hospital branding case study

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• v.9(1); Jan-Mar 2020

A Strategic Imperative for Promoting Hospital Branding: Analysis of Outcome Indicators

Gow-jen shieh.

1 Department of Top Hospital Administration, Taichung Veterans General Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan

Shi-Liang Wu

Che-fu tsai, chi-sen chang, tsung-hung chang, ping-wing lui, wayne huey-herng sheu.

2 Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

3 School of Medicine, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan

4 Institute of Medical Technology, College of Life Science, National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan

Associated Data

Facebook fan page and hospital website of Taichung Veterans General Hospital.

The 52 performance indicators monitored, by branding team.

Counts of visitors to the Facebook fan page per month from 2016 to 2018.

Counts of visitors to the hospital website per month from 2016 to 2018.

LINE groups for primary physicians.

Peer support group webpage.

Themes of Facebook posts from 2016 to 2018.

Optimizing the use of social media to promote hospital branding is important in the present digital era. In Taiwan, only 51.1% of hospitals have official Facebook fan pages. The numbers of likes for these hospitals are also relatively low.

Our objective was to establish a special branding team for social media operation, led by top administrators of our hospital. Here we present our strategic imperative for promoting hospital branding as well as an analysis of its effectiveness.

Led by top administrators, the branding team was formed by 11 divisions to create branding strategies. From 2016 to 2018, the team implemented action plans. All information unique to the hospital was posted on Facebook, as well as on the hospital’s official website. To determine the plans’ efficiencies, we obtained reference data from Google Analytics, and we compared Facebook Insights reports for 2016 with those for 2017 and 2018.

One of the branding team’s main missions was to establish branding strategies and to integrate segmental branding messages. In each quarter we regularly monitored a total of 52 action plan indicators, including those for process and outcome, and discussed the results at team meetings. We selected 4 main performance outcome indicators to reflect the effectiveness of the branding efforts. Compared with 2016, the numbers of likes posted on the Facebook fan page increased by 61.2% in 2017 and 116.2% in 2018. Similarly, visits to the hospital website increased by 4.8% in 2017 and 33.1% in 2018. Most Facebook fan page and website viewers were in 2 age groups: 25 to 34 years, and 35 to 44 years. Women constituted 60.42% (14,160/23,436) of Facebook fans and 59.39% (778,992/1,311,605) of website viewers. According to the Facebook Insights reports, the number of likes and post sharing both increased in 2017 and 2018, relative to 2016. Comment messages also increased from 2016 to 2018 ( P =.02 for the trend). The most common theme of posts varied over time, from media reports in 2016, to innovative services in both 2017 and 2018. Likes for innovative services posts increased from 2016 through 2018 ( P =.045 for the trend). By the end of 2018, we recorded 23,436 cumulative likes for posts, the highest number among medical centers in Taiwan.

Conclusions

We achieved the largest number of Facebook fans among all medical centers in Taiwan. We would like to share our experience with other hospitals that might be interested in engaging in social media for future communications and interactions with their patients.

Introduction

Branding plays an important role because a positive brand helps customers visualize and understand the products. A favorable brand image leads to positive outcomes in customer satisfaction, service quality, loyalty, and repurchasing intention [ 1 - 3 ]. Branding of health care is imperative in business marketing, especially in this digital era when most people search information daily on the internet. The International Telecommunication Union in its report on information and communication technologies for 2017 revealed that mobile broadband subscriptions grew by more than 20% during 2012 to 2017, with an expected global growth up to 4.3 billion users by the end of 2017 [ 4 ]. Social media apps are becoming increasingly popular because of the ease of sharing and disseminating information without barriers, both in time and in space [ 5 ]. Through social media, people can easily obtain information on health care services [ 6 ].

Consequently, the hospital corporate brand is increasingly focused on communications in social media. Digital marketing strategies need to be considered first. In an online world, corporate branding, and the brand experience, lives on the internet [ 7 ]. A Pew Research Center survey showed that 60% of US adults use the internet to search health care information, and 10% of them use social media to follow health care experiences shared by friends [ 8 ]. Another study reported that 34% of health scholars use social media, including online forums and message boards, to obtain information on health and wellness [ 9 ]. Therefore, the use of social media in health care will likely grow exponentially [ 10 ].

Increasingly more patients use social network sites to share their experiences with health care personnel and institutions [ 11 ]. People share their experiences and social support in particular with their families and friends via social media [ 12 - 16 ]. The main advantages of using social media in health care services, as perceived by patients, are the potential to improve doctor-patient communication, increase their understanding of health-related issues, and the ability to share experiences with other patients having similar health conditions [ 17 ]. Also, the ability to respond to patients’ needs and display timely messages on social media platforms means that hospitals could harness existing networks [ 18 ].

According to a survey on broadband internet usage in Taiwan, 89.4% of the 3155 respondents (extrapolated to Taiwan’s total of 18.81 million residents) had used the internet. Among 89.8% of social network or instant message service users, 75.6% used both of these services. Internet World Stats reported that Facebook has reached a penetration of 75.8% in Taiwan, the highest proportion of users in the world [ 19 ]. Another survey found that Facebook was also the most popular social medium (90.9%) among internet users, followed by LINE (a freeware app for instant communications on electronic devices; 87.1%), YouTube (60.4%), PTT (a terminal-based bulletin board system; 37.8%), and Instagram (32.7%) [ 20 ]. Therefore, we speculated that by deploying official Facebook fan pages, hospitals should be able to improve their exposure in the community, promote their reputations, and foster a better impression of these institutions. All of these can help ensure patient loyalty and recruit more patients.

Health care in Taiwan is managed centrally by the Bureau of National Health Insurance. By the end of 2017, the total number of insured people was 23.88 million, and the national health insurance coverage rate hovered around 99.7%. Also, 21,326 (92.8%) of the medical institutions in Taiwan had signed contracts with the National Health Insurance Administration of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. As of 2017, accreditation had been granted to 423 hospitals and 131 teaching hospitals. Based on the levels of accreditation, medical institutions are classified into 3 major categories: medical centers, regional hospitals, and local hospitals [ 21 ].

Prior to 2016, most of the hospital branding in Taiwan was focused on press conferences and press releases. Most hospitals assigned a single department to handle press conferences. Only 51.1% (n=213) of the hospitals had official Facebook fan pages as of 2017. Among them, academic medical centers tended to receive more likes than regional and local community hospitals [ 22 ]. The public sector receives relatively fewer resources from the government despite bearing a heavier burden than the private sector. Personnel and purchasing systems in public institutions are also less flexible, making them less competitive than private hospitals in providing medical services. Thus, how to restore or even to promote public recognition becomes a major issue for public hospitals.

The aim of this study was to support the strategic imperative for promoting hospital branding by establishing a special branding team, led by top administrators of our hospital. Through constant monitoring of internet posts, we aimed to determine what audiences like and to continuously adjust the popular and useful types of posts on the hospital Facebook page and hospital website. The implementation of such cycles of monitoring and improvement, while successfully conducted in private businesses, has rarely been conducted in hospitals, and in particular in public hospitals, both in Taiwan and worldwide.

Here, we share our experience with other hospitals that might be interested in engaging in social media and using them for communications and interactions with their patients in the future.

Study Design

We conducted this study to support our strategic imperative for promoting hospital branding by establishing a special branding team, led by top administrators of the hospital. To ensure the effectiveness of this branding team, we obtained reference data from Google Analytics (Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA) and Insights reports from Facebook (Facebook, Inc, Menlo Park, CA, USA) for the year 2016 as the baseline for comparisons with data for 2017 and 2018.

Strengthening Functions of Social Media

Study setting.

Taichung Veterans General Hospital is one of 19 medical centers in Taiwan. It was established in 1982, and in central Taiwan it is the only government medical center providing medical services to the public. It has 1569 beds, with high daily volumes of inpatient and outpatient services. Reflecting its performance quality, it is the only medical center awarded by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Campaign run by the Joint Commission of Taiwan in 2018 and received the Government Service Award from The National Development Council in 2019.

In the past, our institute, like most hospitals in Taiwan, issued regular news releases as the only tool to disseminate health information to the public. About 60 to 70 press conferences were held every year. To cope with recent marketing trends using social media, a branding team was established to strengthen online media marketing that included both Facebook and an internet website ( Multimedia Appendix 1 ). Our aim here is to share our experiences with other institutes worldwide.

Establishing the Branding Team

The branding team was first set up in 2016. Its main mission was to establish branding strategies and integrate segmental branding messages. Under the leadership of the hospital’s superintendent, 11 divisions were recruited to form this special task force ( Figure 1 ). All divisions were required to draw up their own action plans and performance indicators. Top administrative officers oversaw and monitored task progress periodically.

Taichung Veterans General Hospital branding team organization.

Data Collection and Analyses

We obtained reference data for 2016 for comparison with data for 2017 and 2018. We analyzed statistical differences between the means using IBM SPSS version 21 (IBM Corporation). We applied simple linear regression models (2-sided) to test for the trend in the numbers of likes on the Facebook fan page, posts, and hospital website as obtained during the 3 years from 2016 to 2018.

Outcome Performance Indicators

Each division of the branding team provided action plans together with the corresponding indicators, all of which we periodically monitored. We monitored a total of 52 action plans and indicators in each quarter and discussed the results at team meetings ( Multimedia Appendix 2 ). We selected 4 main outcome performance indicators to reflect the effectiveness and outcome of the branding efforts ( Table 1 ). Compared with 2016, the growth rate in Facebook fans was 61.2% (n=17,474) in 2017 and 116.2% (n=23,436) in 2018 ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ). Similarly, website visits increased by 4.8% (n=9,389,164) in 2017 and 33.1% (n=11,930,020) in 2018 ( Multimedia Appendix 4 ).

Outcome performance indicators monitored by the branding team.

a Growth rate is defined as the value of 2017 or 2018 minus that of 2016, and the result expressed as a percentage of 2016.

b A freeware app for instant communications on electronic devices.

The branding team also formed a LINE (LINE Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) group as a communication channel for patient referrals. There were 489 (in 2017) and 719 (in 2018) primary physicians participating in the LINE group with a growth rate of 100.4% in 2017 and 195.1% in 2018 ( Multimedia Appendix 5 ). To obtain real-time information from the hospital, we invited all primary physicians to join our Facebook fan page. In addition, the branding team asked each medical group to set up peer support groups and to organize at least two activities each year. Reports of the activities held by 46 peer support groups in 2018 ( Multimedia Appendix 6 ) were posted on Facebook. Patients and their families were also invited to join the hospital’s fan page.

General Public and Patient Engagement

According to the Facebook Insights report for 2018, 54.54% (227,989/417,988) of target audiences and 60.42% (14,160/23,436) of Facebook fans were women. Most were between 25 and 44 years of age (199,906/417,988, 47.83%). Based on Google Analytics, more women (778,992/1,311,605, 59.39%) than men visited the hospital website. Website viewers were mostly between 25 and 44 years of age (778,668/1,289,988, 60.36%) ( Table 2 ).

Sex and age group distributions on the Facebook fan page and hospital website in 2018, according to Facebook Insights reports Google Analytics.

a Not available.

Table 3 shows that the number of posts increased from 461 in 2016 to 595 in 2017 (growth rate of 29.1%) and 566 in 2018 (growth rate 22.8%). The number of videos posted was 16 in 2016, increasing to 49 in 2018 and to 90 in 2018 ( P =.04 for the trend). The number of likes almost doubled in 2017 (n=99,262) over 2016 and stayed at approximately the same level in 2018 (n=91,337; P =.42, for the trend). Increments were similarly marked for comment messages, which increased nearly threefold in 2017 (n=2931) and fourfold in 2018 (n=4559; P =.02 for the trend). Post sharing also doubled in both years (n=1755 in 2016, n=4783 in 2017, n=4629 in 2018; P =.36 for the trend).

Facebook Insights reports for posts made from 2016 to 2018.

Post Categories and the Analysis of Likes on Facebook

In total, 1622 posts were provided by each division of the branding team from 2016 to 2018. We divided posts according to their content characteristics into 14 unique post themes and hashtags in the text ( Multimedia Appendix 7 ).

To identify what types of posts audiences liked, we classified the 14 themes into 5 groups for analysis: innovative service, media reports, activity information, patient gratitude letter, and health education information. Table 4 shows that the type of post with the highest number of likes was media reports in 2016, being replaced by innovative service in both 2017 and 2018. The mean number of likes for innovative service posts rose significantly from 2016 through 2018 ( P =.045 for the trend). The numbers of likes for health education information posts remained the lowest for all 3 years.

Likes per post category on the hospital Facebook fan page from 2016 to 2018.

a Average number of likes per post (number of likes divided by number of posts).

Figure 2 shows the cumulative number of likes since 2016. The growth rate from the first quarter to the second quarter was 10.1% in 2016, 17.0% in 2017, and 5.5% in 2018. The growth rate from the third quarter to the fourth quarter was 21.0% in 2016, 21.4% in 2017, and 7.6% in 2018. Some of the increases in the numbers of likes were apparently related to promotional activities during festivals, as well as interactions with fans. For example, fan interaction activities were intensified during the Chinese New Year and Christmas season.

Cumulative numbers and quarterly growth rates of likes on the Facebook fan page from 2016 to 2018. Q: quarter.

Principal Findings

Our main finding is that a public medical center in Taiwan such as ours can, through the efforts of a branding team led by top administrators, gain Facebook fans. We attained the highest number of Facebook fans among medical centers in Taiwan, with a 116.2% increase over 2 years. We believe that the factors contributing to this success were (1) the interconnected Facebook and hospital webpages, (2) active participation of the branding team with timely provision of attractive posts and videos, (3) strengthened interactions with online visitors, (4) fast responses to users’ queries and messages, and (5) increased online streaming.

Functions of the Branding Team

With strong support from the top administrators, the branding team was able to play a key role in implementing strategic marketing functions. We identified several distinguished medical services as strategic features through interdepartmental communications. Results suggested that, in this digital era, targeting social media is an effective approach for promoting health consumer education, health care group communication, and brand awareness. Our Facebook audience not only came from the general public, but also from strategically invited peer support groups and primary physicians. Given the importance of brand management and extraction of associated values, health service organizations should diligently attend to branding initiatives. Enhanced values can be derived by addressing nontraditional brand elements that provide unique opportunities to facilitate institutional viability and vitality [ 23 ].

Hospitals use the Facebook platform as an inexpensive way to educate people on topics of health and well-being, and to communicate different types of information and news to the general public. Based on more than 1700 Facebook posts from 17 hospitals in the United States, Kordzadeh and Young [ 24 ] identified 13 unique health social media post themes and classified them into 3 thematic groups that included announcing, sharing, and recognizing activities. The most frequently used theme was the sharing of health information, which appeared in 35.8% (424/1184) of the posts. Such posts provided health tips and advice to community members [ 24 ]. In our study, we classified 14 themes into 5 groups: innovative service, activity information, media reports, health education information, and patient gratitude letter. In 2016, the most popular post theme was media reports. The main reason is that this information was generally linked to television news reports rather than plain-text posts. Since 2017, for proposing innovative service, health tips and advice were strategically posted in various forms, such as online streaming or videos. Due to the good strategy, innovative service became the most popular post theme. The number of likes for health education information remained the lowest for all 3 years. The main reason may be related to the plain-text form by which the theme was posted. At present, we are systematically replacing plain texts with more interesting online streams or videos.

In addition, to expand our brand and intensify fan interaction, we sent branded gifts such as management books we had published, as well as mugs, ties, purses, and pens carrying our hospital logo, during online streaming. Since many people nowadays prefer watching videos to reading texts, the branding team decided to improve video streaming in real time and to strengthen links to other online media. Probably as the consequence of the above measures, the number of likes rose to make ours the most popular Facebook fan page among all medical centers in Taiwan.

Special Features of Our Facebook Page

Using social media not only promotes marketing, but also upgrades care for patients and their families, enhances health consumer education, advances medical research, and expands brand awareness [ 25 ]. Facebook pages also serve as a tool for patient empowerment and allow for intercommunication between physicians and patients. Given the high volume of posts, it is imperative that the information provided be accurate and in accordance with the medical advice of physicians [ 26 ]. Other studies used Facebook for disease surveillance [ 27 ] and health interventions [ 28 ]. Facebook likes can reflect users’ preference, and thus can help predict health-related behaviors [ 29 , 30 ]. A previous study in 2014 reported that 99.4% (3351/3371) of hospitals in the United States had established Facebook pages. The use of social media varied according to the different characteristics of hospitals such as their size, urban location, and whether they were private nonprofit or teaching hospitals. All these factors affected their levels of activity on Facebook [ 18 ]. Another study of 12 Western European countries in 2012 found that 67.0% (585/873) of their hospitals had Facebook fan pages [ 31 ].

The penetration rate of Facebook in Taiwan is 82%, which is the highest in the world [ 32 ]. Despite this, only 51.1% of the hospitals have official Facebook fan pages. Furthermore, in comparison with other commercial Facebook fan pages, the numbers of likes are relatively low on hospital Facebook fan pages in Taiwan [ 22 ]. Social media is cheaper than conventional marketing, but its effects are enormous. For public hospitals with a restricted marketing budget, promotion through social media is a good investment approach. To strengthen hospital branding and to synchronize with the latest news, our results showed that Facebook and the hospital website are better interconnected. In addition, for better results, information should be posted quickly, within hours of events, and query comment messages should be answered as soon as possible.

Limitations

Our study provided insights into the ways our hospital had established a special team to promote branding by recruiting fans to our hospital Facebook page. However, our study had the following limitations. First, we reported and analyzed the methods of only our own hospital, and did not collect data from other hospitals for comparison. Second, social media and channels are changing rapidly. The use rate of different social media in 2019 could have been different from 2017. We have already expedited the construction of a LINE group in our hospital because of its increasing popularity over Facebook. Third, our Facebook fan page was established in 2012, while we obtained the reference data only in 2016 when we first started our Facebook drive. Fourth, since in Taiwan Facebook and mobile phones had been gaining in popularity from 2016 onward, we implemented these strategies for only 3 years. Details on longitudinal trends remain to be studied.

Our branding team, led by the hospital’s top officers, successfully implemented several strategies that achieved the most popular Facebook fan page among Taiwan hospitals. Strategies we used were powerful in providing information on time and in promoting better medical services. Our unique experience in Facebook management may lay the groundwork for hospitals’ use of social media platforms to improve patient interactions and health care outcomes.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank PY Lin and RW Huang for their indispensable help in data collection.

Multimedia Appendix 1

Multimedia appendix 2, multimedia appendix 3, multimedia appendix 4, multimedia appendix 5, multimedia appendix 6, multimedia appendix 7.

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

The Brand Supplement: When Hospitals Invest in Branding, ROI Gets Healthier

Today’s hospitals are investing billions of dollars in purchasing, acquiring, merging, integrating and upgrading, all with the goal of building better business models and improving patient care. But to get the most out of these investments—to connect meaningfully with patients, healthcare professionals and the communities they serve—hospitals must also invest in that essential business asset: the brand.

