Healthcare transformation refers to the fundamental change going on in the healthcare industry, especially the ongoing transformation from a fee-for-services to an outcomes-based model. Transformation is being driven by meaningful use, value-based purchasing, accountable care organizations (ACO’s), the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and advanced clinical decision support. Summed up, these changes are about aligning incentives and using advanced technology to improve outcomes. For a Minneapolis healthcare content marketing firm, there is much to communicate about, and we’re excited to be part of this transformation.

The first step is to understand the bigger issues. As a Minneapolis industry analyst relations firm, we work closely with a number of the top research firms, including Gartner, IDC and The Advisory Board. Each of these organizations has written extensively about healthcare transformation. In addition, some of the better sources of information about healthcare transformation are The Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation, The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, and The Institute for Health Technology Transformation.

It’s important to follow the law-making and rule-making processes in government. As a Minneapolis government relations firm, we develop and implement effective government relations strategies. We keep clients up to speed on legislative and regulatory trends and developments, and represent our clients before Congress and Federal agencies. Snow has worked with the FDA, HHS, OMB and other agencies. Snow prepares comment letters to Federal and state agencies, meets with Congressional staff to share perspective and seek assistance, sets up meetings with policy makers, produces testimony and whitepapers, and arranges for legislation to be introduced.

Based on well grounded, current knowledge, we provide strategy development and implementation. Suppliers to the healthcare market must communicate how their products and services will help providers meet the new challenges and opportunities in healthcare. Providers must reach out to patients in new ways, emphasizing better outcomes and patient engagement.

For a Minneapolis healthcare PR firm like ourselves, we understand the need to help clients create strategies for thought leadership through content marketing, PR, SEO and SEM and other, integrated approaches. Working with our clients, we help them create original content to drive aggressive content marketing that builds recognition for our client’s solutions, products, people and perspective, while also driving improved SEO and social media.

Dads with smaller testicles are more nurturing fathers, according to a rash of news stories run by Time, NBC, USA Today and other news organizations. Trouble is, the underlying story is far more nuanced – based on a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human fathers.” As healthcare PR professionals, we should be concerned when healthcare reporting sensationalizes scientific findings and fail to accurately rerport on these findings.

The key word there is correlated.

Leading healthcare news watchdog critiques stories linking smaller testicles to men being good dads

As Gary Schwitzer points out in his excellent HealthNewsReview.org blog, most of the news organizations failed to accurately report on this study. Gary notes that the authors of the study, at Emory University, did not claim that they had found a causal relationship between testicle size and parenting skill. In fact, they allow that it could be the opposite: parenting activity results in changes in the male body, including testicle size.

In the Emory University blog the authors state: “We’re assuming that testes size drives how involved the fathers are,” Rilling says, “but it could also be that when men become more involved as caregivers, their testes shrink. Environmental influences can change biology. We know, for instance, that testosterone levels go down when men become involved fathers.”

To be sure, some of the stories, like the ones in NBC and USA Today, do get to the nuance, but deeper in the article after most people have read or heard a misleading headline.

Why is this important to healthcare PR people? If the media can’t get a story like this right, where the information presented is fairly straightforward, how will they get complicated stories right, such as the appropriate treatment options for patients with low risk forms of cancer?

As a Minneapolis healthcare PR firm, we’ve heard clients complain that competitors can make unsubstantiated claims about their products and not get called out in the media. Schwitzer provides a watchdog service for healthcare news stories on a limited budget. His organization, and similar efforts, deserve support. But it’s important that health PR professionals, and healthcare reporters, conduct the checks and digging needed to provide accurate information to healthcare markets and customers.

Like many Minneapolis B2B PR firms, Snow Communications uses Google analytics, SEO strategies, and related digital marketing technologies; but we understand that content is everything. We know a good story when we see it. Maybe that comes from having been a reporter and writer for The New York Times, The Star Tribune, Radio Sweden and other news organizations. Having been an editor, I have a good idea of what editors want, and don’t want. Good B2B PR firms figure out how take a story that is not fundamentally glamorous – and often far from it, and turn it into something a publication’s subscribers want to read.

In addition, we’ve launched dozens of new companies successfully.

Content Marketing: The Gift That Kept Giving

Zepol logo

When we launched new company Zepol, we realized right away that this was a content marketing play – even before that term was in wide use. Zepol publishes trade data – data about the movement of goods from country to country, and that data is of great interest to a lot of people at companies and other organizations.

We made successful pitches about Zepol, its rapid growth, its value to its customers and related themes. But the gift that kept giving was where we offered recognized publications the opportunity to provide Zepol trade data in their publication and on their website. This became a recurring source of promotion for Zepol long after our work with them was complete.

Please read our case study

See details in our Zepol case study.

If you’re a healthcare PR or marketing professional, please note: Over-diagnosis and overtreatment resulting from cancer screenings has led an expert panel to suggest that the word “cancer” should not be applied to conditions that are not lethal. The U.S. National Cancer Institute commissioned a panel to study the problem created by too many growths found through screening that are clinically insignificant and indolent in nature. Writing in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the panel reported:

“Screening always results in identifying more indolent disease. Although no physician has the intention to overtreat or overdiagnose cancer, screening and patient awareness have increased the chance of identifying a spectrum of cancers, some of which are not life threatening. Policies that prevent or reduce the chance of overdiagnosis and avoid overtreatment are needed, while maintaining those gains by which early detection is a major contributor to decreasing mortality and locally advanced disease.”

