize are: understated confidence and leadership, compassion and comfort, approachability and professionalism.

They changed their logo typography and simplified it to make it more contemporary. To get it through their approval processes, they showed how other organizations like Shell Oil, IBM and NBC had changed their logos over time…and that their beloved logo had not been handed down on stone tablets.

They developed a Brand Architecture to create a clear, organized system of brands. It’s similar to what Mayo Clinic does. Principles: Keep it simple, keep a customer perspective, align architecture with business strategy, minimize levels and keep it clear. Their ad agency implementation/tag line is “Find the confidence to face any condition at Cleveland Clinic” in the Letters to Tomorrow campaign. They have done a national cable TV buy for their ads (which I’ve seen.) We saw four of their ads, which were very well done, but didn’t seem to fit the “understated” part of their goal when the tag line said “World Leader” or “#1.” At Mayo Clinic we let others say “world renowned” and don’t say it ourselves.
Results: National awareness has increased from 62-71 percent, and awareness of advertising has increase (I think it was from 16 percent to 22 percent, but I may have that wrong.) Income generated from patients who have responded to the advertising is between $1.2-1.6 million. Calls have come from all 50 states, and the campaign has positively impacted philanthropy.

In response to questions, we learned that their marketing budget is 3 percent of their overall revenue, and that the consultanting firm fee for the re-branding was several hundred thousand dollars. They did not disclose the size of their advertising buy. It would be interesting to know whether the advertising has been directly profitable, although I don’t doubt it has helped in branding.

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Building a Strong Services Brand

Disclosure: This presentation is by Kent Seltman from Mayo Clinic’s Division of Marketing. I’m also from Mayo Clinic, where I work with National Media Relations, Research Communications and New Media. We’re both probably biased. But here’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Kent’s three lessons (which are in the book he is writing with Len Berry) include:

  1. Attend to the Values
  2. Play Defense, not just Offense
  3. Turn Customers Into Marketers

A related article appears in the current issue of the journal, Business Horizons.

The Presented Brand is what the organization controls, and directly affects brand awareness. Examples are advertising, brand name, logo, web sites, employee uniforms and facilities design.

External Brand Communication includes Organization-influenced communication. Examples are media relations and word-of-mouth, which we can somewhat influence but cannot control. Presented Brand and External Communication influence brand meaning, but indirectly.

Customer Experience is the cumulative experience with a company, and is directly and disproportionately influential in creating brand meaning. Nothing trumps the customer’s actual experience in creating brand meaning. Customers’ actual experiences have large influence on word-of-mouth communications.
“Mayo Clinic” is created every day on the fly by every employee in every interaction with every patient. (I also would add that this applies to interaction with other clients such as, in my team’s case, news media. And news media give word-of-mouth with a megaphone.)Over 37 percent of Americans know someone who has been a patient at Mayo Clinic.

Brand History: In the 1890s Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie Mayo gained notoriety for good surgical outcomes because they were early adopters of aseptic surgical techniques, and in 1905 Dr. Will became president of the American Medical Association.

Journalists at the turn of the 20th century wrote several articles that made the Mayo brothers extremely uncomfortable, making outlandish claims about how wonderful they were, like “not a single patient died under their knife” and that they were “the court of last appeal for the sick of all the world.”

Kent observes that “The Mayo Clinic brand became the leading healthcare provider brand in the United States WITHOUT a marketing department or brand manager, just a combination of outstanding healthcare and vigilance to preserve a great REPUTATION.” I agree with him to a point, except when he says “just” outstanding healthcare. Those early newspaper articles played an important role in building the reputation, even though there was no media relations team. The Mayo brothers didn’t like the articles because they created animosity among other physicians. But there’s no denying they played a role, because Mayo Clinic is still seen as that “last hope” for many patients.

Lesson I: Attend to Values First. Key values are “The needs of the patients come first” and “Teamwork.” Here’s a case in which both of those values are exemplified, and infrastructure such as the integrated medical record (since 1905) which is now electronic, vertical buildings, wide halls and priority paging infrastructure helps teams collaborate.
Lesson II: Play offense (extend the brand appropriately) and defend it against well-meaning internal people who might dilute it and against external groups that want to trade on Mayo Clinic’s name.

Lesson III: Turn Customers into Marketers. In our studies, 95 percent of our patients said “good things” about Mayo Clinic after visits to an average of 46 people, and 90 percent advised people to come to Mayo and claimed an average of 7 actually came.

Capitalizing on Word-of-Mouth (WOM) requires providing a service that exceeds customers’ expectations. “The real brand heroes are those industrial engineers and other leaders who design the service processes and the line employees who perform – often on the fly – their individualized service for patients.” Efficiency of care correlates most highly with patient satisfaction at Mayo Clinic.

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