Healthcare’s Current Dose of Disruption

American hospitals are undergoing transformational change. Facing the need to provide quality care to more people at lower cost, hospitals are changing their business strategies. They’re striving to stay competitive, of course. But even remaining solvent is a challenge as they navigate rapidly-evolving regulations and invest in essential new infrastructure and technologies.

Hospitals’ investments are taking many forms. Many are building centers of excellence: focused facilities that leverage research and best practices. These and other enhancements help them earn or maintain their accreditation from the Joint Commission , a non-profit bureau whose mission is to “continuously improve health care for the public.” (Approximately 80% of American hospitals are accredited .)

Government regulations are also driving plenty of spending. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 required the use of electronic health records (EHRs). Tens of billions of dollars have been invested in EHRs in the decades since, and regular upgrades are now considered part of the cost of doing business.

The need for such ongoing investments continues to be a key factor driving hospitals toward consolidation. There doesn’t appear to be any end in sight; hospitals will need to continue to make big moves to adapt to each new requirement and competitive market pressure.

Our Recommended Remedy: Engaging the Power of Brand

We believe that as hospitals’ business models change (to include investments in new systems, technology, mergers, physician groups and other improvements), their investments in branding must evolve as well.

Why? Simply making investments does not ensure an acceptable return on them. Investments must be communicated along with the rationales behind them.

This is when brand shines as a motivating relationship-builder and enduring revenue growth driver. Branding can help a hospital attract new patients as well as skilled healthcare professionals, positioning the institution as the provider of choice within their region. It can accomplish this by communicating how each of the hospital’s investments improves people’s experience of healthcare .

With each investment or business move, a hospital’s brand can convey the most meaningful benefits of the change to each of its constituent groups:

• For patients and the community, a hospital’s infrastructure investment might result in wider availability of quality and convenient care
• For healthcare professionals, an investment in new technology might create opportunities to provide more efficient, effective care

One System’s Story (Or, Just Because You Build It Doesn’t Mean They Will Come)

In recent years, DeSantis Breindel was brought on to rebrand an integrated healthcare system in New Jersey . Three regional hospitals had merged. The new entity aimed to provide patients with coordinated care across a broad network with abundant specialized care.

Striving to build an entire integrated system from the ground up , the hospital group:

• Invested in new technology
• Created an impressive physician group by acquiring leading practices
• Launched an insurance subsidiary
• Created a network of centers of excellence

In spite of all this progress, the group still faced a challenge. It needed to translate its business strategy into a compelling value proposition for all key stakeholders. People needed to understand precisely how these investments would benefit them and increase the quality of regional healthcare.

The system was coming together just as planned. But to play off the famous line from Field of Dreams : just because you build it  doesn’t  mean they will come.

The Power of Brand Diagnostics

We were proud to help this hospital system convey their promise through brand .

Their investment (and our partnership) began with a deep discovery phase to unearth stakeholder priorities. Communities vary, and the needs and expectations of patients—even within a single county—can differ vastly. So our research helped get to the heart of what local patients really cared about.

In-depth conversations and quantitative surveys revealed that one population segment was driven mainly by convenience and cost. Another segment was focused on the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. To be successful, of course, the new brand had to appeal to both.

Research also revealed the types of questions people were asking about the merger:

• How would the consolidation of three independent hospitals into one integrated system benefit patients?
• Why should a physician group sell its practice to the new system?
• Would accessing healthcare in the new system become more bureaucratic and less personal?

These insights led to a compelling brand idea: “360 Degrees of Coordinated Healthcare.”

We recommended that the new brand focus on the patient experience. The new system was designed to pull all facets of their care together: from the hospital environment to the experience of visiting their doctor’s office to the communications or services they’d receive at home. But people needed to understand that the new integrated system would be more responsive to patient needs.

This brand strategy positioned the newly-formed hospital system as a positive contributor to quality healthcare, not just a bottom-line-focused business. We activated this strategy with a visual identity that projected the key values and tenets that would communicate aligned values and promises. Colors, imagery and design represented the system as approachable, warm and inclusive.

Bringing the Brand to Life From the Inside Out

Success of the hospital system’s new brand (and its new healthcare delivery model) hinged on the system’s people. After all, as the face of the organization, their behaviors would shape each and every patient experience.

We needed to ensure these essential internal stakeholders would deliver on the new brand promise. So we designed and implemented a series of internal engagement initiatives to rally employees behind the new brand:

• Brand-based training materials were developed for the management team to deliver to staff. These helped everyone in the system understand their role in bringing the brand to life.
• Leadership teams from the three formerly-separate hospitals came together in a series of working and planning sessions. They created system-wide policies, procedures, cultural norms, employee training and evaluation criteria to make new standards clear.
• Using the brand as a springboard, these leadership teams fundamentally redesigned the hospital patient experience, creating a multi-year blueprint for investment and transformation.

Each of these initiatives clarified the specific promises the hospital system makes to patients as well as the (measurable) behavioral expectations for medical staff and employees. Everyone in the organization was challenged to continuously ask what they can do to offer “360 Degrees of Care.”

This new brand, now at the center of the unified hospital system, offers a vision of patient care that all hospital group doctors, medical staff and employees understand and work to make a reality every day. The brand provides employees with a patient-centric lens through which to view every daily decision and action: issues, operations and standards. All staff are constantly encouraged to deliver enhanced experiences and are evaluated in part on their success at doing so.

With internal stakeholders firmly on board, the brand launched externally through a synchronized marketing campaign spanning:

• Online advertising
• Outdoor advertising
• Direct mail
• A new literature system
• A mobile-optimized, responsive website

From discovery through employee engagement and launch, this investment in brand delivered wonderful results for the new hospital system. Engaged employees delivered a better healthcare experience, patient satisfaction scores rose and leading physician groups joined the network.

Maximizing the Value of Healthcare Investments

Hospitals will continue to make billions in investments. If they expect these expenditures to drive ROI, they must craft and communicate powerful value propositions for patients and qualified healthcare professionals alike—focusing on what these investments enable . That’s their story, the experience and journey they offer: their brand.

Building a strong healthcare brand starts with aligning the brand strategy with the business strategy—supplementing investments in technology, people and infrastructure with an investment in brand. The process will reveal what stakeholders truly yearn for and how the hospital system can help, one meaningful healthcare experience at a time.

There are healthcare goals that inspire everyone, like delivering compassionate, quality care. When hospitals leverage brand, such ambitions become the clearly-understood purpose behind every change they make. Financial or structural investments are transformed into fresh chapters of a compelling brand story—one that stakeholders are eager to join.

To learn more about healthcare branding strategy, contact us .

Originally published January 20, 2020.

About the author

Seth Margolis is a Senior Strategy Director who has spearheaded branding efforts for financial services, professional services and technology companies, as well as for not-for-profit organizations.

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The availability of hospital beds, high costs of healthcare and access to skilled professionals have long been a challenge for families and individuals struggling with mental health conditions. Jonas Hill Hospital & Clinic, a UNC Health Hospital and a division of Caldwell Memorial Hospital sought to fill this healthcare gap by combining an inpatient hospital unit with outpatient treatment and education in the same facility.

Jonas Hill asked The Diamond Group to develop a brand that would bring this community-minded spirit of generosity, hope, health and healing in a beautiful environment to life.

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Value Added: Logo design, WordPress website, Brand Development

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We focused on creating high-quality content that would be of interest to their target audience. we also ran targeted social media ads to increase their reach..

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How We Brought a Hospital Brand To Life: Going from Vague Idea to Reality.

To bring a brand to life with a modern look and feel and a website that patients (and Google) adore required the following services:

Foundational

The Challenge

UNC Health is the largest healthcare organization in North Carolina. Caldwell Memorial Hospital is UNC Health Hospital. Both entities were excited to fill a need in the community for a compassionate, safe, and healthy-healing environment to life. Jonas Hill Hospital & Clinic sits adjacent to Caldwell Memorial Hospital, and it needed a brand created that respected it's relationship with Caldwell Memorial and UNC Health, but also allowed it to stand on its own in the community. The UNC Health brand guidelines were to be the foundation of the brand, but how we saw the brands potential was entirely in our hands.

Jonas Hill Hospital and Clinic is a behavioral health facility in Lenoir, NC. It is a unit of UNC Caldwell and follows the UNC brand guidelines in terms of color palette, typography, and image style.

The approach.

When building a brand it is important to understand the desires and mindset of your client, or in this case, patient. What are they feeling and thinking at the time they interact with you or your brand materials? What is their emotional state and how will your messages impact them? Our goal was to build a user experience from beginning to end that respected the patient and treated them with dignity no matter where they were in the process of finding help for themselves or a family member. The purpose of the website is to build trust, provide important information, and serve as an initial point of contact for patients, families, and/or referring medical staff. The website needed to strike a balance between providing all the information they may need and not becoming overly complex to navigate or understand. The message throughout the brand materials needs to be jargon-free and compassionate. Our marketing plan includes producing content for social media and articles for the website to drive traffic and build awareness for the new facility.

Pocket folders were a to present patient information in a clean and organized manner and get them in touch with the brand. 

The results.

Through a series of interviews with stakeholders we discovered that patients were looking for a mental health hospital that encouraged interaction between staff and patients during inpatient stays. Whether an individual is in crisis or wants to improve their skills to manage everyday life. With this discovery, we were able to establish the hospitals core values and beliefs:

That the balance between safety and therapeutic, dignified care is the top priority The patient and their loved ones are at the heart of every decision and action we take. We are empathetic providers of comprehensive, therapeutic, and whole-person healing. Respecting the importance of the healthcare team, and promoting their wellbeing. A commitment to financial stewardship

A vibrant color palette was selected to communicate optimism and abundant health. The accent colors are to be used in concert with the primary blue colors of the UNC Health brand. 

This discovery of patient desires, and distillation of the brand pillars led to the development of a positioning statement that succinctly communicates their brand promise to all who hear about the hospital.

You are heard here..

With the brands position firmly in place, The Diamond Group created a comprehensive branding strategy encompassing logo design, website, social media, and Facebook advertising to create brand awareness and firmly define their promise to patients, referring physicians and the general public.

The brand, and the website have been a smashing success welcoming hundreds of patients and thousands of visitors each month.

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How to Create Great Hospital Branding in 5 Easy Steps

Learn how to create great brand visuals and build a hospital branding strategy in five easy-to-follow steps.

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Not even the healthcare industry is exempt from the importance of good branding, so today we’re guiding you through the basic steps that will help you create a strong hospital brand.

Unfortunately, because of the covid-19 pandemic hospitals currently have even more business than they can handle. But this too will pass sooner or later, and the importance of healthcare branding will once again become apparent.

Yes, it’s true that people visit hospitals only when they have to . But that doesn’t mean that they only have one choice of hospital and it’s inevitably going to be yours. That’s why we’re looking at 5 key hospital branding steps that will help you create a strong brand and set up your healthcare organization for success.  

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Come up with a unique brand promise

Every good branding strategy begins with creating a unique brand identity. So you run a hospital. A hospital for heart conditions no less. A hospital for heart diseases in New York.

But what makes you truly unique?

Your brand promise is a unique value proposition for your clients (as well as all the basic stuff like what area of healthcare you specialize in). When you start to think up your brand promise, chances are you’ll end up with something that’s already used by your competitors. Keep researching and experimenting so that the final result will be both unique and perfectly suited to your new brand.

Here’s an example you can certainly learn from. St Jude Children’s Research Hospital is one of, if not the most famous children’s hospital in the world. Of course, it goes without saying that they reached this stage in huge part thanks to the expertise of their medical staff. But then again, the name has popped up in many popular films and TV shows, it’s become a hospital brand that’s synonymous with children’s health . The reason for this is their great brand promise, which you can see on their website: “Finding cures. Saving children.”

Highlighting the research aspect, this clinic’s brand strategy focuses on innovation in healthcare . They don’t just save kids (which is incidentally something that most children’s hospitals also do); they find cures even when there isn’t one in sight.

Create a company culture

A healthcare brand is only as good as its staff . In other words, no matter how effective your branding and marketing strategies are in attracting clients, patients stick around if they like the doctors and medical staff providing immediate care. It goes without saying that you should always try to hire the people with the best medical expertise, but when it comes to brand building, creating a company culture with internal stakeholders is almost equally important.

Creating a positive work environment isn’t enough to transform staff into your brand ambassadors. If all they have to say about your healthcare organization is “it’s a great place to work”, in the bottom line, this won’t really help to attract new patients. However, if the staff are also excited about the brand promise, if they are keen to share the messaging of your brand, you’re en route to hospital branding success.

This heartwarming video is part of a hospital branding campaign called “What Are You Bringing To Work Today” from a healthcare organization called Ellis Medicine . The chief pharmacist tells the story of how a thoughtful coworker helped her out during a hard time and also points out that because of this positive work environment, her personal problems didn’t affect the welfare of the patients .

Ellis Brand Campaign Video- "Sara" vF from SMITH & JONES on Vimeo .

Create a visual identity that stands out

You can blame consumerism for it if you like, but it’s also in our nature to let the sense of sight affect decisions that we make it life (for example, it’s believed that red is a good food and restaurant branding color because this is how our ancestors could tell ripe fruit apart from unripe).

A unique visual identity isn’t just a form of differentiation from your competitors, it’s also another channel through which you should enforce your key branding messages . For example, if you’re a cutting-edge research clinic you might opt for a very modern and sleek visual identity, and if you run a big hospital system, a more conventional brand image that will speak to most patients might be a better solution. If you run a nonprofit organization that provides data and recommendations for government whitepapers on healthcare, your identity should command a sense of authority.

Hapvida healthcare system in Brazil is a great example of modern and innovative hospital branding . At first, you might be struck by how colorful and fun a hospital brand can be. But although this isn’t something we’re necessarily used to, this hospital brand image is perfectly appropriate for the healthcare industry. Instead of showing patients in hospital beds, this hospital brand opted for a visual identity that celebrates health . With high-quality images of people in their homes, and a fresh, modern color palette, this brand’s visual identity blends together healthcare with wellness and alleviates some of the usual anxiety around a visit to the doctor. Their hospital logo is both memorable and professional and perfectly reflects their empowering take on healthcare .

Address the patient experience

We’ve explained why it’s important to make your staff your brand’s advocates (they are the ones who interact with your patients). But there are things you can do on the top level of your hospital system that can help transform regular patients into brand ambassadors .

Instead of blatantly telling new patients that your healthcare brand is the best one out there, think about addressing their concerns and pain points , whether it’s the proximity of the nearest hospital or the unease of meeting a new doctor. If you show that you have an ear for their problems and provide a stellar service later on, it will be much easier to get them to make referrals. Good public relations means getting your brand messaging to match the testimonials of your patients.

One great example of hospital branding in this respect comes from White Planes Hospital . It shows a cancer survivor and her doctor talking about the treatment process at White Planes. The interview is focused on the patient experience : how the doctor had previously treated this patient’s mother and of the long-standing bond that has formed since. The medical professional gives her view of the research excellence which has been made available at this healthcare facility, which highlights the brand promise: outstanding medical and customer service .

This case study is yet another reminder of just how much individual patient experience is affected by their relationships with designated doctors and helps to highlight the point that you need to get both patients and staff excited behind your healthcare brand.

Hospital marketing campaigns that make sense

With the world of digital marketing blossoming with ever-inventive marketing strategies and social media ad campaigns, it may seem hard at first how something as conventional as the healthcare industry can claim its market share of this glitzy and creative space.

Well, the answer to that question is pretty complex. With some types of healthcare facilities like plastic surgeons or dental services, it’s becoming perfectly appropriate to utilize the power of social media marketing; for example, many of these hospital brands use influencers as their brand ambassadors.

On the other hand, marketers might have a more challenging task when it comes to large hospital systems that aren’t expected to have particularly trendy or “flashy” digital marketing campaigns. With institutions that deal with more serious conditions, expertise and professionalism come first, so something like a webinar might be a far more effective way to get new patients interested in your hospital brand.

One of the largest and most famous research clinics in the world, the Mayo Clinic , for example, has a great content strategy that perfectly fits their hospital brand. They have a blog section that includes specialized articles relevant to medical professionals, as well as patients’ testimonials .

However, this isn’t to say that social media is off limits for hospital marketing . The Arkansas Children's Hospital in partnership with the Injury Prevention Center started a social media campaign with a shocking title #100deadliestdays. The title refers to the days between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day when there is a spike in teen car crashes and the campaign was meant to raise awareness on safe driving and the protection of children in traffic. But they also expanded the campaign to other related topics like the dangers of children being inside very hot cards during the summer months.

We hope that this brief guide helped you to understand better some key aspects of hospital branding. The most important takeaway that’s perhaps more relevant in the healthcare industry than anywhere else is to focus on people . Just like good doctors don’t approach patients as “work”, but rather people with a unique set of physical and mental features, good hospital branding doesn’t see them as payers of hospital bills.

Hospital brand building goes far beyond a single patient’s treatment. A strong brand stays in the mind of patients as your institution becomes their first pick out of the entire healthcare system.

Having lived and studied in London and Berlin, I'm back in native Serbia, working remotely and writing short stories and plays in my free time. With previous experience in the nonprofit sector, I'm currently writing about the universal language of good graphic design. I make mix CDs and my playlists are almost exclusively 1960s.

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Irresistible hospital branding: 5 tips to make it happen.

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As modern consumerism grows and becomes more sophisticated, healthcare branding has become even more vital to an organization’s growth and success.

While it’s true that most patients will only visit you when they have to, it doesn’t mean that you’re their only choice of healthcare provider. They need to have enough awareness and information about you before they come to you.

In this article, we’ll discuss the techniques to help you create a strong healthcare brand strategy and, eventually, succeed in the industry.

What is Hospital Branding?

Healthcare branding is the process of shaping how a healthcare organization is perceived by the public.

It shows your target audience what you stand for. It’s something that makes people remember your healthcare company. 

A brand strategy needs to highlight your business’s strengths and attract the right customers. 

Why is it important?

Good hospital branding brings your business to various advantages:

• It builds patient trust
• It enhances internal consistency
• It helps understand consumers intimately
• It improves patient journey
• It sets you apart from your competitors

[Read: Optimized Branding for Healthcare Organizations [How it’s Done in 2021] ]

5 Healthcare Branding Strategies To Grow Your Practice

1. Hospital Brand Research

Every branding effort starts with thorough research.

Gather qualitative and quantitative data about your products, services, consumers, and competitors. 

Ask your community members how they choose a hospital, how your practice is perceived, and how it compares to competing facilities in the healthcare industry.

Analyze comparable healthcare brand campaigns of your competitors, interview relevant industry experts, talk to your healthcare staff, patients, and administrators. This step reveals if your target patient prefers your hospital or not. 

If it isn’t preferred, you’ll get an idea about your strengths and weaknesses and can determine your next actions. 

2. Brand Positioning

Based on the data you’ve gathered, what do you think makes your hospital’s brand unique?

Brand positioning allows you to differentiate your practice from other healthcare companies. To do this, your team needs to look at the fine line between your practice from other hospital brands. Think about how you’d like to distinguish yourself in the healthcare industry.

