Will Hospital Quality Award Marketing ever be Positioned with Meaningful Context?

Image by Andrezj Rembowski from Pixabay.

The hospital quality award season is underway as various organizations and magazines, with their black-box analytics, tag community hospitals and health systems as the best or tops in specific care categories.

I am not making light of the accomplishment as quality awards are essential for the patient information in the decision-making process. I have to admit that a newly proclaimed award category of the “Triple Crown of Healthcare” for a Fortune/IBM Watson Health Top 100 Hospital Ranking, CMS 5-Star Ranking, and Leapfrog for Safety is a hard-earned series of awards.

My question for your consideration is, how is the hospital and health system positioning the quality award contextually? This is an important question and goes beyond the traditional look at our claims and how good we are.  

The question is asked since there is little if any, context or content on the value and meaning of the award.

Why, in that case, should the patient and community care? 

Image by Robert Higgins from Pixabay,

Maybe it’s just a checkbox for senior management, the Board of Directors, and physicians in what they consider good marketing?

A little cognitive dissonance for the patient and community?

But beyond the apparent campaigning, what I fail to see is how health systems or hospital awardees are communicating in any meaningful way what those quality awards mean to the community. As I have written in the past, what is the value of that information to the patient? An excellent representation of the actual award and saying are in the top 5 percent nationally in (insert disease here)leaves it kind of lacking, especially when other hospitals you compete against are making the same claim.

Wasted Opportunity

The campaigning I see in its current form treats the patient and community with little respect.  It also reinforces what the healthcare industry has been crying about: healthcare is more complicated than a 5-star rating.  As an unintentional consequence, you create the simple 5-star rating system yourself by all campaigning the quality award.  

It’s about value, not to you but to the patient and community. Instead of taking the opportunity to make the award meaningful with value and context to the patient, hospitals and health systems take the easy way out and puff out their chest to say, look at me.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay,

Leveraging the Opportunity

The patient and community are hungry for information.  And patients are networked today more so than at any other time in the history of healthcare. The future will only make it more so.  So why not get ahead of the curve and start building your ads and marketing communications pieces more value-driven and providing content with context on the importance of said awards?

Explain what that award means to the consumer.  Define the value. Show how it separates you from all the others. Communicate how it reinforces your brand and brand promise. Use the award to create trust. Define the award experience in the patient’s terms. Just don’t throw it out there and say we are in the top 5 percent.  That is not meaningful to anyone.  In an age of quality and price transparency, those ads sorely fail.

I am a patient. I have no context on what the quality award means and the value to me, except getting a “trust us” feeling.

But how can I trust you when you won’t comply with CMS price transparency regulations, and let me see what you charge for some standard procedures?

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing, communications strategist, and thought leader. As an internationally followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Business & Marketing Matters, is read in 52 countries and ranked No. 3 on 100 Top Healthcare Marketing Blogs & Websites to follow by Feedspot.com. Michael is a Life Fellow American College of Healthcare Executives.  For inquiries regarding strategic consulting engagements, you can email me at michael@themichaeljgroup.com. 

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The opinions expressed are my own.