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The Marketing Mindset: How to Transform Health Care

By The SHSMD Team posted 10-21-2019 05:25 PM

  
Doctor with young patient
Why are marketing tools, techniques and approaches so important to transforming health care? In a Business of Healthcare/SHSMD collaborative video and podcast, Zeev Neuwirth, M.D., chief clinical executive for care transformation at Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, said, "The field that really understands what people want and need is the field of marketing." Neuwirth, author of recently published Reframing Healthcare — Roadmap for Creating Disruptive Change, describes the "marketing mindset" that health care organizations need to adopt to thrive in the face of change and new entrants. 

Neuwirth described health care as fundamentally about people who have a physical, emotional or rational need and help in figuring out what's wrong with them so they can get healthy. In his perspective, marketing is the discipline that truly understand people and what they need. Health care, he asserted, must adopt the tools, approaches and techniques of marketing in order to transform health care delivery.

He emphasized that this is not about marketing, promoting or selling health care, it's about changing from a medical mindset to a consumer-oriented marketing mindset. Without this change, "We will greatly limit the possibilities and the future of what we can do in health care," he said. "The new technology and retail giants entering health care are customer-oriented and know how to use the marketing mindset. If we in legacy health care don't realize that, we'll become increasingly less relevant."

One of the strategies Neuwirth recommended is focused segmentation around community needs, rather than "trying to be everything for everyone, everywhere, all the time." Focus requires hiring and training people who are passionate about their work, establishing the processes and policies that help them perform their work and providing them with the right resources and equipment. He describes Intermountain Healthcare in Utah and Renown Health in Nevada as examples of organizations that have adopted the marketing mindset in rebranding, redesigning and reorganizing health care. Intermountain Healthcare effectively segmented its services along two brands, a hospital brand to provide the best medical care in the region and a community care brand to promote community health and keep people our of the hospital as much as possible. Neuwirth described this kind of segmentation as "a marketing mindset move — patient-centered care on steroids."

Digital health also calls for a marketing mindset and toolkit, promising to make health care more convenient for consumers and more cost effective because of the reduced need for physical infrastructure. Remote monitoring can improve clinical outcomes by providing clinicians with more frequent data points and early warnings for indicators such as blood pressure. It also works well for value-based care because physicians can offer more care to more people remotely and reserve office visits for those who actually need to be seen in person. The marketing mindset, Neuwirth emphasized, will help hospitals and health systems grow in this new digital landscape. 

However, he warned against falling for buzzwords and adopting technology because it's trendy. Rather, he said it's important to implement technology that ensures better care for patients. Digital health has to provide value to consumers and if hospitals and health systems don't provide that value, the new entrants "who can nibble away at the high-profit outside edges" will win the consumers who are looking for the most affordable, convenient and accessible care. This creates an existential threat for legacy providers.

Existing providers can keep up with the new demands by understanding the pain points that make health care frustrating. A digital front door can help patients determine what type of care they need and how to access that care. "Think about your experience shopping on Amazon," observed Neuwirth. "Can you imagine if we adopted something like that for health care?"

Health care providers can also use digital health to address chronic diseases, especially those driven by increases in obesity, hypertension and diabetes. Providers can use digital health to make it easier to lead a healthier lifestyle and even gamify positive health behaviors. It's vital, Neuwirth affirmed, to ensure that providers don't treat tools as standalone technology, but build applications for technology on a sound understanding of behavior. "If you slap a digital health device on my wrist, that's not enough. You have to attach it to care, to enhance my relationship with care providers and with others who are healthy, so that I'll change my behaviors."  

While many health care leaders tend to associate digital health with younger adults (digital natives), digital health can also provide benefits for older adults, especially those with physical limitations," noted Neuwirth. Providing care in the home can be even safer than providing it in the hospital setting and digital integration can allow patients' adult children to participate more easily in care decisions, without having to take time off work to communicate with clinicians or see test results. Neuwirth added that he, like many other adult children of aging parents, would be willing to pay for the peace of mind of knowing that the health care providers are monitoring a parent and his or her condition. "We can get very, very creative in these sorts of digital health models."

Watch the full interview video on Business of Healthcare.

Listen to the SHSMD podcast featuring Neuwirth. 
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