Come up with a brand promise

Along with defining your brand’s unique traits, you need to come up with a brand promise to your potential customers. Your brand promise is what your customers should expect from you. This is the reason why your practice has to do the right thing and perform well consistently.

Rethink about the mission, vision, and objectives of your healthcare organization, and connect them with your branding strategy. 

Analyze the data you’ve gathered from your brand research. What makes you different from your competitors? From there, you’ll be able to come up with a feasible brand promise.

For example, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is just among the thousands of children’s hospitals in the U.S. But how did it become famous worldwide?

Aside from their excellent medical staff, the hospital’s name and brand promise, “Finding cures. Saving children”, popped up in many films and TV shows. The brand image became synonymous with children’s health.

The healthcare facility promises not to only save kids, but also to find a cure even in complex medical situations. 

3. Brand Identity

Brand identity refers to your facility’s visual identity. It comprises your messaging (tone, word choice) and visual elements that represent your organization).

You need to use logos, symbols, colors, and fonts strategically to trigger an emotional response and influence your potential patient’s decision. 

Colors play a crucial role in your brand identity. Let’s take a look at these examples:

The American Red Cross uses red for its logo color. This is a bold and passionate color that translates to love, care, and comfort associated with heart, blood pressure, spine, and motor.

Blue is associated with calm and relaxation. Like the sky and the ocean, the color blue creates a feeling of freedom, expansiveness, wisdom, respect, and opportunity.

Green is an aseptic color. It’s associated with health, tranquility, harmony, and new life.

Take a look at how Cleveland Clinic combined these two colors.

Come up with something that makes you memorable, instills a sense of trust and good reputation in the minds of your customers, and sets you apart from your competitors.

To learn more about healthcare logos and other brand visual elements, read: The Easiest Way to Design a Healthcare Logo [in 2021]

4. Brand Story

Even in the healthcare industry, content is still the king. A compelling, engaging, and, most of all, useful content is a significant element in achieving your healthcare success.

Healthcare facilities don’t run out of educational and inspiring stories to tell. Take advantage of it to boost your healthcare branding.

Inspiring and life-changing stories of patients whose lives have changed through your service are a powerful way to connect with more potential consumers on a deeper level.

Likewise, you can offer educational content on vital healthcare topics through blog posts, videos, and infographics. These mediums are not only attention-grabbing, but your audience can also read and understand them better than the traditional white papers and books.

Good brand storytelling assures your audience that you have the right solution for their healthcare needs. It also boosts your digital presence, credibility, and search engine rankings.

5. Patient Experience

You’ve created awareness and set your customer’s expectations. Now, the ultimate judge of your healthcare branding success is the patient experience.

Make sure that your brand is aligned with your patients’ needs and expectations, as well as your facility’s capacity to serve them. It should extend from the smiles on your medical staff’s faces the moment a patient enters the facility to the user-friendliness of your systems.

Think about your patient’s concerns and pain points. Is your hospital located in an accessible area? Is the appointment booking process fast and reliable? Are you open to receiving their post-appointment feedback? 

If you show your patients that you’re eager to listen to their problems and provide an efficient solution, you’ll most likely get referrals. If they can find you online, they can post their online reviews on your web page too! 

In a 2020 study by Software Advice , about 94% of patients read online doctor reviews to find new health providers nowadays, so getting positive reviews from your patients is a win for you. 

Hire a Professional Healthcare Brand Strategist!

Since healthcare institutions deal with more serious conditions and require a lot of expertise and professionalism, creating an effective branding strategy can become complex and challenging.

When strategizing your healthcare branding, one of your goals is to nourish a healthy and lasting relationship with your patients. A good healthcare marketer can help you achieve this. 

Marketing agencies specializing in healthcare brands have enough knowledge about the medical scene, so they would know to boost your brand image accordingly. 

When hiring one, make sure to get relevant data and proof of results from their past healthcare branding projects. Doing so would help you authenticate their experience and credibility.

Digitalis Medical specializes in creating effective and results-based healthcare branding strategies. 

We work alongside doctors to improve their brands and grow their business through proven marketing strategies. Contact us today to know more about our services! 

Ready to boost your practice today? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below!

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Hospital Branding: Tips and Strategies that Work

A strong hospital branding strategy helps set your hospital apart from its competitors. Learn how.

Hospital CEOs tend to forget that hospital branding plays a significant role in building a successful healthcare business. To be fair, having a pretty tall building, state-of-the-art clinical equipment and the best physicians does create a certain appeal. But, it is no guarantee that patients in dire need of clinical services will choose your hospital over the fierce competition in the healthcare industry.

For your hospital to actually win in a highly competitive healthcare system, you must invest in hospital branding. Adopting a strong hospital branding strategy can help you craft a unique image for your hospital and make it every client’s first choice.

In this article, we’ll be sharing useful information on how your hospital brand can gain a healthy market share and boost its patient acquisition and retention rate, through powerful healthcare branding.

But first, let’s address a few basic questions about this branding concept:

What is hospital branding?

It’s a branding strategy that involves creating and shaping the public perception of a hospital. It devotes branding elements to building a unique, distinctive image that resonates with patients.

Why is healthcare branding important?

Healthcare branding shines the spotlight on your hospital, differentiates you from your competitors, and evokes feelings in patients that make them willing to entrust their lives with you.

How can branding improve healthcare?

By prioritizing patients’ experience (due to the need to maintain a positive hospital brand image), branding can significantly improve the quality of healthcare service delivery and patient care.

What is Healthcare Branding?

Branding is a crucial concept within every industry, and the healthcare business is no different. Simply put, healthcare branding is the process of molding a strong, positive perception of your hospital in the minds of both current and future patients.

It involves the careful combination of branding elements such as logo, design, ads, mission statements, tone of content, and a consistent theme throughout all brand touchpoints to create a unique image that makes your hospital unique.

These design rules are what multiple market-leading companies have applied, to create branding and packaging designs, towards resounding commercial success. For instance, cutting-edge clinics like the UK hospital brand, Well, opt for a modern, slightly adventurous yet clinical twist to their visual identity. But for big clinics like the Mayo clinic , harping on their credibility better with a no-nonsense, traditional brand identity might be a better approach.

On the whole, hospital branding is quite different from other kinds of branding, given that the stakes are higher. Patients at a hospital or any other kind of healthcare service provider are not looking to purchase yet another product in bags with eye-popping packaging. Here, they have their lives, and entire existence at stake.

Why is branding in healthcare so important?

Let’s face it — Though healthcare organizations & hospitals, and workers are primarily intended to provide healthcare to the ailing (thanks to the Hippocratic Oath), they are still businesses at their core. Even public hospitals that are not run for profit still need to earn enough revenue to justify their budgets and retain funding.

Times have changed, health technology has made several giant leaps, and people now approach the healthcare industry seeking a broad array of clinical services. And all of these added activities have greatly expanded the healthcare system, creating a bigger technology-oriented market. Conversely, we’ve never had more hospitals competing for market share.

So, if any hospital brand is to have a fighting chance, they need to secure as many patients as they can. And the best route towards that is incorporating aggressive hospital branding and design strategies into their overall marketing strategy.

Here’s why:

Branding helps build your brand image

When your hospital brand is familiar to people even before they need clinical services, it’s not hard to guess which hospital they’d choose w hen they require medical assistance (yours, of course!).

Prognos Health is one of the many technology-based healthcare brands that personify the uncontestable importance of healthcare branding in building an enduring brand image. Right off the bat, anyone with even a little knowledge about hospitals knows the word ‘Prognosis’ and what it means. It has been used too often in the numerous medical dramas on TV to be an obscure, technical word.

Prognosis, (not to be confused with diagnosis,) simply means clinical insight into medical conditions and their likely course. So, by designing their brand name from the word, they were able to craft a unique public identity in their packaging as a healthcare brand invested in the clinical insights business, using a technology-enabled data-based approach to help patients to make sense of their prognoses early on, and to find the best possible options available to them.

Choosing that image and running with it, Prognos Health has been able to build a specific brand image and place it at the very top of general awareness; enabling them to stand uniquely apart from possible competitors in the healthcare industry.

Their 11 years of operation has seen them process over 325 Million de-identified patients and 100 Billion lab results and prescription records.

Your Hospital Brand’s Identity

Typically, when you think of brand identity, a logo with eye-catching typeface, a witty tagline, and a complementary color palette designed by an overly pricey PR agency may spring to mind. However, healthcare branding goes far beyond mere aesthetic appeal.

In healthcare marketing, a hospital brand identity must start with the core of what your health organization is all about. It has to convey the values, voice, and emotional commitment of your hospital practice that lies behind your service offerings.

Let’s consider New York City-based dental care brand, Tend. Tend’s strategy was to blend their dental clinics into the general perception of NYC sophistication. Firstly with a simple logo and toned color choices, they’ve been able to effectively co-opt the increasingly popular notion that “simplicity is the new luxury.”

Using this brand messaging, they’ve grossed estimated revenues of over $30 Million annually. This is the kind of result that you get when you hire a professional branding agency to run your design & branding projects.

Our experience working with numerous clients in the healthcare sector has taught us that besides teaching your employees to offer the optimum patient experience (since they are the ones that interact with clients), one better way to positively influence your brand image is through your visual identity.

This requires a deep level of technical-commercial understanding and a firm grip on the basics of graphic design — like how colors impact patients’ wellbeing and choices. Ultimately, there are different needs to consider. Carefully crafting your hospital brand image is a balancing act that leaves you needing the high-level creativity of a branding agency .

300+ unique, completed projects by our award-winning branding agency with proven results leaves us with a wealth of experience you can lean on. Don’t get caught out in the cold. We’re happy to show you the ropes! Get advice from the chief analyst of our creative agency CEO — Stan here .

With expertly-done hospital branding, you can communicate the opinion, perspective, and image you want to create to both your patients and your workers; or better yet, try to fit into their existing perspectives.

Branding makes your marketing an absolute breeze

Branding ties together all the aspects of your healthcare organization, increasing the productivity of your entire system of marketing efforts. With clever enough design concepts and branding strategies, healthcare companies can strike up organic conversations surrounding their brand; potentially translating to increased engagement metrics.

Mayo Clinic, one of the most revered health research clinics globally has a strong branded content strategy and brand identity that fuels its marketing strategy. With brand content tailor-made for medical professionals and client testimonials that are every bit as eye-catching as they are heart-soothing, they’ve been able to pull in $13.9B in revenue as of March 2021.

Branding helps you communicate directly to your patients

The phrase “consumer is king” is the reigning mantra in today’s marketing, branding and design landscape, and I must say, no truer words have been said.

Customers love to know all the ground-breaking stuff you’ve been up to in your bid to best solve their medical issues. From high-end equipment to cutting-edge biomedical technology systems. Branding is a sure-fire business strategy that provides the means by which you can communicate with them in the best way.

Most of us are very familiar with CVS. Previously known just as a chain of pharmacies, the company reinvented itself in 2016, after over 50 years of existence, as a more complete player in the healthcare system with a wider scope of services.

CVS Pharmacy became CVS Health with four subsidiaries — CVS Pharmacy, CVS Specialty, CVS Minute Clinic. Well, as anyone would expect, what followed was a marketing campaign of historic proportions. but, if you ask us, what really did the trick was their graphic design, logo designs, distinct brand promise, and branding strategy.

Now, of course, they changed the name from CVS Pharmacy to CVS Health, but they retained the same letter font and signature red color.

Then used the same pattern in designing logos for all four new subsidiaries, communicating to customers that they could expect the same level of quality medical care that they had experienced at the old CVS Pharmacies.

Needless to say, the program took off, and to much success!

You could tell that they very likely had hired a top-of-the-line design and branding agency with in-depth knowledge of healthcare marketing. And with the required expertise, you can get similar results with your hospital’s branding. Our team of branding experts has helped many effectively communicate their brand message and brand promise in a way that reflects high-level creativity—the kind that pulls customers in and instantly connects with your brand message.

All the advancements in technology that you’ve implemented in your hospital and your commitment to innovative treatment may be lost with your audience where you lack a coherent, compelling, and comprehensive healthcare branding strategy.

In search of solutions? Need some clarity? Still not sure about how to get started on your hospital’s branding project? We get that all these may seem abstract, and we could go on and on about the importance of hospital branding. After all, it’s our expertise. But we also get that you’re here for results. Our experience in this field means we most likely have the answers to your hospital branding inquiries.

We’re pleased to chat about a potential partnership that will be tailored to your hospital’s need. Click here for a free project pre-development and consultation from our CEO.

Tips to improve a hospital’s brand

It’s no secret that the internet has become a huge factor in shaping the public’s perception and collective awareness. And so, it is only natural that people use it to try to find quick, on-demand solutions to occasional health niggles or scares, or just to learn more about medical conditions.

Fun fact: Google reports that one in every 20 Google search inquiries are directly related to health issues.

With this in mind, you want to hire a maverick design and branding agency with sufficient deep commercial understanding and a high-level creativity to create the most effective strategies for integrating the internet into your general branding, in the best way to elicit positive responses.

As an agency with many years spent on implementing branding principles in healthcare, we know this: most of your patients looked up your medical center online at least once before visiting. The stats also back it up here where it claims two-thirds of all patients search the internet prior to a health consultation.

Below, we’ve listed some tips to help you crack the code of today’s hospital branding. But first, let’s take a look at one of the unique completed projects handled by our award-winning branding agency with proven results:

DME is a mid-size hospital based out of Chesterfield in Virginia. Sometime in the second quarter of 2020, the administrators felt the need to undertake a high-impact, flawless launch of a new brand identity.

There was a request to urgently apply our firm’s deep commercial understanding to help completely revamp DME by developing an internally and externally consolidated branding with winning designs, to create a unique and market-ready brand identity.

Our diverse team of designers and marketers started by mapping out various strategies and designs that involved extended consultations with DME’s management, and in-house deliberations. First, we redesigned their logo using the letters ‘DME’. Simplicity was key — the last thing that a company looking to build brand recognition and momentum needs is a logo that doesn’t expressly say its name.

We then took it a step further by fitting the medical cross in the letter E; both for aesthetic effect and to explicitly indicate the company’s status as a player in the medical services industry, bringing simplicity, and structure.

Our work received high praise from the DME management as it was a key milestone in the execution of a fresh new brand identity that laid the groundwork for success. Only 4 weeks after the designs were published, DME reported a 29.3% increase in the order placements so much that they had to onboard more staff.

Tell your story

One sure-fire way to make a good impression as a hospital brand is to tell stories. Stories create an honest, emotional bridge between you and your target audience.

As a healthcare brand, consumer trust is your most valuable asset and storytelling is a powerful way to build that. By using stories in your branding, you can get your audience to trust your expertise because you engagingly provide valuable clinical information to them.

Engulf your audience in a story that relays to them, what made you start your healthcare organization. What positive change you seek to drive and the experiences leading up to this decision. Massachusetts General Hospital, for instance, makes use of a story recording booth to collate stories by patients about how the hospital is helping them live a meaningful life with their health conditions.

Show your target audience how previous patients have gotten solutions to common medical problems in your care institution or how dangerous it can be to ignore these issues and watch your patient acquisition rates skyrocket.

With the help of a professional branding agency, you can formulate content that somehow communicates your hospital brand’s message in a way that can be understood by laymen, giving your audience relatable content that inspires them to take action.

An excellent case-in-point of how storytelling can be incorporated into healthcare branding is how the New York-Presbyterian Hospital included an “Amazing Stories” section on its website. The clinical center publishes heartwarming stories of how it has helped several patients from the perspective of the patient, through excellent clinical care and service delivery.

How’s this for effective brand storytelling: one of the stories published on the hospital’s website explains how its doctors expertly performed a series of surgeries (including a heart transplant!) to save the life of a young girl who had been born with only half a heart.

Be Different

Hospitals are, by design, extremely similar. They provide a similar system of services and have similar kinds of infrastructure. Even the physical structures look similar most of the time. The patients are bound to ask, “What does your hospital offer that others don’t?” and that’s the exactly question your brand design and strategy must look to answer.

Hospital administrators hoping for breakthroughs in hospital branding must find ways to highlight the unique differences of their hospital.

Established 30 years ago, Care Hospitals was a leading healthcare establishment in Allegheny, getting recommendations, referrals, and transferring patients from hospitals across the state.

Peter Wagner, the Medical Director of Care Hospitals in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania contacted us, when his hospital was in a tricky situation, he had been referred to us by a friend of his — a VP at a company that our agency had worked with in the past.

From March 2019, Peter began to notice a decline — Government funding and other donations began to decrease. After Peter’s (free) pre-development consultation with our expert team , we immediately swung into action, and our first step at rebranding the hospital was to redesign its logo and tagline.

We came up with a stylized version of the word “care” and then included the medical cross to indicate that it’s a hospital. The tagline “quality you can always trust”, emphasizes the sophisticated system of clinical care and credibility that the hospital had developed over the course of its 30 years of operation.

However, what really made this project a resounding success was the story-telling. It took deep commercial understanding for our designers and marketers to tell that it was not just enough to piggyback on a brand campaign, since most of the people in the area already knew the hospital anyway.

We compiled stories from patients, video interviews in fact, outlining their experiences at the hospital and their opinions about the staff. Then, our expert team went to work on these stories, highlighting high points that indicate a unique feature of the hospital. These were then paired with just the right soundtrack. The result was a sublime video that promoted the hospital’s best features using true, good-to-honest stories.

Not only did our award-winning agency help Care hospital’s patient enrollment get back on track, they also recorded a 25% increase in private donations, and finally, they received a nomination for the annual Healthgrades America’s Best Hospitals Award.

Strategies That Make Hospital Branding Successful

We’ve designed an effective system that has helped many hospitals (and indeed businesses in other sectors) to zhuzh up their branding; and in our experience, specific strategies just work for healthcare businesses. They’ve been market-tested many times and have never failed to yield impressive results.

Below are a few of such strategies for hospital brands:

Monitor your online reputation

Good hospital branding involves controlling the online discourse surrounding your hospital brand by posting valuable content and publicizing positive stories about your brand on your medical institution’s website.

Also, it’s important to effectively manage the negative reviews of your hospital’s brand and provide reprieve to complaints as fast as possible. This would go a long way in helping you to build a positive reputation. Cleveland Clinic does this admirably, and their online reputation managament has yielded an exceptional brand image with a review score of 97.4%.

Strategic content creation

Strategic internet content creation is the heart of branding. With well-designed, timely content that appeals to the emotions of your audience, you can command traffic to your hospital brand’s website, and to your hospital by extension.

Amplifying your online presence across various media touchpoints helps you to reach a wide audience and to get them familiar with your brand. We all know how brand familiarity drives positive purchase decisions.

In other words, providing people with valuable information across various online channels is a time-tested branding strategy that has helped numerous healthcare concerns to worm their way into the forefront of the audience’s awareness. Mayo Clinic and WebMD , for example, have both consistently been the most reliable source of clinical information for people over the years, and have become very reputable.

The being said, although content creation is part of the process of branding your hospital, the content you create should be centered around helping the consumer first, not marketing your services.

