Internal Marketing: Making the Most of What You’ve Got

Conference Call Minutes

February 14, 2007

Presenter: Judy Goodwin & Janice Murphy

Participants:

  • Alle-Kiski Medical Center, New Kensington, PA
  • Doctors Community Hospital, Lanham, MD
  • Floyd Memorial Hospital, New Albany, IN
  • Frisbie Memorial Hospital, Rochester, NH
  • The Hospital of Central Connecticut, New Britain, CT
  • Providence Hospital, Southfield, MI
  • Southern New Hampshire Medical, Nashua, NH
  • St. Mary's Medical Center, Huntington, WV
  • St. Mary's, Evansville, IN
  • Swedish, Seattle, WA
  • UC Irvine, Irvine, CA

See PowerPoint slides

Thanks to Doctor’s Community Hospital for inspiring the topic. They have assigned an inpatient nurse educator and she has spent the early months of her assignment talking to inpatient staff. She discovered many didn’t know about the Joslin program. The trick is to make the best use of the educator’s time on the inpatient side to generate outpatient business without seeing everyone with diabetes.

St Mary’s in Evansville is focused on nursing in-services to encourage discharge planning so inpatient referrals aren’t at the last minute. “You need to keep repeating the message.”

Both sites have worked with case managers and discharge planners to increase awareness of types of patients who can benefit from outpatient diabetes education.

The inpatient list of people with diabetes could be used to do follow up calls after the patient is home to see if they want to come for diabetes education.

Some Affiliates say Resource Manuals on the nursing units have not been that successful in the past. Swedish is going to try distributing EZ Start Resource manual, Flipchart and handouts to inpatient nursing units. Kits are available free from Joslin Boston. They were originally designed for PCP offices, but worth a try as inpatient resource. Boston will provide an evaluation tool if you want to use the EZ Start kits.

Hospital of Central CT is trying online nursing in-services to increase awareness of diabetes care and Joslin resources available.

Satisfied patients can do testimonials for your program either formally or informally.

If your hospital has a community outreach site like Alle- Kiski in PA, Joslin’s On the Road or Just a Start programs could introduce people to your program.

Affiliate ideas:

  • Posting placards on inpatient rooms about Joslin
  • Getting Joslin referral pads out to discharge planners and onto the nursing units
  • Writing articles for employee newsletters
  • Stuffing department mailboxes with patient diabetes newsletters or schedules of classes
  • Grand rounds for MDs
  • “Community Medical School” for consumers
  • Having Diabetes Day in the staff cafeteria including a carb counting lunch

Are you effectively using your Diabetes Advisory for input on your marketing strategies? Community stakeholders from diverse groups can be very helpful to include on your Advisory.

Have you surveyed your referral groups to see if you are meeting their needs?

Are you advertising in the senior newsletters in your area?

For some referral sources, the emphasis may need to be on “education only”

Is your physician relations department marketing your program when meeting with new physicians? Does he/she have Joslin brochures and referral forms?

How are you measuring the effectiveness of your marketing? Can your front desk ask, “What made you schedule an appointment?” and track the results.

Reach out to the local press when new diabetes technology is introduced. Floyd had an article about Exubera in their hospital magazine prompting many media outlets to call them for interviews.

Get your brochures and class schedules out to assisted living and skilled nursing facilities.

Thanks for all the Affiliate input on this call! Hopefully everyone came away with at least 1 new idea to try.