Adding a New Face and Singing the Benefits of Retail Healthcare

by William Melendy with Nisha Gidwani, RediClinicWilliam Melendy

Four years ago, a little known concept arrived at five Houston area H-E-B stores. The concept was simple: take away the hassle of seeing a healthcare provider for common healthcare needs. You know the ones, they usually take about 15 minutes to diagnose, but take several weeks to get an appointment or require an unwanted visit to the emergency room.

Enter RediClinic. Today RediClinics are open seven days a week with extended hours in fifteen Houston and six Austin area H-E-B stores. These clinics are staffed by nurse practitioners and physician assistants who treat 25 to 30 of the most common medical conditions and provide preventive care.

So how do you communicate a totally new concept in healthcare that matches the way that we live today, in a totally new way? Armed with this challenge, the RediClinic marketing team developed a social media strategy incorporating Facebook, Twitter and website enhancements to complement its traditional marketing tools.

Setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts seems like a simple process. Personal accounts take mere minutes. However, setting up business pages to have a professional and consistent look with a company brand is a bigger challenge. Two full days into the process and our pages were far from complete!

Bring in the professionals! Vollmer social media expert Dayna Steele spent a few hours at our offices and we were on our way learning the tricks of Facebook. Dayna was able to show us the nuances in both Twitter and Facebook to ensure we posted in the right format, communicated effectively with our targets and used the tools available within the social networking sites to create the look that we wanted. With Dayna’s guidance we were able to direct our web designers at First Creative to use FBML coding to create a location search and newsletter sign-up option on our Facebook page. Who even knew FBML existed?

On our own it would have taken time, effort (and maybe tears) to get to the point we are now. The experts at Vollmer were able to teach tricks of the trade and in the end save us time, money, and frustration.

So become a fan of RediClinic on Facebook and Twitter and I’m sure that you will agree that we have brand centric and professional pages. All thanks to our social media experts at Vollmer.

Check Your Pulse

by India Chumney-Hancock, VOLLMER Houston

The Healthcare industry can be confusing and competitive for even the most sophisticated companies with everyone from hospitals, physicians, and payors to consulting and technology companies trying to break through the clutter. How does a company compete for coverage and market share with industry giants?

Know industry trends and keep up with legislative issues. These are the two things that even the smallest healthcare organization can use to their advantage. The market is an opportunity, rather than a battle for share or dominance. So many clients focus their attention on what the competition is doing rather than focusing on positioning themselves as thought leaders. It’s the company that focuses on innovative solutions to the healthcare crisis that gets noticed.

So how do you turn the issue of Medicare and physician reimbursement into something people care about – focus on the patient and the care the physician is able to provide to that patient. Educate the media on the medical home concept and introduce them to the company and physicians that live by that model rather than those that see it as a pilot program. How do you address the new IRS regulations for community benefit and charity care – help a tax-exempt hospital tell its story and show that this is not something new, but something that is at the core of the organizations’ mission.

The more a healthcare company is willing to step up and quickly respond to current events and latest research the more successful it will be in growing and increasing awareness. The most important tool to public relations success is to stop comparing yourself to the biggest players in the market, and focus on what differentiates the company from the competition. The differentiator may not be the most profitable side of your business, but the halo effect can do wonders to a company’s perception and position you as the dominate player in the market.

I’m a healthcare junkie. I keep up with the trends, read industry books for pleasure, and save healthcare articles that I read on vacation so that I can contact the reporter when I return to work. Why? Because I believe that everyone has a story to tell and the more people understand the healthcare industry the closer we will come to finding a solution.

Healthcare is about collaboration and identifying solutions that meet the underlying goal of all healthcare providers – access to quality care for patients. Healthcare is evolving every day be it technology, reimbursement, information sharing or the latest procedures. The company that invests in an advocate who is identifying ways to put that company in front of its key stakeholders is the company that will be seen as the industry leader. People are looking for someone to explain and lead them in the ever changing, complex world of medicine. Check your company’s pulse. Are you ready to take the lead?