Why? Because people are always likely to get on the defensive once they sense that they’re being pitched to. Of course, we all know that businesses don’t just create online content for purely altruistic purposes. But, the most effective way to capture your audience’s attention is to proffer useful information first.

This creates the impression that you genuinely care about their welfare, allowing them to relax and become somewhat more receptive. This way, by the time they read your call-to-action phrases — strategically placed toward the end of the content — like, “Call now to book an appointment” or “Contact us to learn more!”, they will be more likely to actually follow through.

Keep in touch with your patients

Everyone loves that nice doctor who finds the time to send them an email a few times a month, giving them tips or information related to their diagnosis. And thankfully, this is done very easily these days, with the various email automation systems and related tools on the market.

When your company makes it a point to keep in touch with patients, it removes the distasteful, impersonal feeling that many patients complain about, and lets them know that you care about their well-being even outside the four walls of the hospital.

This positive feeling towards your hospital can inspire brand loyalty in them, with the added advantage of organic referrals. The University of Tokyo Hospital serves a worthy reminder of how little acts like this cover quite the distance in the hearts of patients, securing their lifelong customer loyalty.

Be consistent with your branding efforts

Brand awareness goes beyond the level of creation. You need to stay consistent. The average person is daily inundated with tens of internet content; from social media posts to emails in their inboxes. It’s humanly impossible for them to keep track of all of them.

However, by maintaining a certain level of consistency in your branding, you can create a more permanent image in the minds of your audience, increasing your chances of converting them into paying customers. You want to start by having clear-cut conversations about critical details that will make your hospital instantly recognizable and memorable.

A consensus about these details — your messaging, your brand promise, voice and tone, color pallete, logo, fonts, and other graphical elements of your visual identity should be reached. The agreed set of information about how your hospital’s corporate identity should be presented should then inform a brand guideline that will be used across all marketing channels and touchpoints (of interaction) you share with your patients.

Track the success of your brand marketing strategies

If you employ the market-tested design branding strategies that we have listed in this article, there’s a good chance you will see great results.

However, some strategies may work better than others due to operational differences. In such situations, how do you determine the brand marketing strategies that work well for your hospital and the ones that don’t?

The answer lies in tracking your branding strategies effectively. A common way hospitals do this is by casually asking consumers to fill in questionnaires that contain questions like ‘How did you get to know about this hospital?’ and ‘What do you think about the quality of our services?’.

Another way you can track your hospital’s branding strategy is by attaching unique contact information to each branding and marketing touchpoint; thereby creating a system where every new patient can be traced to the exact brand marketing pathways by which they came in.

View 500+ UNIQUE completed projects with proven results

It’s the age of technology, and now more than ever, people (or patients) live a sedentary lifestyle, which means that they stay a lot in their comfort zone, playing video games, working from home without much movement. There is a surge in inactivity that almost inevitably means humans are now more prone to health conditions that require clinical attention.

Unlike the last decade where patients would visit hospitals that were chosen by their health insurance providers and called it a day. Others that, for one reason or the other, didn’t have health insurance simply went to the closest hospitals at the slightest discomfort, there are no other options.

People now undergo checkups on websites by online physicians and enroll in virtual (faceless) one-on-one clinical consultations from platforms like Lemonaid Primary Care Complete who offers comprehensive and tailor-made health care solutions for individuals and families. Word of mouth referrals have taken the priority when considering whose health services to patronize, and patients are now armed with more knowledge from the internet (customer review).

What do all of these mean? Healthcare branding now plays an important role in the decision-making process of any patient as it influences their perception, and this is why you want to leave your hospital branding to only a professional branding agency to handle for you.

We understand that you may not fully understand some of the concepts that we have discussed here; considering how far outside the scope of your profession they are. Even better, when it’s time to take positive action with a branding strategy, you need a specially built partnership with a branding agency that is tailor-made for your hospital’s commercial needs.

Whether general brainstorming or the added night shift, our team of experts will stop at nothing to bring your hospital brand alive.

So, if you have any questions or inquiries, why don’t you contact our expert team right away? Fill out the project brief here and let us come up with a winning design and tailor-made strategy for your specific project as soon as possible (it’s free).

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Healthcare Branding: The Definitive Guide [2024]

Sliman M. Baghouri

As the pace of healthcare quickens and the number of brands multiplies, it’s patients, not medical businesses, who decide which brands live and which ones die.

An overabundance of look-alike medical brands and me-too services are forcing patients to search for something, anything, to help them separate the winners from the clutter.

Today’s patients seek out brands that create experiences; that intrigue them in a sensorial, emotional, and creative way.

My promise to you is that by the end of reading this article, you’ll have the components of a brand strategy so you can pivot your medical business to a higher level.

A level where profitability is predictable, success is inevitable, and a lasting healthcare brand that empowers its patients.

This article also covers:

What is healthcare branding?

• Patient cognitive bias towards certain brands
• The danger of looking like everyone else in healthcare
• The difference between healthcare marketing and branding
• The unmatched advantages of branding your medical business
• The 5 stages of healthcare branding strategy
• How to measure your branding efforts
• Example of branding in other healthcare fields

Let’s start.

Healthcare branding is the management of all components that make a healthcare brand for which patients believe there’s no substitute.

So how do you define a brand?

A brand is not your logo, it’s not your ads or marketing campaign. It is not your visual identity, graphics, or business collateral. And It is not the “sum of all impressions from your customer”.

A brand is your customer’s feeling towards your brand. It is what makes you unique in the eyes of people. It is a feeling because our judgments and buying decisions are based on trust, not rationality.

As much as we like to say “I base my buying decision on logic”, We don’t. Buying decisions are made by our limbic system . The part of the brain that is responsible for decision-making.

Trust creation is a fundamental goal of brand design….Trust is the ultimate shortcut to a buying decision and the bedrock of modern branding. ― Marty Neumeier

How to know if you have an established healthcare brand?

#~1) A brand needs to be different . If a brand is not differentiated, it is not a brand. It is a “me too” service or a product. If you claim to have a brand it needs to be unique in a way that sets you radically apart , adds value , and enhances the experience to your patient.

# QUICK TEST

If you want to put your medical business to the test, Finish the following positioning statement exercise. A seemingly easy but surprisingly hard to finish sentence:

Our Medical Brand Is the only [Category] That [Differentatior].

Template: Our ____Is The Only ____That ____.

Example: Our practice is The Only Cosmetic Service That puts its patient’s confidence a #1 Priority.

#~2) The brand has substance. A brand without purpose is a soulless brand. If your healthcare brand is not purpose-driven people won’t join it. In addition, it should be heading towards a concrete objective or a vision. The word vision/mission is tossed around a lot but much of the so-called “mission/values/vision” are treated as decoration rather than a compass for the brand to follow. And rarely are maintained.

#~3) The brand cultivates a community around it. Your brand does not exist in a vacuum. It needs to be supported by its stakeholders and customers. Your brand will be the ecosystem for the whole team AND the patients to thrive. It will be a playground for increased productivity, innovation, and profitability.

#~4) Your brand needs to reflect its audience values. Your brand should mirror what your patient/audience believes. If your brand does not offer a flattering reflection of its customer’s core values, it will not gain their loyalty. If I’m an overly cautious person and value safety, my go-to hospital will be healthier™ , the risk-free hospital. If I’m into enhancing my lifestyle quality, I’ll sign up for The Joint Chiropractic membership. If I want to avoid the dental horror show, my favorite dental practice will be Odentia, the painless dental experience.

#~5) Your healthcare brand should carry human attitudes. Gone are the times where brands communicate their robotic offering and wait for patients to come. “We offer the best care service” Yeah? So does everyone. People now value communication that is infused with humanistic attributes. Your brand should claim a communication voice that is unique to your business. We’ll lay down examples of this approach in the next few sections.

#~6) Your brand is aesthetically meaningful. In an information-rich and time-poor age, aesthetics are the best communication language for your medical business. Great medical brands are not tied with the “blue color + red heart” symbol design. Their aesthetics convey meaning to their patients and sets them apart from the “lookalike” visuals.

If you can check all of the 6 points above, I suggest you do not waste your time reading this article. You are already ahead.

If not, stick around. I’ll provide you with a complete roadmap to revamp your whole practice into a dazzling healthcare brand.

Patient cognitive bias and why we favor a medical brand over another

In his book, Start With The Why, Simon Sinek explains why some brands are more successful than others. He proposes that for brands to have a cult-like loyalty and lead their market, they need to articulate their “why” and be vocal about it.

By “why” he meant your reason for being or your purpose. Why do you do what you do (besides making money) and why would anyone care? It seems an easy task but it is a surprisingly hard feat to accomplish. Most brands know what they do, some know how they do it, but few who know why they do what they do.

The logic for why communicating your purpose is a competitive edge lies in our biological structure. We value meaningful messages more than a robotic, bland value offering. And we make our decision based on how much trust signals we got from said messages.

To illustrate, I’ll use two pitches for a dental practice, one with a why message (or a purposeful message) and the other with a what message (a simple value offering).

#~First (WHAT MESSAGE):

We’re Confidental™, we provide the highest oral care services for our patients at an affordable price. Enjoy a brighter smile!

It states who they are, and what they do. Good. It also explains how this benefits patients (affordable prices/brighter smile). Let’s see how this will look when your “why” is well articulated.

#~SECOND (WHY MESSAGE):

What good is a smile if you’re nervous about it? Our practice was founded to help patients lead a stress-free lifestyle. The more confident you are, the less stressed your life is. There are many ways to fight anxiety; one is to be confident in your dental appearance. That’s where we come in. We make you confident in your smile.

Being vocal about the Why in the second pitch does one thing that gains you a competitive edge. It influences preference-based judgments about your medical business.

When you use a purposeful message, your communication is perceived by the limbic system, the part of the brain that is responsible for emotions and decision-making.

When your medical brand is purpose-driven, it attracts with meaningful messages rather than pushes with uninspiring marketing.

Being clear on your why create a bias towards your practice and patient will favor your brand no matter who the alternatives are.

“If I can trust the maker, I can buy it now and worry about it later. The degree of trust I feel towards the service, rather than an assessment of its features and benefits, will determine whether I’ll buy this service or that service”.

The danger of not branding your healthcare business

With the never-ending rise of competition, if you do not possess a competition-proof healthcare brand, your business will be submerged in the sea of sameness.

We’ll go through some of the issues that if left untreated can risk your business’s long-term success.

#1) The looming shadow of healthcare commoditization

With the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the shift from a Fee-for-service to a Fee-for-value, primary healthcare is increasingly becoming commoditized.

We’re seeing companies provide direct-to-consumer services that can be ordered online and fulfilled from a single remote location. An example of that is the rise of DIY dentistry, why go to a board-certified orthodontist when you can get braces in the mail?

Roman also offers online doctors who you can see right in your home, diagnose and prescribe you with prescriptions that get delivered right to your address.

The insurance and corporate entities are encouraging and promoting this trend. This is disheartening to solo-practitioners and medical business owners.

Big Pharma also suffers from the cutthroat competition by the generic “me too” drugs that flood the market once the patent expires for their branded counterparts.

The need for differentiation is acute.

#2) The rapid rise of competition in healthcare

The increased competition in the healthcare industry gives patients a wide range of choices to pick from. Patients are pickier than ever with high expectations for your care quality and lower prices demands. Resulting in a price-cutting race to the bottom. A race no one wishes to win.

The same medical facilities offering the same care services and competing for the same patient.

Some medical businesses try to “avoid” this risk by offering better equipment or advanced tech stack. But this differentiation is not radical. It is a mere attempt to gain a foothold. To be different means to claim competitive attributes that are unique to you and irreplaceable to your patients.

#3) Grabbing short-term gains while incurring the long-term losses.

Most patient acquisition “strategies” target the wrong aspect of healthcare marketing . The advertising campaign, social media marketing, referrals, or word-of-mouth, all focus on one thing: acquiring .

The catch here is that acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Meaning medical businesses are focusing on the more expensive ways to generate cash flow. Instead, the main focus should be rerouted to retaining .

However, the issue with the current patient retaining “strategies” like “leverage personalization”, “communication with passion”… is that they are mere techniques and not cohesive enough. Retaining a patient should be planned, strategized, and measured for the long run. We’ll see how brand strategy offers such capabilities in the next few sections.

#4) Dwindled productivity and the rise of internal silos

When your staff starts feeling like “a cog in the machine”; when processes overshadow purpose; when decisions seem disconnected or when patients are uncollaborative, you experienced the gradual emergence of functional silos.

When people work at cross-purpose, they start losing the high sense of mission and everyone starts pulling in a different direction. Creating an inconsistent patient experience and hurting the work productivity of your practice.

Your stakeholders need to gather around a concrete mission. A mission that gives meaning to the role they play. It is your job as the leader to supercharge your business with mission-driven strategies. And I’m not talking about the hidden mission statement that no one reads or the “message from our CEO” video.

Having a mission-driven business is not about crafting the same sounding statements and expecting that to be the catalyst for a successful healthcare brand.

Being mission-driven requires gaining external and internal buy-ins to your medical brand. It requires strategic planning and maintaining your core values year after year.

The difference between healthcare branding and marketing.

Marketing is inviting somebody on a date; Branding is the reason they say yes.

Marketing without branding is a mere tactic that comes with an expiration date.

If your marketing efforts are not directed by the branding strategy and do not communicate your brand attributes, it will never cultivate your brand and build loyalty.

Marketing should be focused on reaching and communicating the brand’s values to your audience.

While branding is cultivating these attributes and directing your marketing channels so your messages and philosophies are communicated without distortion.

Branding is hyper-focused on building loyalty, trust, and empowering your patients and stakeholders.

The unmatched advantages of branding your healthcare business

Before getting into the processes of a brand strategy, let’s explore what benefits and perks branding can offer your business.

#1) Branding cuts through the “me too” medical brands

With the overabundance of imitative care services, branding creates an unbreachable wall against the competition. By branding your medical business, you create new reasons for why patients should favor your practice over the rest of the pack.

Since branding renders the competition irrelevant, it works as a vaccine against market commoditization. It singles your brand out of the “me too” brands. Your medical business will drill its mark in the minds of your patients.

#2) Increasing profitability and gaining higher market shares

An established healthcare brand often claims the dominant position in their respective fields, with market shares of 50% or higher.

They also tend to command the highest price premiums- up to 40% more than generic services.

This is because patients know that your brand has no substitute. It is the only brand that can fulfill their care needs in its unique way.

When your medical business is not cutting down prices for the sake of competing or “staying alive”, it can flourish and thrive.

#3) Profitable and seamless M&A transactions

There are several benefits of a brand strategy when it comes to M&A transactions (mergers and acquisitions, the transactions in which the ownership of a business is transferred or consolidated with other entities).

We’ll explore how branding can facilitate an M&A.

#~First , for target firms in an M&A transaction, Brand Equity (the perceived worth of a brand) is a significant role when acquirers evaluate target firms. To secure a higher ROI deal from an M&A, your brand is the most valuable asset to benefit from.

#~Second , for acquirers, having brand guidelines works as a “decisional filter” against target firms candidates.

You need to target firms that will empower your brand portfolio. And to do this, you should ask questions like Will this hospital/practice solidify our position in the market? Will it purify or defocus our mission? Do their values and our purpose match or do they contradict each other?

To find a clear answer to questions like these, you need to let your brand’s core attributes guide your decisions.

#~Third , the failure rate of M&A transactions is said to be between 7090% and that a poorly conceived or executed M&A destroyed more than $200 billion in shareholder value in 20 years.

Some of the major reasons for this are manifold:

• When merging happens between healthcare businesses, clashes of values are bound to happen. This leads to internal conflict between key personnel and major disagreement hindering business processes.
• When disregarding the corporate culture, mergers suffer the inevitable decrease in operational efficiency. If internal stakeholders are not on board with the new culture, a decrease in productivity is predictable.
• Often, in an M&A transaction, the target firm’s employees are wary of job losses and the acquirer’s staff adapt the “conqueror mentality”. This leads to unvoiced opinions and an uncollaborative environment for the whole team.

This is where brand strategy comes into play.

It unifies stakeholders under one umbrella. By using a communication framework and building a brand culture , you can mitigate the risk of a failed merger.

#4) Innovation and productivity are predictable, not accidental

Your medical business’s performance starts with the internal dynamics of your brand. If your whole team is unified around one purpose and vision, it will also attract patients and engage them in a deep and meaningful relationship that transcends the traditional marketing goals of brand preference and loyalty.

Brand culture is the culture that a company cultivates in order to powerfully and consistently deliver its brand to the market. It’s how people work together to bring the brand alive for customers. ― Mark Di Somma

When your medical business has a brand culture of its own, staff are encouraged, invested and operational efficiency will soar up. Work becomes more thrilling and meaningful. Conversely, if the brand lacks culture, it disengages staff leading to a decreased productivity and your business values fizzle out before reaching your patients.

According to recent research, 94% of executives believe that having a workplace culture is key to a thriving business.

#5) Creates “brand preference” and skyrockets patient retention

Unlike other means of patient acquisition, branding pulls . It aims to entice patients to favor your business, NOT push them into it.

It creates relationships between your brand and the patient, forming a firm rope that links your patients and the brand. Since branding is a creative and a stirring way to attract patients, it shapes what we call “brand preference”.

Brand preference is a cognitive judgment a patient makes regarding your brand. It measures to which extent purchasing decisions are made based on the attachment to your brand rather than the price, convenience, or regardless of the alternatives.

In addition, Creating strong brand preferences boosts patient retention. When your patients perceive your practice to be the only brand that speaks to them on an emotional level , their attachment and loyalty to the brand get deeper.

“Can you measure brand preference”? Yes. We’ll go into brand measurement in a few moments.

The 5 processes of branding strategies

In this section, we’ll go into the 5 stages of a branding strategy and unfold how each stage creates an established brand for your medical business.

Stage ~1) Brand DNA

In this part of the process, we build the DNA of your brand, the bedrock, and the values that will be the building blocks of your business.

#1) Brand Essence

To build meaningful relationships, your brand must carry a purpose behind it. This is why digging deep and extracting the essence of the brand is critical. In this phase, we uncover the story and the “why” behind your medical business and how it impacts your audience.

#2) Future Brand

Without a concrete vision for your brand, it can never navigate future-storms or thrill and challenge your stakeholders. The Future Brand phase focuses on crafting a visionary path for your brand that will act as the brand’s true north.

#3) Brand Pillars

In this phase, we extract the guideline principles that direct your brand. These philosophies and attributes will be communicated later to your audience in a novel manner. Each decision will be vetted against your Brand Pillars, they will regulate any future commitments.

Stage ~2) Brand Positioning

Positioning does not seek to beat the competition. Instead, it aims to make the competition irrelevant ― Renée Mauborgne

Positioning is where your care service stands in relation to others offering similar services.

The positioning stage is all about focusing your brand on a specific audience and specific value offering. It’s about building perception and infusing uniqueness into your brand.

To illustrate, I’ll use an example:

Healthier™ , An Orlando Based hospital, is positioned as the safest hospital in town. Although it offers the same service lines, it’s focused on safety and welfare.

