Marketing as Education to Generate Awareness
In July 2008, Glendale Memorial Hospital in California implemented two new imaging technologies from Toshiba: a Vantage MRI system and an Aquilion 32-detector row CT scanner. Amy Stricker, manager of marketing and communications, knew that educating Glendale’s referring clinicians on the capabilities of the new technology would be crucial to the hospital’s marketing efforts.
“When you get new technology, it’s important to educate physicians on what makes it different,” Stricker says. “Technologies like this are a big investment, and they are huge assets to the community. Physicians and their patients will benefit from the new features, but they need to know what they are.”
Stricker developed print materials for Glendale’s referring community that highlighted the clinical benefits of the new technologies. “It was a matter of finding out what made our technology better and conveying that in a simple way,” she says. “With the CT, we talked about how you could get high-resolution images for any part of the body in seconds. For the MRI, we emphasized the superior image quality and the availability of non-contrast MR angiography, which is particularly important to patients with renal complications because of the Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis risk.”
The materials also focused on aspects of the new technologies that made them more patient friendly, including the MRI system’s proprietary Pianissimo™ noise reduction feature (which reduces noise by 90 percent during scanning) and the CT unit’s rapid speed of scanning, which results in shorter waiting times. “Referring physicians want to make sure their patients have the best experience possible,” Stricker notes.
Jim Burch, director of communications for TAMS, says, “As an imaging-services provider, your currency is information. You’re taking images, but what you’re really doing is providing information about the patient to the referring physician, so the best way to market to that physician is through diagnostic clinical information. You’re speaking the same language.”
Stricker used the TAMS Image Maker kit as a resource for both clinical images and information. “We have our own campaign branding and images we use for most of our materials,” she notes, “but the sample ads and pieces provided with Image Maker were helpful in giving us ideas and showing what the key messages in our promotions should be.”
While Stricker chose to focus primarily on referring-physician marketing, Burch notes the same principle can be applied to patient outreach. “Consumers can get their information from a wide variety of locations, not all of which are trusted. I think the savvy hospitals and imaging centers are working to provide valuable, in-depth information and resources for patients. A print ad doesn’t help them take control; it only provides them with enough information to be curious. The additional educational materials are what consumers are looking for,” he says.
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Tags: Awareness
Category: Education & Training —