Skip to main content

Hospital Marketers: TIme To Own the Growth Agenda

Hospitals' salad days are over, at least if you believe the breathless headlines.  Gone are the days when business models could be built simply by chasing Medicare's hot reimbursement du jour. 

Unfortunately, more than business models were built on such crabbed thinking. Where Medicare led, capital structures, facilities, strategic thinking, indeed the very definition of 'success' were sure to follow. 

And follow they did. Massive was the party. Crushing are the debt loads and mediocre the results. Naturally a pounding hangover ensues, though the remedy - perhaps a 'rescuing'  full-asset merger - is neither quick nor painless.

(Example: Elmhurst Memorial Healthcare's dalliance with Northwestern Memorial HealthCare.  “I think having that new facility is going to be a real challenge for (Elmhurst)  financially,” says my friend Brian Sanderson, a partner at Oak Brook-based accounting firm Crowe Horwath LLP) 

"We've nothing left to cut!" is the common refrain - common, predictable and mostly untrue. Still, organizations make their own reality and, if you believe you're out of ideas, you are. 

So might I suggest it's time to GROW? And by growth, I don't mean (say it quickly so it blurs together) "Let's grow Orth-onc-diac!" Like every other hospital on the planet. No, that party's long over.   Incremental value lies in completely new directions. 

New directions begging for someone to reframe, to call 'time-out' on the B.S. of "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!"  Someone to innovate and incubate new generations of business models.  Someone to OWN THE GROWTH AGENDA.  Why not you? 

Time for idea-driven marketers to leave the past behind and take a big step forward.

(Connect with me on Linkedin.) 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more