Patients visit Healthier because it’s the risk-free choice. In their ads, visual identity, communication, everything emphasizes safety.

Here’s Healthier positioning statement:

Another positioning example comes from Odontia, a dental practice based in Pasadena, CA. Odentia is positioned as the pain-free dental experience. They understand how patients are reluctant to visit the dentists because of the looming fear of a bad dental experience.

Odentia is the only dentistry service that puts painless dental experience as its #1 Priority.

Odentia Positioning Statement:

Developing a differentiator or and a positioning for your medical business is the first key to break through the noise. The positioning of your brand must be prominent throughout all contact points your patient has with your brand, thus creating a consistent and unique experience.

Stage ~3) Brand Persona

This stage is about infusing humanistic attributes into your brand’s communications. To make deeper connections, your messaging needs a dash of personality.

We’ll develop a unique voice and a persona for your brand so it resonates perfectly with your target audience.

This stage consists of 2 Phases, Brand Archetype, Brand Voice.

#1) Brand Archetype

As we are all different, our desires are different. When we consider that certain behaviors or personalities increase certain desires, we can understand why some personalities appeal to us more than others.

An archetype is a typical character that represents universal patterns of human nature.

They are the personification of our behaviors and provide a roadmap that enables you to more accurately appeal to a given audience with a specific personality.

According to Psychologist Carl Jung , there are twelve archetypes:

The Innocent, Everyman, Hero, Outlaw, Explorer, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Lover, Caregiver, Jester, and Sage.

Each archetype represents a collection of desires that make up their values.

For example:

The ruler archetype is driven by the desire to control , lead, and power.

CEOs and other C-suite executives fall into the ruler archetype.

On the other hand, an archetype like Caregiver is driven by a desire to care for others, compassion, and safety.

In this case, Mothers-to-be can represent the caregiver archetype.

This stage will identify your ideal audience personality, then align your brand with the archetype that would most appeal to their desire.

The trick here is to align your brand as tightly as possible to a single archetype to allow your brand personality to feel all the more familiar to your audience and to communicate with the consistency and humanity of a real person.

Let’s say your target audience is mothers-to-be and your hospital helps them deliver babies. (A caregiver archetype)

Your brand should also embody the caregiver archetype, meaning, the communication will be soft-spoken, reassuring, and caring.

#2) Brand Voice

If your brand could talk, in what manner would it speak? This is exactly the aim of this phase. To define the personality of the target audience and THEN to craft a voice or a manner of speak that fits your brand archetype.

Brand voice is the tone and language used when communicating your brand’s message, ads, marketing, website copy, or when talking with your patient.

The tone of voice should reflect the brand’s personality and should be appealing to your target customer. Is your brand’s voice formal or playful? Serious or authoritative? Your communication should be consistent throughout all contact points your patient has with your brand.

Here’s a non-medical example of a brand’s voice.

A tongue-in-cheek billboard advert for The Economist in 1990 that sympathizes with their target audience: CEOs and company executives.

Strip away the huge salary and the executive jet, and you find much solitary misery. Even chief executives are human.

The economist’s tone of voice and the message connects deeply with their audience, creating stronger bonds and loyalty for the brand.

Another example from Arnold Palmer Hospital:

When defining your voice, brands should know who their talking to.

That’s what Arnold Palmer Hospital does throughout its marketing channels.

It’s talking to worried moms and dads.

Their voice is reassuring and realistic.

Stage ~4) Brand Communication Framework

All the above strategies will amount to very little if they are not well communicated to your audience. So, how do you go about sharing your positioning, personality, and philosophies to the market? This stage is the portal from which you’re going to send your messages to your patients.

In the Brand Communication Framework process, we utilize techniques such as Storytelling, Main Narrative, and Secondary Messaging.

We’ll dissect your positioning in the market to secondary messages and form small sets of stories out of them.

These stories will then be distributed through all of your communication channels. Form of social media, press, website, blog articles, case studies, and ad campaigns.

This way you can—asynchronously—feed your target audience your message and position in the market.

This framework will act as a compass for every touchpoint your audience has with your brand. Its goal is to create consistency across all contact points while telling stories about the brand.

Stage ~5) Brand Art Direction

No one gets a second impression. And so does your brand’s visuals.

In healthcare, visuals are predictable. “blue/red/green” + “heart/plus or a teeth/smile symbol”. By far, this is the most underutilized aspect of branding in the industry.

Your aesthetics are the first element your would-be patients encounter with your brand. So visuals should work as an “ optical communication ” for first impressions, conveying meaning, and your positioning to your patients.

Your visual identity should inform and complement your brand’s values while at the same time differentiating your medical business from the competition.

When done right, great aesthetics have the power to turn a commodity into a premium brand. And in this stage of the branding process, we start by visualizing the brand’s values and market position based on its internal branding.

Here’s what most companies fail to accomplish : they use the same color scheme, same design pattern, same overall aesthetics, and call that “consistent visual identity”.

You can be consistent, but consistently meaningless. Your visual identity is as good as the meaning behind it.

If your visuals do not reflect your brand’s or the product’s promise to your patient, it has not succeeded to do its mission.

The good news is, your visuals will be based on your brand’s positioning, philosophy, and purpose. The design aspect of the brand will mirror its values and what it stands for. Hence solidifying its market position and perception.

**One Medical Visual Identity **

How to measure branding success?

In the business world, often the focus is on yearly revenue or sales. Not only that, but marketers, in order to measure their marketing efforts, they need to project the sales each quarter.

And to accomplish they use a model called purchase funnel .

This model tracks sales by tracking customers as they move from awareness (being aware of your business) to interest to consideration to intent to evaluation and, finally, to purchase your service.

This model is only helpful if:

Your main goal is to project revenue in the short term

• Patients move toward their purchase in predictable stages
• Current revenues are more important than brand- building
• Acquiring customers is more important than keeping them or;
• You have no use for non-customers.

There are a lot of ifs here, most of which no longer pans out.

Instead of stuffing patients into funnels and squeezing the profit out of them, healthcare brands should encourage, empower, and delight their patients so they can build the brand.

This is not to say that monthly or quarterly revenues are not important. Just that monthly and quarterly revenues are more sizable, more profitable, and more dependable when you focus on long term relationships instead of short-term revenues .

Enters: The Brand Ladder

Because the objective of branding is to nurture and build relationships, it puts the emphasis where it belongs—on the customer (your patient).

The Brand Ladder model aims to measure the success of the branding effort by tracking the patient attachment and loyalty to your brand. It offers a clear metric as to how your medical business is doing at each level.

Each rung of the ladder represents a satisfactory state of your patient with your brand. From patient satisfaction to delight, to engagement, and finally to empowerment. The object is to get as many customers as possible up the ladder to the top.

Here’s how it works:

#~First, The bottom rung represents patient satisfaction. This is where trust begins. The patient has tried your care service and found it to be as advertised.

While satisfaction is a good sign, studies have shown that satisfaction alone is not a reliable predictor of repurchase behavior or patient loyalty.

#~Second, The next rung up is patient delight. Here’s where trust really catches fire. If you can surprise your patient with something more than baseline satisfaction, you’ll spark the kind of emotion that leads to loyalty.

This is the realm of great patient experience because delight is the leading cause of a patient’s “willingness to recommend.”

#~Third, One level higher is patient engagement. When a patient is truly engaged with a brand, he or she enrolls in the tribe. With membership comes increasing loyalty, escalating repurchase habits, and an emotional attachment that goes far beyond patronage.

This is where the brand becomes a building block in the patient’s identity, success, well-being, and even fulfillment.

#~Fourth, On the top rung is patient empowerment. This is the level at which patients incorporate your brand into the deepest part of their lives. They may depend on it for emotional support, social status, personal growth, or even business success.

They would no more switch to another brand than swap their right leg for a wooden peg. If you suddenly pulled your brand out from under them, they would collapse in a heap.

Empowered patients will move heaven and earth to ensure your success, happily attracting others to the tribe with their magnetic sense of commitment.

Measuring Branding with the Brand Commitment Scale (BCS)

The Brand Commitment Scale is an easy-to-use survey that yields a single number from 20–100. This score represents your overall progress up the brand ladder, where empowerment is given four times the weight of satisfaction.

If conducted annually, the BCS can highlight your gains (or losses), suggesting where you need more investment. It can also let you compare the scores at each rung of the ladder, and for each of the eight questions.

The power of this survey lies in its simplicity. All it takes is a service like SurveyMonkey and a little of your patient’s time. A sample of 1,000 surveys should be enough for most medical businesses to get a useful reading.

Examples of branding in the healthcare industry

Healthcare is a vast industry. So to provide you with a wider set of examples of how these branding efforts play under different circumstances, I will lay down a list of articles on how branding will look like in some of the popular medical fields.

Hospital branding

When your hospital staff takes refuge in functional silos instead of a collaborative ecosystem; when you face the jagged transition to value-based care; when the market dynamics changes before you adapt; when patient retention dwindles; or when your hospital is swimming in a sameness-sea of “me too” hospitals, it’s no surprise half of the current health systems will vanish.

So, how will you cut through these hurdles?

Well, this is what I’ll share with you in this article.

In this article, you’ll discover:

What is a hospital brand?

• What is a hospital brand strategy?
• Perks and advantages of branding your hospital
• How can a brand strategy take your hospital to a new level?
• Case study of an established hospital brand
• Pivoting your hospital during this pandemic

To read about hospital branding click here

Dental branding

In this article, I’ll share with you what makes a charismatic dental brand, and how by branding your practice you can achieve patient loyalty to your practice.

I’ll also share with you the 3 deadly sins dental practices make when trying to build an authentic brand.

This article covers:

• What is dental branding? What it is not, and other myths.
• What makes up a drab, bland, and dull dental brand.
• What makes up a charismatic dental brand.
• Advantages of having a charismatic dental brand.
• Quick techniques to know if your practice is charismatic

To read about dental branding click here

Pharma Branding

In this article, we’ll discuss fatal but easy-to-turn-a-blind-to issues in the pharmaceutical industry and how branding can solve these problems.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of

• Threats that Big Pharma is facing
• What is branding in the pharmaceutical industry?
• The unmatched advantage of branding; And
• The 5 stages of developing a pharmaceutical brand strategy

To read about pharma branding click here

Healthcare mission statements development + Examples

In this article, we’ll go into how to develop a mission statement for your medical business that stands out.

You’ll craft a mission statement that is unique, memorable, and—authentic.

Furthermore, we’ll see the practical use cases of a mission statement and how it will benefit your practice.

• What is a mission statement in healthcare?
• Why most medical businesses fail to develop an authentic mission statement
• The practical importance of a mission statement
• What you need to do BEFORE forming a mission statement
• How to develop a mission statement
• Examples of mission statements in healthcare (Hospitals, dentists, chiropractic, etc..)
• What to do and what NOT to do with your mission statement.

To read about healthcare mission statements click here

The truth about healthcare branding

Healthcare branding brings new ways to reach patients. A way that is focused on building relationships and long-term success for your medical business.

Building a brand can be the competitive edge that singles you out of the sea of “sameness”. It is a future-proof strategy for leaders to supercharge their business with.

• what is healthcare branding
• patient cognitive bias and why we favor a medical brand over another
• the danger of not branding your healthcare business
• the difference between healthcare branding and marketing
• the unmatched advantages of branding your healthcare business
• the 5 processes of branding strategies
• how to measure branding success
• examples of branding in the healthcare industry
• the truth about healthcare branding

Sliman M. Baghouri, Founder of unnus™, he's the co-author of unnus magazine and regular contributor in the healthcare marketing industry.

• Free course

Health System Branding Case Studies

Delivered july 16th, 2021 . contributors: alexandra i., key takeaways.

• Northwell Health reached " historic highs " in terms of customer awareness and satisfaction after rebranding from the namesake North Shore Long Island Jewish Health, with a current market awareness of 50% , a likelihood to recommend score in the " high 90s " and a net promoter score in the " 45-47% range ."
• AdventHealth enjoyed a 91% positive consumer response to its new branded house namesake and logo, and realized a " 90% increase in clicks, 40% increase in impressions, 38% increase in CTR and top position in the rankings" for its new unified website.
• Catholic Healthcare West's rebranding to Dignity Health in 2012 , Ascension Health's transition to Ascension in 2012 as well as Clarian Health's name change to Indiana University Heath in 2010 are three additional, if slightly dated, examples of successful health system branding/rebranding initiatives that corroborate the themes demonstrated within the more recent, preceding case studies.

Introduction

#1: north shore long island jewish health to northwell health source  , health system overview.

• Northwell Health is New York's largest health care provider , with 23 hospitals, over 830 outpatient facilities and an economic impact of $1.44 billion in its community of operation.
• The health services organization is also the largest private employer in the state, with more than 76,000 employees, including 3,800 physicians.  
• According to the latest reporting by Northwell Health, it provides patient care to approximately two million individuals in its designated market area.
• Originally formed from two community-built hospitals — North Shore Hospital and Long Island Jewish Medical Center — the institution's former name was the byproduct of the institution's long history of growth through mergers and acquisitions.

Rebranding Strategy

• Prior to the successful launch of its rebranding effort in 2015 , Northwell Health had attempted and failed for nearly eight years to pivot away from its historic namesake of North Shore Long Island Jewish Health.
• According to Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling , CMO Ramon Soto and former Communications Director Terry Lynam , this former name was problematic for a variety of reasons:
• It was " cumbersome , often mispronounced or botched up in some way by news organizations, other healthcare organizations and the public," as well as the healthcare system's own employees .
• The name had no brand equity outside of the New York metro area.
• Even within the New York area, " the old name localized us as being too Long Island-focused, when the bulk of our organization has expanded beyond Long Island."
• The specific references within the name (e.g., geographic) " started really impacting physician recruitment."
• As a result, Northwell Health formally launched a brand identity system refresh comprised of a new name, logo and supporting signage/communications .
• The rebranding initiative was crafted to recognize that Northwell Health had transformed from a " group of hospitals " into a " behemoth with 23 hospitals, 685 outpatient practices and a vast network of long-term care, rehab, home care, hospice and urgent care services as well as its own school of medicine, school of graduate nursing/PA studies and research institution."
• It also supported the organization's growth focus of " expanding fiercely into Manhattan, into Westchester, into Staten Island, into Queens, Brooklyn," and " becoming highly visible and clearly understood within and beyond the New York metropolitan area."

Implementation: Name/Logo

• In order to identify a " highly visible and clearly understood " name and logo in the New York area, the organization completed an " onerous process " in partnership with Interbrand.  
• Per Mr. Soto, Northwell Health first researched the historic naming conventions of health institutions across the country, and determined that there are currently six core s c h e m a s for healthcare system names, including religious affiliation, location, benefactor.
• Next, the organization brainstormed a list of six hundred potential names that met the health system's " baseline of criteria ," however, most of these names had been trademarked.
•   15 viable candidates were ultimately available, of which seven received " a ton of market research " and were reviewed by the executive committee of the board.
• Northwell was ultimately selected, owing largely to " North ," which offered a clear connection to the organization's history and provided a " rich storytelling ability ."
• In parallel, the " generic medical look " of the former logo was updated with a " colorful , life-affirming identity incorporating upward-pointing arrows that evoke growth, progress, and positive change."

Implementation: Sub-Services

• Although Northwell Health's rebranding initiative was not applied differently to the organization's various support services (e.g., in-patient hospital care versus specialization), care was taken to respect the history at each of its locations.
• Specifically, Northwell Health made the decision to preserve the historic names of all of its facilities, such that the Northwell name appeared alongside the individual name of each site.
• According to Mr. Lynam, " keeping the names of the hospitals was in recognition of their unique histories within their respective communities because many of them date back, in some cases, 100-plus years...others have been in existence for 50, 60 even 80 years."

Implementation: Internal Marketing

• Well in advance of the rollout of such signage, however, Northwell Health devoted months if not years to engaging with its internal team members regarding the rationale and importance of the proposed rebranding effort.
• Per Mr. Lynam, Northwell's executive team appreciated that there was " a lot of close personal association with the old name, especially among employees who had been with the system for decades."
• As such, a variety of steps were taken to get buy-in internally before moving forward with external communications.
• For example, Northwell leadership circulated a " brand bus " that toured a l l o f t h e health system's facilities to engage with employees on the reasons for the " massive change. "
• Although Northwell health experienced " some pushback " among employees, there was " full awareness " as well as " improved acceptance " of the new name and logo by the end of the tour.

Implementation: External Marketing

• The external marketing associated with Northwell Health's rebranding was a " costly endeavor ," according to M e s s e r s Soto and Lynam.
• The healthcare system spent " millions of dollars " just on the signage for its hospitals, outpatient facilities and vehicles.
• Notably, investments in temporary signage were made to ensure a smooth, unified rollout, recognizing that permanent signage would take time.
• In tandem, Northwell Health spent " well over ten million dollars a year " on consumer marketing for the new name.
• In support of this advertising, the organization monitored a panel of 2,000 consumers every month, which were leveraged to copy test " everything " and complete " head-to-head testing " of all ads versus competitors.
• Special attention was given to " graphic look and treatment " in each ad, with Mr. Soto stating " we wanted our stuff, our content, to be incredibly arresting, but visually look very different. So we use this parallax affect filming technique in how we developed commercials and put them out in the marketplace."

New York Customer Audience

• Beyond the larger goals of the brand identity system refresh, of which the " consumer piece was only a piece of the equation," Northwell Health looked to appeal to two key customer segments : (1) New Yorkers and (2) wellness customers.
• Recognizing the particularly competitive environment of New York, where Northwell Health would compete against " iconic institutions like NYU Langone, Mt. Sinai and New York Presbyterian," the healthcare system benchmarked the go-to-market models and branding approach for all relevant health systems in the area.
• This included both quantitative and qualitative analysis , with the support of experts including Interbrand and M o n i g l e and modeling after consumer leaders such as Amazon.
• As part of this assessment, Northwell Health interviewed more than 3,000 New York consumers to understand their choice drivers, and surprisingly found that innovation was the " number one attribute that consumers were looking towards to build a relationship," rather than the more common priority placed on " best doctors, the latest procedures " in other markets.
• Considering these inputs, the healthcare system rolled out a storytelling approach to reach consumers, that included an " almost populist " tone and messaging that " we’re the health system for the everyday person."

Wellness Customer Audience

• In conjunction with targeting the greater New York customer base, Northwell Health also wanted to reach consumers who were interested in wellness services, and to have a " brand that reflected its greater mission not just to treat people, but to help them be and stay well."
• According to Mr. Soto, a key in selecting the Northwell Health name was the " well " piece, which signaled the system's commitment to " taking the journey with consumers in a very different way" and emphasizing wellness in its offerings.
• Beyond the selection of its new namesake, the organization also sought to reach the health and wellness segment of consumers by providing differentiated offerings and " doing a ton in the wellness space to make it authentic and bring it life."
• For example, Northwell Health became the " first health system to hire a Michelin star chef as the chief chef of the health system, and rolled out the tagline " food is health ."

