Pinnacle invited its community of referring clinicians to a presentation highlighting the Aquilion ONE’s features and capabilities; from the start, Henry knew the invitation had to be as unique as the technology itself. “We wanted the invitation to be catchy and to attract attention in a busy office,” she says. “The best way for referrers to understand the difference between the Aquilion ONE and a 64-detector row CT was to see the 3D images in color.” Because Pinnacle had yet to install the scanner, Henry’s team pulled clinical images from the Image Maker kit provided by Toshiba and loaded them onto cartridges for custom-made slide viewers based on the View-Master® model. “We mailed the slide viewers in a clear plastic tube so they would be noticed immediately,” Henry says. “It was a huge success. We had a great turnout at our open house.”

Becky Daghir Wardzala, public relations manager for Hendricks Regional Health, Danville, Ind., also felt that referring-physician outreach was crucial to marketing Hendricks’ new Vantage Titan™ MRI system. “When we get something new that’s better for patients, we like to give physicians some clinical information so they can understand the benefits,” she says. Hendricks conveyed this information using a letter from its radiology director, combined with print materials based on Image Maker templates.

“We inserted a customized photo of our machine, and we dropped in a paragraph about how we’re looking for the best-quality images for proper diagnosis,” Wardzala recalls, “There was already a nice list of bulleted points outlining the benefits for physicians and patients in the Image Maker materials, so we included that as well. The letter from our radiology director recapped those benefits.”

Anne Kolwe, marketing director for Cardiovascular Institute of the South (CIS), Houma, La, focused more on patient marketing following the institute’s acquisition of an Aquilion ONE CT system. “The referring physicians already knew what the technology was, but to reach our patients, we needed to use a lot of different media outlets, including newspapers and television,” she says. “We wanted to humanize the campaign and give patients a better understanding of how the technology relates to them.”

Though CIS developed its own print materials and television spots in accordance with its established branding, Kolwe used the camera-ready images provided by the Image Maker kit in the campaign. “The scanner is an example of how we offer the latest and greatest technology,” she notes, “so the commercials featured high-tech images. We wanted to give the feel that we are using the most advanced technology.”

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