Inspired Marketing: Special COVID-19 Episode: Communicating Effectively in Healthcare

December 25, 2020 Stan

Ross Jacobs is the Account Executive of Healthcare Customer Experience at Oracle. He’s been in the healthcare industry initially as a microbiologist working in the virology lab on vaccine research and development. Today, he leads the conversation with three healthcare providers and showcases how they’ve been communicating to both their staff and public on the latest COVID-19 updates.

Lauren Cislak is an executive director at Indiana University Health where she leads corporate communications, public relations and social media. She’s been in the healthcare industry for 20 years and held similar communications positions at Eli Lilly, IceMiller and Zimmer-Biomet. Prior to healthcare, she worked in consumer packaged goods and with a large law firm. She is now serving as the public information officer (PIO) for IU Health’s COVID-19 Incident Command team.

Dan Weaver heads up communications for UCHealth, which is a system of 12 hospitals, hundreds of outpatient clinics and more than 25,000 employees in Colorado, southern Wyoming and western Nebraska. UCHealth includes the state’s only academic medical center, University of Colorado Hospital, and they have about 6,000 affiliated providers. Dan tries his best to never touch any kind of paid marketing, but he oversees corporate communications including earned media, owned media, internal and executive communications, events and patient communications. He’s also been the system’s public information officer over the past few months.

Craig Kartchner is AVP of Marketing and Customer Experience at HonorHealth in Scottsdale, Arizona. He
leads marketing, digital strategies, advertising, and consumerism for the organization, focusing on
mapping customers’ healthcare journeys and replacing pain points with moments of delight. This
involves working with all areas of the company to remove barriers to accessing care, and to make it easy
and valuable for patients to engage in their own care. Craig also leads digital and web strategy,
branding, customer research, content marketing, CRM strategy, analytics, and marketing automation
efforts. Craig previously served as senior director of marketing at Intermountain Healthcare. He earned
his bachelor’s degree from BYU and his MBA from the University of Utah.

Tune in and Get Inspired to:

Managing crisis communications among unique regions and cities, and even departments within one organization
Getting creative in how your show transparency to your audience and team
Create a dedicated crisis communications team and command center to get information out quickly
Learn about how a crisis will force you to make radical transformation toward positive changes likely fitting into longer term marketing plans
Reassure your audience that they can still go in for care as needed, even during a crisis

Key Takeaways:

[4:00] Information and communication are often used interchangeably but they are two very different things.
[4:40] Lauren shares what she’s doing in communication to properly discuss how her 30,000-plus person team at Indiana University Health is addressing COVID-19.
[9:20] Transparency really worked very well for Lauren. She knew her team was scared, especially the ones on the front line. They wanted to know how many team members tested positive for COVID-19. Communication was key during this time.
[11:45] Lauren was cautious to use the CEO during certain events but knew that he had to be in newsletters/videos to communicate what was going on for this crisis.
[13:35] Dan shares what were the key priorities he and his team focused on at UCHealth.
[17:50] Dan’s CEO also has been providing regular updates.
[24:55] The messaging at UCHealth has transitioned to reassurance to their employees and publics, and what they’re doing to keep everyone safe.
[25:40] Craig’s background is a bit different; he’s in marketing. He shares what he’s been doing at HonorHealth.
[29:35] Craig launched a campaign to address some concerns the public had about COVID-19 as well as provide resources to the community.
[32:50] The marketing department had to be very sensitive towards starting back up again.
[37:35] Dan is curious about how Craig is leveraging marketing automation right now.
[39:55] There is so much more that we can be doing with the virtual medical visits. How are Lauren, Dan, and Craig utilizing this?
[43:45] It’s important people do not postpone the care that they need. Come into the hospital.
[46:25] How are Lauren, Dan, and Craig utilizing the face of their CEO and how is that evolving as the crisis changes?

The Inspired Marketing podcast is produced by Relationship One. Our goal is to share real experiences and inspirational stories of marketing leaders that are transforming their organization using the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

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