Success Metrics

• Specifically regarding Northwell Health's success in reaching these target consumer groups, Mr. Soto asserts that " the results speak for themselves ." For example:
• The company is at " historic highs in terms of awareness " with a market awareness of 50% , which is approximately three times Northwell Health's closest competitor.
• Northwell Health's likelihood to recommend score is in the " high 90s " compared to a " low 80s " at the beginning of its rebranding journey.
• The organization's net promoter score is in the " 45-47% range ."
• Brand perception is " super solid " and the old name is never mentioned in customer focus groups.
• More generally within the healthcare marketplace, there was an " excited reception " for the company's new logo, and a general recognition that Northwell Health had " come out on the other side stronger for having [rebranded]."
• Meanwhile, from a financial perspective, Northwell Health saw its revenue grow by 15.7% over the last three reported years to $12.5 billion , while available reporting indicates that relative expenses/profitability have remained generally stable.
• Although the rebranding effort was not crafted to support the growth of one practice in particular, relevant growth data by specialty/division can be accessed here .

#2: Adventist Health System to AdventHealth

• AdventHealth is a Christian, mission-based healthcare services provider that is sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and is " one of the nation’s largest faith-based health systems."
• The health system is led by its 50 hospitals and 30 clinics , employees 80,000 employees and services over 5 million patients annually in the South, West and Midwest United States.
• Prior to its rebranding initiative, AdventHealth formally operated as a unified company, but advertised each of its entities under a local brand , totaling approximately 30 distinct brands .
• As a result of the healthcare system's historic naming convention, AdventHealth VP of Marketing Sharon Line Clary asserts that " you wouldn’t know that we were part of this bigger organization, that we were a national company. We just looked like individual, localized companies."
• Recognizing this pain point, AdventHealth Central Florida CEO Daryl Tol asserts that the organization decided to move forward with a rebranding effort with two goals in mind:
• A desire to " bring everything together " under one brand identify and promise to customers, and
• An acknowledgment of the company's intention to be " part of the transformation of healthcare ."
• Initially, the Adventist Health System began crafting the brand identity refresh and transition to a branded house purely as a transition of names , signage and logos, according to AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw.
• However, when Mr. Shaw became CEO in 2016 , he expanded the campaign to include a larger organizational transformation, into a " consumer-centric organization " with a unified customer promise.
• With this broader focus, AdventHealth leveraged its rebranding initiative to " become a more consumer-centric, connected and identifiable national system of care, enabling consumers to easily distinguish locations and services across its vast care network."
• In particular, unifying all locations under one name enabled AdventHealth to " strengthen its brand reputation ," " raise broader brand awareness " and provide a seamless transition for customers within its healthcare network.

Implementation Overview

• The AdventHealth rebranding effort was led by Sharon Line Clary, the Vide President of Marketing, and a team of approximately one dozen individuals.
• Notably, the team started the rebranding process by consulting with " other health systems that had launched successful rebranding campaigns," such as Ascension (additional resources related to Ascension are available at the end of this brief).
• Specifically in crafting the new name and logo, AdventHealth invested in consumer research and " put our own preferences aside " in favor of what would appeal to the broadest consumer base.
• The name AdventHealth was identified because it " conveys an expectation of things to come in health care, while also drawing a strong connection to the organization’s rich Seventh-day Adventist roots."
• In parallel, the logo was crafted to highlight the " breadth and diversity " of the system of care, while also showcasing the Christian cross at its core and using a traditional " sans-serif typeface and blue and green color palette."
• After obtaining signoff from its sponsoring organization, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, AdventHealth found that the desired brand name was owned by a third party, and entered into negotiations to secure it.
• Unlike Northwell Health, the brand architecture was applied i n a u n i f o r m f a s h i o n across all entities and practices areas " from hospitals to urgent care to doctors offices," and included the rollout of 13,000 building signs in addition to " screensavers and desktop backgrounds, email signatures, business cards, uniforms, lab coats and badges."

Implementation: Internal Communications

• In the years leading up to the formal brand reveal and signage rollout in 2019 , AdventHeath " started to train and educate its internal family and bring them on board."
• Obtaining buy-in from employees related to the rebranding initiative had been one of the " biggest takeaways " from AdventHealth's conversations with other health systems.
• As such, the organization introduced an " internal culture and service initiative " named " The Whole Care Experience " to align its then 60,000 team members well ahead of the brand initiative.
• This included an " immersive training experience to align on its mission, vision, values and service standards so that consumers would have a consistent, exceptional whole-person care experience at each and every care location."

Implementation: Traditional Advertisements

• Once the internal AdventHealth team was aligned, the organization launched a " multi-million-dollar campaign ," starting with a series of initial billboards and TV commercials .
• This was followed by a " bridge campaign " in November and December 2018 , which had the goal to help " connect the old name with the new name ."
• In January, alongside the formal rebranding announcement , AdventHealth shifted messaging to the Feel Whole marketing campaign, which included digital, print and television advertising.
• These placements were complimented with " several major partnerships " that " prominently featured the AdventHealth brand, including the AdventHealth Training Center, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ training facility; and DAYTONA Speedweeks Presented By AdventHealth, which is highlighted by the 61st annual DAYTONA 500."
• Mr. Shaw notes that the advertisements themselves marked a substantial " shift " for AdventHealth, which had traditionally featured its " physicians , buildings, accolades and technology" in television and print advertising.
• However, in an effort to be consistent with the consumer-centric ethos of the rebranding organizations, consumers were made the " stars " of AdventHealth's ads, which included commercials that " featured a bell choir of cancer survivors ringing in their cancer-free life."

Implementation: Digital Marketing

• Underpinning this external marketing effort was an investment in AdventHealth's digital c o m m u n i c a t i o n s infrastructure, including the introduction of a new, consumer-centric website: www.AdventHealth.com .
• This required the consolidation of over 800 websites and 35 different CMS platforms under a single brand and URL.
• The newly introduce website promised a " new easy-to-navigate user interface, enhanced search functionality, appointment scheduling capabilities, self-service billing and payment options and helpful content for health care consumers."
• Additionally, the health system launched the AdventHealth app, which " empowers users to take charge of their health care with a simple and intuitive interface that reminds patients of doctors’ appointments, notifies them about prescription refills, alerts them of new lab results...and offers patients convenient appointment scheduling and access to their medical records."

Key by Customer Audience(s)

• Although the target audience for AdventHealth's rebranding effort was broad-based, Mr. Shaw noted that particular attention was given to appealing to both religious a s w e l l a s non-religious consumers .
• In particular, special care was taken in selecting the AdventHealth name itself to ensure that it " resonated " with customers outside of the Christian faith.
• R a t h e r than the clear religious association of the healthcare system's prior namesake, AdventHealth was thought to appeal to consumers interested in a " healthy life and a new beginning ."
• Despite this intended audience, however, AdventHealth also made it clear within rebranding materials that its affiliation with the Seventh-day Adventist Church would remain the same .
• Considering the relative r e c e n c y of the AdventHealth rebranding initiative, as well as the complicating impacts of the global pandemic , credible associated success metrics are somewhat limited.
• However, one year into its rebranding, AdventHealth reflected on its progress and confirmed that its approximately 30 hospital brands had successfully migrated to " one distinct identity ," thereby " making it easier for consumers to distinguish AdventHealth’s locations and services across the network.
• Consistent with this achievement, a wide variety of leading, consumer engagement and satisfaction indicators confirm the efficacy of the designed rebranding program with its target audiences. Specifically:
• AdventHealth found that general consumer response to its new name, logo and associated marketing was overwhelmingly positive, at 91% of consumers in its target market(s).
• From a digital marketing perspective, AdventHealth also experienced growth for all pages including a " 90% increase in clicks, 40% increase in impressions, 38% increase in CTR and top position in the rankings."
• Moreover, in the first three months of the pandemic, the health system's new brand attracted a 22% increase in impressions (an incremental 5.4 million impressions) as well as an 8% increase in clicks (an incremental 100,000 clicks).
• From a financial perspective, AdventHealth has seen its revenue grow by 13.8% on a quarterly basis to $3.3 billion for the first quarter of 2021 , while available reporting indicates that relative expenses/profitability have remained generally stable.
• Moreover, in the eight months immediately following the rebranding effort, AdventHealth similarly reported that it was enjoying " fiscal stability and system growth, adding four new hospitals."
• Meanwhile, AdventHealth's annual reporting on community investment indicates a substantial increase in community engagement since the rebranding initiative was launched in early 2019, with total community investment expanding to $1.2 billion from $499 million .

Other Noteworthy Health System Branding/Rebranding Examples

• Catholic Healthcare West successfully rebranded to Dignity Health in 2012 , at a time when it was the fifth-largest health system in the United States. Relevant discussion of the rebranding initiative by Dignity Health is available at these links ( one , two ), while related media coverage can be accessed at these links ( one , two ).
• Ascension Health became Ascension starting in 2012 to facilitate its transition from a holding company of separate autonomous health systems into a unified operating company. Statements on the rebranding from Ascension are available at these links ( one , two ), while associated media reporting can be accessed here .
• Clarian Health rebranded to Indiana University Heath in 2010 in order to enhance the health system's ability to compete nationally. Reporting on the details of the rebranding initiative is available at these links ( one , two ).

Research Strategy

Did this report spark your curiosity, dignity health | catholic healthcare west is now dignity health, healthcare rebranding: 6 success stories and 3 cautionary tales, clarian health to change name to indiana university health, indiana university health, when does a hospital know it’s time to rebrand 5 marketing execs share tips, how northwell health and ascension executed massive rebranding campaigns and what other health systems can learn, what’s behind all of the hospital and health system rebrands — hencove, about northwell, episode 30: northwell health’s successful rebranding with mr. ramon soto, adventhealth signals a new beginning in health care, customer story: adventhealth – ua corporate solutions, advent health case study - rebranding success with schema app, adventhealth sees $578m loss in q1, a year into rebrand, adventhealth remains focused on putting consumers first, why adventhealth’s rebrand was more than a name change, how adventhealth is making the most of a healthcare revolution, from florida hospital to adventhealth, a rebranding journey of many years, a look at the florida hospital rebrand - your creative agency + digital marketing firm | diace designs.

How hospital systems can use a rebrand to improve their culture

Eniana Vrenozaj

Rebranding your healthcare organization is sure to be a massive undertaking. It’s not just about converting thousands of branded assets to the new brand identity. Your rebrand implementation project will touch on every aspect of your organization’s operations, from internal processes and staff training to branded patient touchpoints. Because of this, a rebrand represents the perfect opportunity to do something else entirely: drive cultural change in your healthcare system.

When you rebrand, you focus your organization’s attention on the brand as you systematically address each touchpoint and sunset old practices or collateral that don’t fit the new identity. When BrandActive helps healthcare organizations with rebrand implementation, we do so with an eye to strengthen culture. This enables our clients to emerge with a better, stronger, more unified brand — and a more positive culture, too.

Why rebranding and cultural change go hand in hand

While some non-healthcare organizations rebrand with specific cultural goals in mind, rebranding is more often driven by commercial concerns. But the fact is that a company’s brand identity can’t help but shape its culture. In that sense, the outcome of any rebrand will effectively evolve a company’s culture.

For better or worse, rebranding represents a time of cultural upheaval. If your corporate culture was already strong, your staff may be concerned about whether the brand change will detract from the existing culture. And if your culture was relatively weak, you will need to work harder to rally your team around your new corporate identity. The good news is that the rebranding process offers many opportunities to engage your staff in ways that elevate the new brand  and  build your company’s culture.

The idea that brand and culture go hand in hand is especially important in an industry like healthcare. That’s because healthcare companies are in the service industry. Each team member in a healthcare organization is, in a very real way, a brand ambassador. This includes everyone from the C-suite all the way down to the environmental services (EVS) team and nurses. Each play a critical role in expressing a healthcare brand in their interactions with patients and other stakeholders. In this context, an organization’s ability to create a positive internal culture matters. If a hospital’s staff takes pride in their brand, it will positively impact the way that brand is expressed at every touchpoint.

How to build your organization’s culture as you rebrand

When BrandActive works with healthcare organizations to implement brand change, we guide them in building their corporate culture using the following tactics:

Address the meaning and processes behind the assets

In order to build up your culture as you rebrand, you must go beyond the  branded assets  that form the core of your rebranding efforts. You must consider the meaning and processes  behind  branded touchpoints, as well as the interactions that various stakeholders have with them.

Rebranding checklist | Over 150 branded touchpoints

Is your company in the midst of a rebrand or planning for one? Our free rebranding checklist is a great way to start to scope what is involved with a initiative like this.

By thinking deeply about what various assets communicate to stakeholders, it’s possible to enhance both brand and culture. Take wayfinding signs, for example. Most companies don’t see something as utilitarian as wayfinding signage as an opportunity to advance their culture. But when you consider the role of wayfinding signage in a hospital, you start to see that culture does, indeed, play a role. Patients and visitors who are trying to figure out where to go in a hospital or healthcare system may be doing so as part of an experience that is fraught with stressful emotions. If a hospital’s wayfinding system is seamlessly easy to navigate, it can reduce stress and  improve the patient experience .

One client we worked with recognized this reality and approached wayfinding in a way that went beyond thoughtful branded signage. They put together a series of scripts for reception staff and volunteers to use when responding to wayfinding questions. These scripts prompt staff to offer directions to patients in a way that aligned with the organization’s brand and culture. They recognized that many patients and visitors needed more than just succinct directional information. They also needed a warm, friendly interaction to ease stress and offer comfort.

By considering the deeper context behind a branded asset — in this case, wayfinding signage — this organization took their branded experience one step further and built culture in the process.

Involve your staff as much as possible

Another way to elevate your organization’s culture in a rebrand is to involve your staff in the rebranding decisions that impact them. When employees feel that they are part of the rebranding process, they are more likely to take ownership of the new brand.

Take uniforms, for example. Scrubs, lab coats, polo shirts, and more are a major class of branded asset. But they are also articles of clothing that your staff must wear every day. For employees, these items become deeply personal. You wouldn’t want someone to dictate to you exactly what you’re allowed to wear. And neither does your staff.

Give your employees a reasonable level of input in the process of selecting uniform colors, cuts, and materials. Invite them to share their recommendations and wishes related to the new uniforms. Doing so will make them feel valued and heard. As a result, they will be more likely to wear their new uniforms with pride. And they will also be more committed to the new brand and what it stands for.

Centralization of processes

Many healthcare organizations are highly fragmented. They run a lot of their communications, asset development activities, and vendor relationships at the hospital level rather than at the central organizational level. This makes sense given that hospitals are physically separated and often become part of a larger healthcare system through a series of M&As and other deals.

But a rebrand is a project that demands  centralized planning for decentralized execution . In our work with healthcare clients, we use this centralized planning function as an opportunity to step up collaboration moving forward. We help them find ways to leverage the various entities’ knowledge bases — including vendor portfolios and internal processes — to capture efficiencies and improve processes system-wide. Instead of handling approvals for marketing materials in five different ways, we work with clients to identify one simple process that the entire system can adopt. In the process, we rationalize assets and remove redundancies.

By creating consistency in internal processes, we build a shared culture across a decentralized healthcare system. This trickles down to patient interactions by ensuring that their experience at hospital A is the same as their experience at hospital B within your healthcare organization.

Communicate your rebranding plan internally

All the different stakeholders within your organization will have different needs and desires related to the rebrand. They will also need help understanding how they will be impacted by the rebrand and what their role will be in transitioning the brand.

Because  there are so many stakeholders within healthcare systems , it’s critical that you come up with an effective and timely internal communication plan. This includes a  help desk for internal questions,  of course. But you should also be strategic about how and when to share information.

For example, if you’re dealing with a chief nursing officer (CNO) who’s responsible for a number of hospitals, you probably want to include the CNO in the decision-making process. And you’ll then want to cascade that CNO’s decisions to all the nursing managers at the different locations. You must cascade information in the appropriate manner in order to keep everyone informed throughout the process. Timely information and a transparent process go a long way in keeping your entire organization engaged in the rebrand. When your staff understands what is happening and why, they are eager to help implement the rebrand because they see the value in it.

Your rebrand will inevitably have an impact on your culture. The question is whether it will ultimately help or hurt that culture. By rebranding with an eye toward building culture, you can increase your rebrand’s impact — and strengthen your corporate culture, too.

Related Insights

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Hospital branding in Italy: A pilot study based on the case method

Affiliation.

• 1 a Department-Institute for Research in Marketing, Behavior, Communication and Consumption "Giampaolo Fabris" , IULM University of Milan , Milan , Italy.
• PMID: 28350275
• DOI: 10.1080/07359683.2016.1275211

The article investigates if, and in affirmative case how, Italian hospitals are managing corporate brand communication. Thanks to results of qualitative research, this article offers insights on Italian hospital branding. The pilot study based in the case method is to be considered a starting point for wider investigations on this topic, and it is useful for managers and practitioners who want to understand the role of corporate brand in hospital communication management and to connect health care professionals with the audience in a meaningful way in those countries in which the health care system is a mix of both public and private institutions.

Keywords: Branding hospitals; communication; corporate brand.

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• Healthcare Branding: Examples, Tips and Effective Tactics

As a healthcare organization, you undoubtedly provide essential medical services, and possibly even specialize in a particular field.  

Naturally, you’d expect that new patients would easily discover you online whenever they require the kind of care you and your expert team offer.  

However, in today’s digital age, attracting new patients isn’t as simple as it seems. 

Consumers today conduct an online search before scheduling their next doctor’s appointment. You need to stand out in the crowd. And that means branding your healthcare practice.  

Where to go? What to do?

What is healthcare branding for hospitals?  

So, healthcare branding is all about giving a personality and identity to healthcare organizations, like hospitals, clinics, or even individual doctors. Just like any other brand, healthcare providers want to stand out, create a positive reputation, and connect with their patients on a deeper level. 

Now, branding for hospitals isn’t just about having a fancy logo or a catchy slogan (though those can be helpful). It’s about creating a holistic experience for patients. 

Think about it this way — when you hear the name of a hospital or see its logo, what comes to your mind? Maybe it’s their quality of care, the friendliness of their staff, or even their specialization in certain medical fields. All of these impressions are part of the branding efforts. 

So how do you go about creating a memorable brand for your healthcare practice? Before we answer that question, let’s take a moment to understand why healthcare branding is so essential to the success of your business. 

Brand helps distinguish your practice from competitors.

Let’s say you run or manage a dental practice . For reference, in my town alone—a suburb of Atlanta with just over 33,000 residents—when I conducted a search for dental practices within a 10-mile radius, 20 dental offices popped up on Google Maps. Twenty! How do I choose one?

I could start by narrowing it down to which locations accept my insurance. Like 94% of patients seeking a new provider , I will read reviews about prospective dental offices and oral healthcare professionals. Beyond that though, I want to know what sets an office apart from its competitors, and that’s where branding can make all the difference. 

What sets your healthcare organization apart from others?

This is a great place to begin when it comes to branding or rebranding your healthcare enterprise. What is it that sets you apart from the same type of practice just two miles down the road? Why should people choose you, that is, beyond the fact you accept their insurance?

