Ads Proliferate Across St Louis as Hospitals Push Services, Name-Recognition
November 20, 2012By Jim Doyle
Television ads that promote a health system’s cancer treatments. Radio spots that proclaim the virtues of bariatric surgery. Sponsored links found with Web engine searches. All these messages are aimed at capturing your future health care dollars.
Such branding is at times almost subliminal, with billboards barely intruding into the sightlines of drivers along Interstate 44 and the St. Louis area’s other highways. But some broadcast ads may sound like a blaring megaphone.
The St. Louis area is a booming health care market, and health systems and hospitals are using marketing and advertising dollars to compete for patients and promote their brands and niches, from maternity to stroke care.
But some health care experts question whether hospitals should spend so much money on promotion and advertising, especially the nonprofit health systems that pour tax-exempt funds into these campaigns.
Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the health research group at Public Citizen, a liberal policies advocacy group in Washington said that “hospitals seem to be spending money left and right trying to get more patients.”
“Absent significant costs controls, there’s nothing to stop them,” he said. “It’s siphoning money away from health care. Advertising shouldn’t be confused with taking care of patients or improving patient care.”
For competitive reasons, health systems — both nonprofit and for-profit — are reluctant to detail their marketing and advertising budgets or strategies. But a few local hospital officials spoke generally about their goals.
“Why do hospitals advertise? There is a noble side to it, and also a realistic side,” said Laura Keller, a spokeswoman for St. LouisUniversityHospital. “I don’t think it ever hurts to remind someone that there are lots of choices that you have if you’re dealing with a major health issue. We need to educate the patient, and there are good messages there.
“On the business side, people need to understand that without money we cannot support our mission,” she said.
Still, in the last couple of years SLUHospital, which is owned by for-profit Tenet Healthcare Corp., has reduced its advertising expenditures due to its parent company’s belt tightening and redirected the money into capital expenses, such as SLU’s new outpatient bone marrow transplant clinic, Keller said.
The St. Louis area has a relatively stable health care market, which means local health systems fight for every tenth of a percentage point in hospital occupancy rates and outpatient center usage.
And some independently owned hospitals that are not affiliated with a major health system are fighting for long-term viability or even survival.
David Dillon, a spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association, said marketing and advertising is “core to our mission to educate the public.”
Apart from ads that promote a hospital’s special programs, he said, the ads promote better public health by reminding patients of the need for preventive screenings such as mammograms.
Samuel Steinberg, a Florida-based hospital finance consultant, remains skeptical about the benefit of advertising.
“It’s very difficult to be able to demonstrate that these things are worth the investment,” he said. “Hospitals and health systems that put a lot of money into advertising say it is beneficial. But when you ask them to prove it, there’s a real shortage of good research that verifies that it’s worth it.”
Ad dollars at work
For larger health systems, millions of dollars are spent on marketing and advertising.
The nonprofit BJC Healthcare system, which operates 13 hospitals in Missouri and Southern Illinois, spent $13.4 million on “advertising and promotion” in 2010, according to two of its IRS Form 990 tax filings.
“It’s part of the necessary overhead,” said June Fowler, a BJC spokeswoman, adding that the health system pursues a multimedia strategy, from TV to the Internet.
BJC has an ad campaign promoting its hospitals as providing “the world’s best medicine,” and operates a website to solicit feedback. Magazine and the Post-Dispatch ads for Barnes-JewishHospital, which is BJC’s flagship hospital, proclaim the medical research breakthroughs of its “top docs” and swiftness in heart care.
Another BJC hospital, MissouriBaptistMedicalCenter, uses some of its ad dollars to compete for heart patients and maternity cases. One radio ad for the hospital featured a gentleman’s account of his granddaughter’s birth and the special care provided by the maternity ward.
SSM Health Care, a nonprofit Catholic system that owns 17 hospitals in four states, has run a recent series of TV spots in St. Louis to promote its cancer care. In various media, SSM has also stressed its hospitals’ heart care.
“The primary purpose of our marketing is to provide information to our community so that people understand and can make informed choices about using the services we provide,” said Bob Porter, chief strategy officer for SSM Healthcare-St. Louis.
“While we do spend money on marketing and advertising, far less than a penny of every dollar of our expenses goes to that and we try to be prudent in those expenses,” he said. “For us, health care is a social good, not a commodity.”
Porter said that SSM’s patient volume has risen with its advertising expenditures.
Chesterfield-based Mercy Health, a nonprofit Catholic system that operates hospitals in four states, has spent advertising dollars in recent years, including newspaper ads, to rebrand its hospitals under the Mercy name.
Print ads also promote its “MyMercy” online service that enables patients to view their medical records and communicate with their doctors — using a computer or smart phone. Mercy Children’s Hospital in Creve Coeur sponsors children’s TV programming.
MHM Support Services, a key affiliate of Mercy that oversees many of its corporate expenses, spent $8.1 million on “advertising and promotion” in fiscal year 2011, its Form 990 tax filing states.
Some hospitals have discrete service lines that they promote through advertising. St. Alexius Hospital, for example, has created radio ads for weight-loss surgery.
St. Anthony’s Medical Center, an independent hospital in south St. Louis County, spent $1.9 million on “promotion and advertising” in the 2011 fiscal year, its Form 990 states. The hospital’s marketing campaigns have included direct, targeted mailings of brochures to homes in affluent suburbs to promote mammogram screenings and other preventive services.
Jan Hess, vice president of Chesterfield-based St. Luke’s Hospital said the independent hospital spends its advertising and marketing dollars mainly on email and direct mail campaigns, rather than TV or traditional media, to promote the quality of its physicians and “to connect people with our services.”
St. Luke’s is one of the local health providers that tries to measure the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns through the use of periodic, third-party “perception surveys,” which show how area residents perceive the hospital’s services.
For Lonnie Hirsch, a founding partner of Healthcare Success Strategies in Irvine, Calif., a consulting firm, the success of a marketing campaign comes down to “strategy and messaging.”
If a campaign’s goal is branding alone, Hirsch said, the results will be difficult to track. It is much easier to gauge results if the campaign tends to “drive people to take an action rather than just be aware of the value of the institution,” he said.
That’s the approach that Metro Imaging took with its TV and radio ads.
The Creve Coeur-based provider of MRIs and CT scans saw patient volume increase dramatically when it started running ads offering “onsite” results to customers, and those numbers shot up further when Metro started advertising its comparatively low prices.
“Our phones are ringing off the wall when our ads are running,” said Dr. Harley Hammerman, Metro’s chief executive.
“To be effective, you really need to have something to differentiate yourself. For the hospitals, I think it’s mainly branding.”
‘It’s siphoning money away from health care. Advertising shouldn’t be confused with taking care of patients or improving patient care.’
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