Patient Experience
Healthcare branding and the law of expectations
The other day, I took my daughter to the dermatologist for a follow-up treatment for a minor skin ailment, her fourth visit. Her mom had taken her on the previous trips and had warned me that it could take awhile. Not the treatment, which included a quick evaluation by the doctor and a five-minute spray application. The wait.
The entire visit took an hour from start to finish, almost all of it waiting. “How could a dermatology practice afford such poor service?” I thought, especially given the multitude of options available to us in our area and the commodity level of care we needed. Read the rest of this entry »
Truth #4: If you want to know what will work in healthcare marketing, don’t ask your customers
The Truths We Hold Self-Evident: Fourth in a Series
A few years back, we worked with a large dental practice that wanted to stand out in the market. In the initial meeting, we discovered management believed their best bet was to promote the expertise of their dentists, a decision based primarily on the results of an annual survey that showed respondents ranked “skill of my dentist” number one from a list of values they thought important when choosing dental care. Read the rest of this entry »
More examples of how pricing is creeping into hc encounters
Yesterday, I had two experiences related to pricing in healthcare I’d never encountered before. First, I met with a nurse practitioner as part of my regular Type II diabetes follow-up. Things are progressing to the point where I might need to consider Insulin, and so she was outlining the different types of Insulin available and how they are used. In each case, she started with giving a general price point. For example, “Now this version, which is also fairly expensive, is used in these circumstances.” After three or four of these descriptions, I was intrigued enough to stop and ask: Read the rest of this entry »
Newspaper strikes back – oh, and it’s a great healthcare story
Perhaps the traditional media powers read Adam’s last blog post “Bye bye traditional media” and decided to launch a counter-strike. In this Sunday’s Star Tribune, the front page features a story by healthcare reporter Chen May Yee on new tactics by hospitals to collect payment for some procedures ahead of time. Here’s the counter-strike: the article, “Hospitals forced to become bill collectors,” is only available in the print edition of the paper. There is a teaser online, and I imagine at some point down the road (a few days? a week?) the story will end up on their web site. But for now, unless you pick up the paper itself, you’ll have to wait.
So there are two blog posts in one here: Read the rest of this entry »