Is it because you have a warm, welcoming team? Is it because you make it easy for patients to contact you via online scheduling and give them the option to ask questions about upcoming appointments via text?

Maybe it’s because your healthcare CRM for patient relationship management allows you to have every aspect of a patient’s health chart at your fingertips, so the moment they call your office, you can greet them by name and ask how they’ve been feeling since their last doctor’s visit. These subtle touches have a profound impact on the overall patient experience . 

Whatever it is that gives you the advantage over the competition is how you need to brand your healthcare practice so you become the obvious choice. Once you determine how and what you want to convey, you can create a memorable brand with logos, colors, taglines, and materials that support your vision in print and beyond.

This treatment center has created an effective color scheme and applied it to its logo and homepage . Note the feel-good/back-to-nature vibe the various elements create.

Good branding helps your healthcare organization attract and retain patients.

Branding establishes a relationship with current and future patients. Once you’ve determined how you’re different and what sets your organization apart from others offering the same medical services, you’ll be able to take steps toward creating your messages and designs. Your logo, tagline, and a line or two about what patients can expect at your practice – your elevator pitch – are often the first touchpoints of the patient experience. How that branding makes them feel is important, such as:

• Establishing trust
• Conveying a partnership
• Expressing warmth
• Showing expertise
• Conveying years of experience
• Advertising cutting-edge treatments
• Expressing a patient-centric focus

Creating a memorable logo and descriptive tagline often means taking a simple approach to your healthcare organization’s brand. Make sure the name of your business is an accurate reflection of the services you provide. Write a short tagline that’s easy to remember. Use colors that make sense, but avoid looking too similar to all the other practices in your area.

ARC Psychiatry checks the boxes with their simple name, logo and tagline.

For example, you may want to avoid a cartoon tooth to signify your dental practice. Sure, it’s cute and memorable, but it’s a bit overdone from a branding standpoint. You are original. Let your brand reflect that.

FormHealth goes all-in with orange and applies the color as an identifier in their branding scheme.

Healthcare brands should speak to patients’ emotions.

Your healthcare brand should speak to the patients’ emotions. 

Making healthcare decisions, including choosing a new provider, are often emotional experiences. Let your logo, taglines, and other marketing materials indicate that you can connect with patients about their health and wellness on a personal level.

This helps patients get a feel for what it will be like when they come to your office for an initial appointment. It gives them an idea of what to expect about how they will be treated and helps establish trust. 

You’ll likely attract more patients if your practice comes across as more personal. Then it’s up to your healthcare team to deliver on those expectations.

Two Chairs not only nails its branding with distinctive colors, fonts, and styles, it also puts its “personalized approach” front and center.  

Successful healthcare brands connect with patients’ values.

Your healthcare brand should also reflect patient values. In that manner, you will gain patient loyalty and referrals to friends and family members. 

One example of connecting with patient values is a dental office that offers sedation dentistry. Actual pain is a pain point for many dental patients, and a reason they avoid scheduling annual preventive checkups. If your practice takes the pain out of the equation with the option of sedation dentistry, then letting patients know that they can have a pain-free, relaxing experience is a great way to present your brand.

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to branding your healthcare organization. Check out this helpful article to learn five ways to help make your brand stand out . It walks you through the following five steps:

• Integrate mission with messaging.
• Develop strategic value propositions.
• Establish a distinctive voice and tone.
• Create a strong visual identity.
• Create a comprehensive style guide.

Then get busy studying your competition and requesting feedback from current patients about what you do well and why they love your medical practice. Build your brand based on what’s missing from practices like yours in the community, and deliver exactly what your future patients are searching for. 

Patient experience plays a key role in building hospital brand  

When it comes to building a hospital’s brand, patient experience plays a huge role. For instance, when you have a great experience at a hospital, you’re more likely to share that positive experience with others, right? 

Communication plays an equally important part in shaping the patient’s experience. Hospitals should aim to have clear and understandable communication, making sure patients are informed about their treatment options and involved in decision-making. If you want patients to feel heard and understood, then take the time to listen and address their concerns. 

By leveraging marketing automation software, hospitals can improve communication efficiency, and personalization. It helps maintain consistent communication across different channels, such as emails and text messages. You can also personalize the communication. 

To learn more about how you can leverage marketing automation software to the fullest. Talk to our experts today! 

Conclusion  

To wrap it up, healthcare branding is essential for organizations to establish a unique identity and build patient trust. It helps you stand out in a competitive landscape. 

By investing in healthcare branding, organizations can attract and retain patients while creating a roadway to their overall success. 

The brand value of a hospital is based on medical quality, healing environment, service quality, communication, access to treatment and coordination. 

Branding is important in hospital services because it builds trust with patients, helps hospitals stand out from their competition, and attracts new patients. It creates a positive reputation and makes patients feel confident in choosing the hospital for their healthcare needs.

The elements of branding in a hospital typically include a unique logo and visual identity, a consistent tone of communication, a well-designed website, engaging content, a strong online presence, and a focus on creating a positive patient experience. 

Karla is a writer and graphic designer with a history of working in healthcare marketing. She earned a Master of Arts in Communication & Rhetorical Studies from Syracuse University.

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All is Well: Health Care Branding at Be Well Hospitals

March 2016 witnessed the management of Be Well Hospitals grappling with a major challenge: establishing itself as a mid-tier health care provider in an existing two-tier market that made patients choose between quality and pricing. Be Well Hospitals case study author Professor Piyush Kumar discusses branding strategy takeaways.

ISB Insight: How did Be Well capture your attention? What motivated you to create a case study for it?

Piyush Kumar: I was on the lookout for cases in the health care sector for my Services Management course. Health care is a large sector that is not generally known to focus on building customer centric service models. But Be Well Hospitals fulfilled this requirement, being one of the few ventures with a professional, customer and process- oriented approach. The fact that the venture was trying to solve challenges both at the marketing and branding fronts as well as on the service front with a unique approach was interesting from the point of view of developing a case study. Further, the case was facilitated by an ISB alum, who was connected to Be Well as one of their funders.

ALL IS WELL: HEALTH CARE BRANDING AT BE WELL HOSPITALS

What are some key takeaways from this case?

The branding challenge posed to Be Well was unique in the sense that the firm had to create a new market structure, rather than aiming to work with the existing structure. The current system in the health care sector consists of two recognised tiers: the renowned brands offering high quality services at high prices, and the small clinics and nursing homes with low pricing and easier access but possible degradation in quality. Be Well created for itself a third tier, aiming to combine quality with optimal pricing.

Be Well dealt with this challenge by branding itself as a mid-tier organisation. In the Indian context, this is particularly difficult to execute, since the customer segment of health care is fixated with the idea that only big, famous brands are reliable. Be Well as such has established itself as a mid-tier brand offering accessible health care at lower prices than those of bigger brands, reinforced with the quality smaller clinics cannot provide.

It is important to observe how Be Well has proven its mettle in the fiercely competitive service sector, where a firm has to prove at every point that it deserves the mid-tier. Setting up a service brand as well as their own clinical operations and thus solving the branding challenge—all of this makes the Be Well case truly worth studying.

ALL IS WELL: HEALTH CARE BRANDING AT BE WELL HOSPITALS THREE TIER CHALLENGE

What are some features that are truly unique about the Be Well case?

Having interacted with those working in the health care sector, particularly in services, I have come to understand that most of the industry does not believe in the feasibility of possible standardised services. However, the Be Well case demonstrates, through an individual who has previously devoted a fair amount of time to big concerns such as Apollo Hospitals, that standardised health care is indeed possible with appropriate implementation.

Something else that sets Be Well apart from other mid-tier health care providers is the centralised system of recruitment and the management’s inclusive treatment of staff. Be Well has focused on the goals and aspirations of the doctors, medical superintendents, consultants and other staff employed, and hence aligned these key players with the organisation’s overall mission.

About the Case Authors:

Professor Piyush Kumar is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia and Visiting Faculty at the Indian School of Business.

Professor Sonia Mehrotra is Associate Professor & Head- Centre of Excellence for Case Development at Prin. L.N. Welingkar Institute of Management, Development and Research.

Geetika Shah is Associate Director, Centre for Learning and Management Practice at the Indian School of Business.

About the Writer:  Samriddhi Mukherjee is a Content Associate at the Centre for Learning and Management Practice, Indian School of Business.

About the Case:   “Be Well Hospitals: Branding a Mid-Tier Service in a Two-Tier Market”. Indian School of Business case no. ISB088 (Indian School of Business, July 2017). Harvard Business Publishing. For more information: https://hbr.org/product/be-well-hospitals-branding-a-mid-tier-service-in-a-two-tier-market/ISB088-PDF-ENG

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Hospital Branding – A Step Towards Holistic Wellness

Author : , DesignerPeople --> Branding --> July 16, 2019

Last Updated on April 15, 2024 by DesignerPeople

Today in 2020, competition has got stiff, due to hectic lifestyles we hardly meet people and if we do prefer talking on generic things instead of focusing on medical aspects. People are comfortable sitting at their comfort zone, checking physician/surgeon reviews on sites or take part in faceless discussions on platforms such as www.practo.com.Dependence has increased from referrals, prior experience to Reviews and aggressive Research. We always have a specific image of each hospital in your surroundings, and that’s where branding plays an essential role. Does branding influence your perception in terms of which hospital to go? Why? What value is it offering?

Table of Contents

What is Hospital Branding?

Hospital Branding system revolves around trust and familiarity to create a distinct image from competitors. Along with core benefits such as quality service, world-class treatment, best physicians and medical equipment there are other crucial aspects which hospital should focus on branding elements such as hospital colour, theme, positioning, and an identity which is directly connecting to human physiological behaviour.

HOSPITAL BRANDING: IT’S ABOUT HEARTBEAT AND NOT CHEST BEAT

Brand design agency is connect emotionally about how you feel, hope,  perform, dream about the hospital. It’s a promise to provide tangible as well as intangible benefits to you and interests always make our Heart Beat. Empathy also plays a vital role in the concept of Heartbeat. Doctor should make sure that he creates a mentally positive impact on the patient. while Chestbeat is described as branding first cousin “selling”, and this concept sucks over Heartbeat in the hospital sector, for example, Levi’s is known for creating Heartbeat with the feeling of freedom and relaxation and not with thread count or fabric data. This way, branding engages with Heartbeat resulting in customer loyalty and chest beat involves with factual data resulting in the concept of selling.

STRATEGIES THAT MAKE HOSPITAL BRANDING SUCCESSFUL

1.brand research.

Even before you launch your brand, gathering of qualitative as well as quantitative data is must step as part of your brand strategy.

Competitive as well as health care sector research is mandated step to establish your brand.

2.BRAND POSITIONING

Brand positioning is an art, as well as a science.

Positioning in hospital sector deals with the level of care, honesty, reliability the brand is in the eyes of customer .Brands distinct values than that of competitors make patients feel special and taken care of are worthwhile investments.

SOME CASE STUDIES OF FAMOUS HOSPITALS REVIEWED BY DESIGNERPEOPLE BELOW

Apollo Hospital

Along with its hospital delivery system, it has created its brand image in its unique style. They conduct educational programs and seminars to explain people about changes in medical science and its infrastructure. This way, it has positioned in providing services, goodwill, dominance, loyalty and emotional bonding with patients.

Narayana Hrudalaya

Positioned for service quality, affordability and scale. Narayana Health has distinct from others by providing a pre-eminent centre for telemedicine in India and delivering services at free of cost. Their main motive is to serve rural people of India, which will improve their brand visibility both in urban and rural places.

Cloudnine Hospital

They have been providing excellent maternal and neonatal care by setting higher standards which India have not yet experienced, and that is making them distinct from their competitors.

Cloudnine believes nurturing of babies not only during birth but also the entire duration of pregnancy. They have come up with world class state of the art facilities, training for expectant mother and father in terms of handing baby for the first time, they value your feelings, and hence they provide full liberty on family members visiting on the day of delivery of the baby. Leading to an emotional connection, and therefore, the brand has very well positioned itself in this space. Showing how they care for your feelings on your most important day and such brands establish their identity actively in the mind of people.

3. BRAND IDENTITY

Brand identity comprises a message that includes tones, word choice and visual elements such as logo, colours, a font that acts as the face of your brand.

Colours play a very crucial role in creating your brand image and some substantive commonality in the use of colour:

1.Red – Colour of passion, energy can be intimidating and hence associated with heart, blood pressure, Spine and motor.

2.Green – It is aseptic, the colour of fertility and balance.

3.Blue – Associated with calming and relaxing. The Society of Critical Care Medicine recommends for such calming colours that promote rest in critical care units.

4.Violet – Purple or violet is associated with the head, nervous system and cerebral activity, also representing mental health and epilepsy worldwide.

5.Pink – Its more feminine and warm so representing breast cancer.

6.Gold – Hallmark of therapy

source: in.pinterest.com/pin/340444053062437520/

Standard solid colours are associated with adults and geriatrics while soft subtle tones represent child-friendly colours.

4.BRAND STORY, EXPERIENCE AND ACTIVATION

Achieving a strong brand story is possible by maintaining consistency. If you claim to value patients and hung up them on the phone for 10 minutes then definitely you are killing your brand.

It’s a brand strategy of collaborating your stakeholders, physicians, receptionist and every person who is representing the real expression of your brand. Total quality management concept includes tangible as well as intangible elements and plays a vital role in sustaining the quality of the brand.

Various external marketing campaigns can also help to enhance your brand for example

Mayo Clinic conducts past and current patients to be a “Mayo Clinic Champion.” which are their brand ambassadors and are encouraged to share their story and advocate for other patients.

Successful patient emotional stories also help to build a brand.

Cancer patients are brand ambassadors for successful stories for Tata cancer hospital Mumbai as they also create awareness and share their own motivational stories.

5.WAYFINDING SIGNAGES

Patients, family members, expected parents and new staff come to your space facing significant moments in their lives. Your brand should be there to receive a diverse public with care, reassurance and warmth. However, many times, floorplans of many hospitals are complicated and intimidating to visitors. That creates wayfinding challenges at times when people are already anxious and distracted.

So images in the hospital sector should add a sense of professionalism, as it can lead to patient dissatisfaction where customers are frequently lost and disoriented

Seattle Children’s Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital Branding are great examples of innovative wayfinding.

They have created a meaningful relationship between the zones, based on the geography of the Pacific Northwest: Forest, River, Mountain, and Ocean.

Signage should truly enhance the experience of the patient

Wayfinding in hospital if done right does more than just direct patients from point A to B: it’s a pillar of exceptional patient experience, the shift of frustrating ordeal into a fluent, engaging journey. A more unified experience between tech, the built environment, and the staff is critical to alleviating stress and maximizing efficiency.

Branding strategies in the hospital industry is dependent and based on consumer satisfaction, recall of brand and create a visible position of the brand.

You might need help with this process. Reach out to DesignerPeople today as for hospital Success; we have the experience to define and refine ideas and mould them into a compelling and unique brand.

source: in.pinterest.com/pin/404057397795896063/

source: coroflot.com/ZiyaadPondor/Wellkin-Hospital-Branding

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source: toastdesign.co.uk/portfolio/redesigning-hospital-branding/

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source: drivenxdesign.com/mda2012/project.asp?ID=10425

source: in.pinterest.com/pin/519813981985469222/

source: chemistanddruggist.co.uk/news/co-op-rebranding-branches-top-priority

source: behance.net/gallery/71437625/Dental-Hospital-Branding

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Author: Anush Malik

Being a strategist’s head and a long term visionary personality aims to achieve excellence in branding, packaging and digital marketing field. My 15 years of design experience and masters degree ais my strength which keeps me motivated and keep me going positively. I have participated in extensive branding design conquests in India, USA, Australia and New Zealand with winning zeal. My objective is to encourage start-ups and hence involves actively in the articles which will act as a productive intake of knowledge for them. Do connect me personally via my LinkedIn and I love to share my expertise with you.

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• 10 Best Branding Ideas For Hospital Growth in India

As Dr. SMART's hospital continued to thrive, he understood the importance of establishing a strong brand presence. He focused on developing a comprehensive hospital branding strategy. This helped create a distinct identity, build trust among patients, and position the hospital as a trusted provider of quality healthcare services.

Drlogy Hospital Growth Strategies will provide valuable insights to hospital administrators, enabling them to make informed decisions and establish their hospital branding for long-term growth and prosperity.

Also Check: AI & Cloud Based Hospital Management Software For Better Branding of Your Hospital

Branding Ideas For Hospital Growth Strategies in India

Here are the 10 best branding ideas for hospital growth strategies in India, presented in a short table format that includes hospital listing:

Please note that the table provides a brief overview of each branding idea, and a comprehensive branding strategy may involve a combination of these ideas tailored to the hospital's target audience and goals.

Here's a breakdown of the above 10 best branding ideas for hospital growth strategies in India.

• Hospital Listing
• List the hospital on online directories and platforms for increased visibility.
• Reach a wider patient audience and enhance online presence.

Logo Design

• Create a unique and visually appealing logo that represents the hospital's identity.
• Ensure the logo reflects the hospital's values and creates a memorable impression.

Visual Identity

• Develop a consistent visual identity with cohesive colors, typography, and design elements.
• Create a cohesive and professional look across all branding materials.

Compelling Tagline

• Craft a memorable tagline that effectively communicates the hospital's unique value.
• Create a concise and impactful statement that resonates with the target audience.

Website Design

• Design a user-friendly and visually engaging website that reflects the hospital's brand image.
• Provide comprehensive information, intuitive navigation, and an appealing design.

Brand Messaging

• Define a clear and compelling brand message that communicates the hospital's mission and values.
• Craft messaging that resonates with patients and highlights the hospital's unique qualities.

Patient Testimonials

• Share patient success stories and testimonials to build trust and credibility.
• Highlight positive patient experiences to showcase the hospital's quality of care.

Online Reputation Management

• Monitor and manage the hospital's online reputation through reviews and feedback.
• Respond promptly, address concerns, and maintain a positive brand perception.

Community Partnerships

• Collaborate with local organizations and initiatives to establish a strong presence.
• Demonstrate commitment to community well-being and engage with local stakeholders.

Thought Leadership

• Position key hospital experts as thought leaders through blogs, articles, and speaking engagements.
• Establish industry authority and showcase expertise to build trust and credibility.

These branding ideas, when implemented strategically, can contribute to the growth and success of hospitals in India.

Budget Allocation For Branding Strategies For Hospital Growth Strategies

Please note that the budget allocation ranges provided are approximate and can vary based on factors such as the size of the hospital, specific branding requirements, and the extent of branding activities. It is crucial to conduct a detailed analysis and consider individual circumstances when allocating budgets for branding strategies.

Branding Importance in Hospital Growth in India

Here are basic branding's Importance in hospital growth in India.