The authors note that while mortality from certain cancers – e.g., breast and prostate – declined between 1975 and 2010, the incidence has increased significantly because the screenings found large numbers of insignificant cancers. In contrast, they note, screening for colon and cervical cancer decreased incidence as well as late-stage disease through detection and removal of precursor lesions.

The panel’s advice? Reclassify  non-lethal lesions as “IDLE” – indolent lesions of epithelial origin. What’s the implication for healthcare PR and marketing professionals? Use caution when promoting screening programs or technologies. Be aware that overtreatment and over diagnosis is a significant problem, and communications about screening or screening technology should reflect this. For example, testing for PSA (prostate specific antigen) should include “informed consent” between patient and doctor, in which the pros and cons of PSA testing are discussed. Healthcare PR professionals should consider including some cautionary statement in their promotions for screening programs and screening technologies. Cancer screening has saved many lives, but patients should be aware of the risks.

With the rise of patient engagement, candor and full disclosure are the new standard.

Simply put, a strategic communications plan is a description of a company’s marketing and communications goals and activities. And it should be treated as an essential document for any company, especially a start-up. While every plan should include a few key sections (outlined below), there is no single, one-size-fits-all approach that works for every business. A communications plan for a restaurant will be much different than one for a hospital, for example. But here is a snapshot of the crucial elements that every plan should include.

An Overview

This opening section describes the nature of the business and how it plans to grow through strategic communications and marketing.

Background Research

Arguably, the single most important feature of any communications plan is the background research and analysis. After all, how can you be expected to tell your company’s story if you don’t know much about the industry in which you operate? Generally this background research will identify the current market size, segmentation, target customers, growth opportunities, risks and competitors. In addition a SWOT analysis for the company itself would be helpful here.

Establish Your Mission, and Your Messages

Now is the time to define your brand, your products, your company and your value proposition to the market.

State Your Goals

Goals should be simply what you want your communications to achieve. These are specific, measurable outcomes: a percentage of market share, annual sales, growth into certain markets, etc.

Define Your Strategy

Strategies are the initiatives that will allow you to realize your goals. These should answer the question of “how” the company plans to communicate to its customers. For example, a restaurant might devise a strategy for becoming a go-to family gathering place on Monday nights, in the hopes of meeting its overall revenue goals. Or, a backup software company might create a strategy for focusing on a certain customer niche, like publishing companies or law firms, in order to support its own expectations.

Define Your Tactics

These are the tools of the trade. Identify the channels of your communications strategy here, such as social media, blogging, digital advertising, direct response marketing, or media relations. Be as specific as possible. It’s not enough to simply list a bunch of marketing channels – describe how they will be used. Consider the strategies you’ve identified above. Do your tactics support them?

Build a Schedule and a Budget

Now that you have a set of tasks to complete, put them on a schedule. Identify who “owns” each task, and list anticipated completion dates. Keep your team accountable and abreast of approaching deadlines. Also, is your marketing and communications budget in line with the strategies you plan to implement? Talk with vendors, publishers, printers and anyone else that can give you the necessary cost information to make sure what you’re planning falls within your budget.

Keep it Alive

You’ll put a lot of work into this plan. The last thing you want is to see it relegated to a dusty corner in someone’s office. Marketing and communications strategies evolve. You might have to prioritize certain goals over others. Test and measure what’s working and update your plan accordingly.

This is part one in a five-part series titled The Art of the Pitch. Join us each Friday from May 4 through June 1 as we discuss successful media outreach strategies. 

Just as advertisers try to “pitch” consumers a message they hope will resonate, public relations professionals pitch journalists with suggestions for stories, on behalf of their clients. But not all pitches are created equal, and it helps to understand what circumstances create the most favorable conditions for eventual media exposure.

For our purposes, let’s assume you’ve got a fully-prepared spokesperson ready and available to do an interview . All you need to do is secure and arrange the opportunity.

#1 – Business Relevance

The most vital step in any media relations program is to consider what kinds of coverage make the most sense from a business perspective. Coverage in the Baltimore Sun likely won’t do much good for a business that operates solely in Seattle, for example, nor will coverage in a consumer interest publication for a B-to-B manufacturer. If you want to sell more widgets, focus on the media whose audience may be interested in those widgets.

#2 – Current Events

News, by definition, is the reporting of a recent event.  Journalists need sources to comment on these events, so the more you can match the needs of your source to the needs of the journalist, the better it is for everyone.

General, how-to stories work well enough, but the most successful pitches address a current event and provide a source for commentary.

#3 – Source Expertise

This one may seem obvious, but it’s worth considering for a moment whether the topic you’re pitching aligns with the expertise of your spokesperson. Sometimes PR people get a little trigger-happy with the media relations before doing due diligence with the source, and that’s a mistake. For example, with our law firm clients we are careful to check that a certain case or court ruling is something they’ve been following, and could speak about with authority.

The last thing you want is to secure an interview with a journalist, only to have the source decline because they’re not familiar with the subject.

#4 – Timeliness

The world of public relations revolves rapidly. What’s hot today is old news by tomorrow. Media deadlines are short, so timely outreach is vital. PR departments (and their agencies) need to pay close attention to what’s making news (or better yet, what’s likely to be making news in the near future). Make sure that your spokespeople are available and not, say, taking a cross-country flight in the next few hours after pitching an interview. Journalists won’t wait.

This is a bird’s-eye view of four critical elements that make for an ideal media pitch. Part 2 of The Art of the Pitch will be posted next week, in which we’ll discuss “Doing Your Pitch Homework”.