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The healthcare industry’s current evolution is being driven by reform, fluctuating reimbursement, innovations in care, and the evolving needs of people at every stage of life. Organizations of all sizes are committed to enhancing access to care and making it more efficient and effective. They also want to strengthen their operations and find new ways to differentiate themselves in order to attract patients and increase revenue.
This shifting environment is driving collaboration, consolidation and convergence in healthcare, which includes:
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Unique partnerships among diverse organizations. Examples are joint ventures, clinical affiliations and integrated networks that are bringing together what might have been strange bedfellows a few years ago. Now, regional competitors are joining forces, for-profit and non-profit providers are finding common ground and other groups are scouring the nation to find the right partners to meet their needs.
Significant numbers of mergers and acquisitions, particularly in the hospital sector. An analysis by Kaufman, Hall & Associates showed that 49 transactions involving U.S. hospitals were announced in the first half of 2015, an increase from the 43 and 46 transactions announced for the same time period in 2014 and 2013. Mergers and acquisitions offer a competitive and operational edge to hospitals and provide vital lifelines to struggling facilities. They can be exciting and harrowing for all, requiring careful engagement of employees, doctors, patients, and the general public.
Blurring geographic and operational lines. Healthcare organizations are reaching beyond traditional geographies. Institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, Duke University Health System and Hackensack University Medical Center are expanding into new regions and, in some cases, internationally. Similarly, companies are evolving beyond their traditional roles. For example, providers like Ascension Health are transitioning into the payor space, and payors like Highmark Health are expanding into the provider sector.
For all healthcare companies, communicating effectively — and involving public relations professionals in organizational growth — is essential. Branding, internal communications, community relations, media relations, and interactive marketing are not just valuable supplements supporting business goals. They ensure success. More so, they can help solve some of the biggest challenges healthcare organizations face as they grow: how to become trusted in unfamiliar territory, how to maintain relationships with existing audiences as new ones are courted, and how to tailor outreach to different constituencies.
Branding for the future
Companies expanding beyond their historic geographic and operational boundaries often have no reputation preceding them, and must develop one. The Cleveland Clinic has created a global brand rooted in science and best practices in patient management that extends beyond its origins in northeast Ohio. This has been critical as the organization has extended its reach to new patients through its clinics and affiliates across Florida and in cities such as Las Vegas, Toronto and Abu Dhabi that have no longstanding local connection to its work.
Organizations like Ascension Health are establishing similar, broad-reaching brands. Many understand Ascension as a compassionate provider of quality healthcare. Through transactions such as its acquisition of U.S. Health and Life Insurance Co. and the creation of subsidiaries such as MissionPoint Health Partners, it is making significant inroads into new service areas, including providing health plans and cost- and care-management.
So how do other expanding organizations position themselves in regions and arenas where they are not known? Where they have no legacy or connection?
Public relations teams lay the foundation for this kind of growth into unfamiliar terrain with effective brand positioning that ensures the organizations they support have a defined purpose that transcends geographic or operational history. They establish messaging that expresses a company’s culture and demonstrates tangible things — best practices, quality resources, a commitment to charity care, an approach to service line expansion — which make sense for the new market and its constituencies.
This is particularly important in mergers and acquisitions. While we often think about the growing healthcare market and expanding healthcare companies in national and even global terms, all healthcare — like all politics — is local. Employees, patients and partners may be impressed by a big name, but they trust the local institutions they work for and receive care from. So, the impetus is on the company coming into a new market to make a connection around value and ensure this explanation proves true as it begins to get to know and serve its new neighbors.
Employees are community
In times of growth and change, organizations can fall into the unforeseen trap of ignoring their existing employees, physician partners and volunteers. The all-consuming work of establishing new relationships, getting to know new regions and markets, and integrating new companies, staff members and partners into the fold can mean the needs of those already on board receive short shrift.
Internal audiences can be a healthcare company’s best asset or worst detractor. Overlooking those already in the fold can have long-term consequences, including lowered morale, reduced retention and productivity and, ultimately, compromised growth.
Public relations teams are vital in keeping internal audiences top of mind and ensuring that periods of growth and change are paired with an increased — rather than a waning — focus on internal communications and engagement. They recognize the importance of educating existing audiences about organizational changes: why a move into a new market or the addition of a new company or service line makes sense, and what role they play — and will continue to play — in their organization’s growth.
They also are mindful to carve out time and space for these audiences to ask questions, express concerns and be a part of conversations about change; and to ensure that communications are consistent, relevant, multi-channel, and two-way. In many healthcare organizations, this requires several levels of engagement to reach all employees, doctors, volunteers and others, and involves a combination of print, electronic and in-person communications.
Planning for growth
Just as engaging internal audiences requires different types of outreach, so does engaging patients and partners in new markets and regions. No community or market sector is the same. Not only is it impossible to create a template that will work for every situation, it is counterproductive.
Growing healthcare organizations must educate themselves about the idiosyncrasies of each market they enter and anticipate challenges — from market confusion to opposition. They must be prepared to communicate with audiences frequently, and be ready to modify plans as unexpected issues arise. They also must be prepared to connect with constituencies in diverse ways — at meetings, in the community, in print media, via broadcast advertising, online, and through a broad range of social networks.
Public relations professionals are drivers of this process. They are adept at tailoring communications best practices to an infinite variety of scenarios. Through research and experience, they identify opportunities and challenges, examine important audiences, and decode how to reach and influence them. They establish messages and then craft and execute plans to disseminate these messages so as to drive growth, ease market acceptance, and set their companies apart from others trying to claim the same market or mindshare.
Case for over-communicating
Healthcare’s new era of collaboration, consolidation and conversion requires communication and engagement. While others on the leadership team focus on the critical nuts and bolts of change, the public relations team recognizes that communication about change must exceed the pace at which it happens.
It is not enough to draw up strategic communications plans, refresh brands, develop messages and identify multiple channels for distributing them. It is not enough to simply check these boxes. An organization’s brand isn’t what it believes and says about itself. It is what others believe and say about it.
Communications professionals understand this, and take responsibility for ensuring that organizations focus on two things as they make change happen: articulating their missions, and demonstrating that they are living these missions.
Without a commitment to over-communicate regarding these two fundamental areas of focus, organizations operating in this era of fast-paced change may flounder. With it, they will succeed.
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Nicole Cottrill is a Partner in Finn Partners’ healthcare practice.
Lo Isidro, senior director at Real Chemistry with more than a decade of strategic communications and PA experience, has joined Narrative Strategies.
Nelson Fernandez, former North American chair of APCO Worldwide and managing director of Burson-Marsteller, has joined Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires as director of communications and PA.
Lilit Bargar, who was most recently an EVP in the healthcare practice at Weber Shandwick, comes on board at GCI Health as EVP, corporate practice lead.
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