• Branding plays a crucial role in hospital growth by establishing a strong identity and reputation in the competitive healthcare market in India.
• Effective branding builds trust, credibility, and loyalty among patients, attracting new patients and retaining existing ones.
• A strong brand differentiates the hospital from competitors, creates a positive perception, and influences patient decision-making.
• Branding helps convey the hospital's unique value proposition, services, and commitment to quality care, setting it apart in the minds of patients.
• It enhances brand recognition and recall, leading to increased patient referrals and positive word-of-mouth.
• Branding contributes to long-term growth by fostering patient loyalty, expanding market share, and attracting top talent.
• A consistent brand presence across all touchpoints creates a cohesive and memorable experience for patients.
• Strong branding supports the launch of new services, speciality centers, and initiatives, facilitating their success.
• It builds community relationships, promotes goodwill, and positions the hospital as a trusted healthcare provider.
• Effective branding generates a positive emotional connection with patients, reinforcing the hospital's growth and success in the healthcare industry.

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Hospital Growth Strategies

A 14 steps comprehensive guide to hospital growth strategies for hospitals from scratch to explore a full hospital growth potential like Dr. SMART for growing and expanding hospital operations in India with detailed information.

Bonus: For Hospital Growth Using New Advanced Technology Check: Best Hospital Management Software in India

Summary Overall, Branding is essential for hospital growth as it establishes a strong identity, builds trust, and differentiates the hospital in a competitive market. Effective branding attracts patients, fosters loyalty, and drives sustainable growth for the hospital in India.   If you want hospital growth strategies or want to expand your hospital operations, Drlogy will give you A to Z solution to hospital growth statergies on 14 blog solutions of  Drlogy Hospital Growth Strategies . Please visit this series to get all your answers.

Hospital Branding Strategies FAQ

What are some effective branding ideas for promoting hospital growth.

Implementing these branding ideas can help promote hospital growth by enhancing brand recognition, building trust, and attracting new patients.

• Consistent visual identity: Establishing a cohesive visual identity through a well-designed logo, color scheme, and brand elements across all marketing materials, website, and physical spaces.
• Thought leadership content: Creating and sharing informative and engaging content, such as blog posts, articles, and videos, that positions the hospital as a trusted authority in healthcare, building credibility and attracting new patients.
• Community involvement: Participating in community events, sponsorships, and health initiatives to showcase the hospital's commitment to the local community, fostering trust and loyalty.

How can patient testimonials and success stories contribute to hospital branding and growth?

Patient testimonials and success stories play a significant role in hospital branding and growth by showcasing positive patient experiences and building trust among potential patients.

• Testimonial collection: Actively collecting and featuring patient testimonials on the hospital's website, social media platforms, and marketing materials to highlight the quality of care and positive patient outcomes.
• Video testimonials: Creating video testimonials where patients share their experiences and outcomes, providing a powerful and authentic way to connect with prospective patients and build trust.
• Case studies: Presenting detailed success stories or case studies that highlight specific treatments, procedures, or patient journeys, demonstrating the hospital's expertise and successful outcomes.

How does online reputation management impact hospital branding and growth?

Effective online reputation management plays a crucial role in hospital branding and growth as it influences the perception of the hospital, attracts new patients, and fosters patient loyalty.

• Online review monitoring: Actively monitoring and responding to online reviews across platforms such as Google, Yelp, and healthcare-specific review sites to address patient feedback, demonstrate responsiveness, and maintain a positive reputation.
• Encouraging patient reviews: Proactively encouraging satisfied patients to leave reviews and ratings on online platforms, increasing the hospital's overall rating and attracting new patients through positive online reputation.
• Social media engagement: Actively engaging with patients and the community on social media platforms by responding to comments, sharing relevant content, and showcasing the hospital's expertise, which strengthens the hospital's brand and online presence.

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Health System Branding Portneuf Health Partners

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You are now at usa (english), asia pacific, anmed health case study - arjo move® program.

A 98% decrease in workers’ compensation costs and an 82% decrease in patient handling-related injuries helped AnMed Health earn nearly $2.6 million in total annual savings. 1

As South Carolina’s largest independent, not-for-profit healthcare system, AnMed Health has been serving the region’s residents for more than 100 years. But even with a longstanding legacy of providing quality care, the organization recognized a need for support — both in protecting its patients and employees from injury and protecting itself from injury-related costs. Citing its demonstrated results and broad range of support solutions, AnMed Health chose Arjo MOVE . Together, they have reduced injuries and costs throughout the system and created a culture of care that is focused on safe patient healing.

“The partnership between AnMed Health and Arjo has been key to the success of our program. Ensuring our needs are being met, Arjo MOVE’s strong service and clear communication has been present since day one.”

Todd O'Quinn Director of Safety AnMed Health

AnMed Health is comprised of five hospitals, including a 461-bed acute care teaching hospital, a 72-bed women’s and children’s hospital, a 55-bed rehabilitation hospital, and two additional hospitals that serve smaller towns in South Carolina and northeast Georgia. Altogether, more than 3,700 professionals are employed by AnMed Health, which sees over 100,000 patients each year in its Emergency Department, alone.

The challenge

Prior to working with Arjo MOVE , AnMed Health assessed their facilities and found some daunting figures related to patient handling injuries: over $125,000 in costs for workers’ compensation in one year and nearly 60 work-related injuries in another. Looking to dramatically and efficiently reduce these numbers, the health system turned to Arjo MOVE to help implement a long-term solution.

The process

AnMed’s Arjo MOVE consultant team performed a complete walkthrough assessment of multiple hospitals within the system and created a program tailored to the organization’s specific needs.

The solution

Then, equipped with a guaranteed reduction in patient handling-related injuries, the Arjo MOVE program was officially implemented at AnMed Health. The Arjo MOVE package included:

• Comprehensive equipment assessment: a thorough review of AnMed-targeted facilities to ensure the proper placement, allocation, and training for need-specific tools throughout the organization
• Safe patient handling team: a training program engineered to educate and empower high-performing staff members within the organization (known as Transfer Mobility Coaches) for organic, built-in support at all times
• Discipline-focused consultants: Arjo MOVE provided consultancy services from experienced professionals working within the field to help address staff concerns at their level
• Continuous support: all AnMed Health facilities received

The outcome

Injuries In its first two years as an Arjo MOVE partner, AnMed Health experienced an 82% reduction in patient handling-related injuries.

Within two years of becoming an Arjo MOVE partner, AnMed Health facilities saw dramatic decreases in instances of both patient falls and hospital-acquired pressure injuries, and welcome improvements in both workers’ compensation expenses and work-related injuries in general. In addition, AnMed Health has evolved the Transfer Mobility Coach® program to include an annual Transfer Mobility Coach of the Year award.

Awards and recognition

Recently, AnMed Health has earned several notable recognitions based in part on positive outcomes fueled by Arjo MOVE . These accolades include:

• Official OSHA VPP facility
• Participant in the South Carolina Safe Care Commitment
• Magnet certified by the American Nurses Credentialing Center
• The Joint Commission 2013 Top Performer on Key Quality Measures ®
• U.S. News & World Report Best Regional Hospitals

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References:

• Arjo data on file.

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Kolkata doctor rape and murder: What happened on the night of incident

The semi-nude body of the 31-year-old woman post-graduate trainee, who was raped and murdered inside a seminar hall of rg kar medical college and hospital, was found on august 9. here's what happened on the day of the incident..

Listen to Story

• Before committing the crime, accused consumed alcohol with a patient's relative
• Later, he entered a seminar hall in the hospital where victim was resting
• He exited the hall about 45 minutes later, as per the crime timeline

Hospital services across West Bengal remained disrupted on Monday due to the ongoing protests by the medical fraternity over the gruesome rape and murder of a junior doctor at a government-run hospital in Kolkata last week.

Interns and postgraduate trainees at state-run medical establishments across the state have joined the ongoing agitation in support of the junior doctors' cease work at that hospital. Now in its fourth day, the protest will continue until those responsible are brought to justice.

The semi-nude body of the 31-year-old woman post-graduate trainee doctor , who was raped and murdered inside a seminar hall of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, was found on August 9 morning, sparking a nationwide outrage.

After initial investigation and examination of the CCTV cameras installed on the hospital premises, Kolkata Police arrested a civic volunteer, identified as Sanjay Roy, who later admitted to his crime .

The accused, who was arrested in an intoxicated condition from outside the hospital, has been sent to police custody till August 23 and many high-raking officials of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital have been suspended for negligence in the matter .

Here is a timeline of everything that has happened in the case so far:

August 5-8: Sanjay Roy travelled to Salua in Kharagpur to attend a Police's Welfare Society meeting. He stayed there from August 5 to August 8, claiming he was on duty as a civic assistant.

August 8, morning: Upon his return to Kolkata on the morning of August 8, Sanjay Roy first visited RG Kar Hospital, where he worked as a broker, to facilitate the admission of a patient. After ensuring the patient was admitted, he left the hospital but returned later that night.

August 8, night: At around 11 pm, Sanjay returned to RG Kar Hospital to assist the same patient with an X-ray. The patient's family accompanied him during this time. After spending a few minutes with them, Sanjay left the hospital building.

August 9, early hours: Sanjay returned to the hospital again at around 1 am to help another patient whose surgery was scheduled. After assisting this patient, he remained on the hospital premises, where he consumed alcohol with one of the patient's relatives behind the hospital building. He also provided financial assistance to the patient’s family and arranged an Uber bike for their journey home.

August 9, 3 am: At approximately 3 am, Sanjay went back to the third floor of the Chest Medicine building at the hospital. Within minutes, he entered the seminar hall where the lady doctor was resting. It was here that he allegedly raped and murdered her. Sanjay left the seminar hall after about 40-45 minutes.

August 9, 4:30 am: CCTV footage captured Sanjay leaving the hospital premises at around 4.37 am. He then returned to his barrack and went to sleep.

Later that morning: The Kolkata Police, after reviewing the CCTV footage and observing his suspicious activities, detained Sanjay Roy from the barrack. He was brought back to the hospital for questioning.

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How can health systems approach reducing health inequalities? An in-depth qualitative case study in the UK

• Charlotte Parbery-Clark 1 ,
• Lorraine McSweeney 2 ,
• Joanne Lally 3 &
• Sarah Sowden 4  

BMC Public Health volume  24 , Article number:  2168 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Metrics details

Addressing socioeconomic inequalities in health and healthcare, and reducing avoidable hospital admissions requires integrated strategy and complex intervention across health systems. However, the understanding of how to create effective systems to reduce socio-economic inequalities in health and healthcare is limited. The aim was to explore and develop a system’s level understanding of how local areas address health inequalities with a focus on avoidable emergency admissions.

In-depth case study using qualitative investigation (documentary analysis and key informant interviews) in an urban UK local authority. Interviewees were identified using snowball sampling. Documents were retrieved via key informants and web searches of relevant organisations. Interviews and documents were analysed independently based on a thematic analysis approach.

Interviews ( n  = 14) with wide representation from local authority ( n  = 8), NHS ( n  = 5) and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector ( n  = 1) with 75 documents (including from NHS, local authority, VCSE) were included. Cross-referenced themes were understanding the local context, facilitators of how to tackle health inequalities: the assets, and emerging risks and concerns. Addressing health inequalities in avoidable admissions per se was not often explicitly linked by either the interviews or documents and is not yet embedded into practice. However, a strong coherent strategic integrated population health management plan with a system’s approach to reducing health inequalities was evident as was collective action and involving people, with links to a “strong third sector”. Challenges reported include structural barriers and threats, the analysis and accessibility of data as well as ongoing pressures on the health and care system.

We provide an in-depth exploration of how a local area is working to address health and care inequalities. Key elements of this system’s working include fostering strategic coherence, cross-agency working, and community-asset based approaches. Areas requiring action included data sharing challenges across organisations and analytical capacity to assist endeavours to reduce health and care inequalities. Other areas were around the resilience of the system including the recruitment and retention of the workforce. More action is required to embed reducing health inequalities in avoidable admissions explicitly in local areas with inaction risking widening the health gap.

Highlights:

• Reducing health inequalities in avoidable hospital admissions is yet to be explicitly linked in practice and is an important area to address.

• Understanding the local context helps to identify existing assets and threats including the leverage points for action.

• Requiring action includes building the resilience of our complex systems by addressing structural barriers and threats as well as supporting the workforce (training and wellbeing with improved retention and recruitment) in addition to the analysis and accessibility of data across the system.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The health of our population is determined by the complex interaction of several factors which are either non-modifiable (such as age, genetics) or modifiable (such as the environment, social, economic conditions in which we live, our behaviours as well as our access to healthcare and its quality) [ 1 ]. Health inequalities are the avoidable and unfair systematic differences in health and healthcare across different population groups explained by the differences in distribution of power, wealth and resources which drive the conditions of daily life [ 2 , 3 ]. Essentially, health inequalities arise due to the systematic differences of the factors that influence our health. To effectively deal with most public health challenges, including reducing health inequalities and improving population health, broader integrated approaches [ 4 ] and an emphasis on systems is required [ 5 , 6 ] . A system is defined as ‘the set of actors, activities, and settings that are directly or indirectly perceived to have influence in or be affected by a given problem situation’ (p.198) [ 7 ]. In this case, the ‘given problem situation' is reducing health inequalities with a focus on avoidable admissions. Therefore, we must consider health systems, which are the organisations, resources and people aiming to improve or maintain health [ 8 , 9 ] of which health services provision is an aspect. In this study, the system considers NHS bodies, Integrated Care Systems, Local Authority departments, and the voluntary and community sector in a UK region.

A plethora of theories [ 10 ], recommended policies [ 3 , 11 , 12 , 13 ], frameworks [ 1 , 14 , 15 ], and tools [ 16 ] exist to help understand the existence of health inequalities as well as provide suggestions for improvement. However, it is reported that healthcare leaders feel under-skilled to reduce health inequalities [ 17 ]. A lack of clarity exists on how to achieve a system’s multi-agency coherence to reduce health inequalities systematically [ 17 , 18 ]. This is despite some countries having legal obligations to have a regard to the need to attend to health and healthcare inequalities. For example, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 [ 19 ], in England, mandated Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), now transferred to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) [ 20 ], to ‘have a regard to the need to reduce inequalities between patients with respect to their ability to access health services, and reduce inequalities between patients with respect to the outcomes achieved for them by the provision of health services’. The wider determinants of health must also be considered. For example, local areas have a mandatory requirement to have a joint strategic needs assessment (JSNA) and joint health and wellbeing strategy (JHWS) whose purpose is to ‘improve the health and wellbeing of the local community and reduce inequalities for all ages' [ 21 ] This includes addressing the wider determinants of health [ 21 ]. Furthermore, the hospital care costs to the NHS associated with socioeconomic inequalities has been previously reported at £4.8 billion a year due to excess hospitalisations [ 22 ]. Avoidable emergency admissions are admissions into hospital that are considered to be preventable with high-quality ambulatory care [ 23 ]. Both ambulatory care sensitive conditions (where effective personalised care based in the community can aid the prevention of needing an admission) and urgent care sensitive conditions (where a system on the whole should be able to treat and manage without an admission) are considered within this definition [ 24 ] (encompassing more than 100 International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes). The disease burden sits disproportionately with our most disadvantaged communities, therefore highlighting the importance of addressing inequalities in hospital pressures in a concerted manner [ 25 , 26 ].

Research examining one component of an intervention, or even one part of the system, [ 27 ] or which uses specific research techniques to control for the system’s context [ 28 ] are considered as having limited use for identifying the key ingredients to achieve better population health and wellbeing [ 5 , 28 ]. Instead, systems thinking considers how the system’s components and sub-components interconnect and interrelate within and between each other (and indeed other systems) to gain an understanding of the mechanisms by which things work [ 29 , 30 ]. Complex interventions or work programmes may perform differently in varying contexts and through different mechanisms, and therefore cannot simply be replicated from one context to another to automatically achieve the same outcomes. Ensuring that research into systems and systems thinking considers real-world context, such as where individuals live, where policies are created and interventions are delivered, is vital [ 5 ]. How the context and implementation of complex or even simple interventions interact is viewed as becoming increasingly important [ 31 , 32 ]. Case study research methodology is founded on the ‘in-depth exploration of complex phenomena in their natural, or ‘real-life’, settings’ (p.2) [ 33 ]. Case study approaches can deepen the understanding of complexity addressing the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions in a real-life context [ 34 ]. Researchers have highlighted the importance of engaging more deeply with case-based study methodology [ 31 , 33 ]. Previous case study research has shown promise [ 35 ] which we build on by exploring a systems lens to consider the local area’s context [ 16 ] within which the work is implemented. By using case-study methodology, our study aimed to explore and develop an in-depth understanding of how a local area addresses health inequalities, with a focus on avoidable hospital admissions. As part of this, systems processes were included.

Study design

This in-depth case study is part of an ongoing larger multiple (collective [ 36 ]) case study approach. An instrumental approach [ 34 ] was taken allowing an in-depth investigation of an issue, event or phenomenon, in its natural real-life context; referred to as a ‘naturalistic’ design [ 34 ]. Ethics approval was obtained by Newcastle University’s Ethics Committee (ref 13633/2020).

Study selection

This case study, alongside the other three cases, was purposively [ 36 ] chosen considering overall deprivation level of the area (Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) [ 37 ]), their urban/rural location, differing geographical spread across the UK (highlighted in patient and public feedback and important for considering the North/South health divide [ 38 ]), and a pragmatic judgement of likely ability to achieve the depth of insight required [ 39 ]. In this paper, we report the findings from one of the case studies, an urban local authority in the Northern region of the UK with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. This area was chosen for this in-depth case analysis due to high-level of need, and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (2009-2018) had experienced a trend towards reducing socioeconomic inequalities in avoidable hospital admission rates between neighbourhoods within the local area [ 40 ]. Thereby this case study represents an ‘unusual’ case [ 41 ] to facilitate learning regarding what is reported and considered to be the key elements required to reduce health inequalities, including inequalities in avoidable admissions, in a local area.

Semi-structured interviews

The key informants were identified iteratively through the documentary analysis and in consultation with the research advisory group. Initially board level committee members (including lay, managerial, and clinical members) within relevant local organisations were purposively identified. These individuals were systems leaders charged with the remit of tackling health inequalities and therefore well placed to identify both key personnel and documents. Snowball sampling [ 42 ] was undertaken thereafter whereby interviewees helped to identify additional key informants within the local system who were working on health inequalities, including avoidable emergency admissions, at a systems level. Interview questions were based on an iteratively developed topic guide (supplementary data 1), informed from previous work’s findings [ 43 ] and the research advisory network’s input. A study information sheet was emailed to perspective interviewees, and participants were asked to complete an e-consent form using Microsoft Forms [ 42 ]. Each interviewee was interviewed by either L.M. or C.P.-C. using the online platforms Zoom or Teams, and lasted up to one hour. Participants were informed of interviewers’ role, workplace as well as purpose of the study. Interviewees were asked a range of questions including any work relating to reducing health inequalities, particularly avoidable emergency admissions, within the last 5 years. Brief notes were taken, and the interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and anonymised.

Documentary analysis

The documentary analysis followed the READ approach [ 44 ]. Any documents from the relevant local/regional area with sections addressing health inequalities and/or avoidable emergency admissions, either explicitly stated or implicitly inferred, were included. A list of core documents was chosen, including the local Health and Wellbeing Strategy (Table 1 ). Subsequently, other documents were identified by snowballing from these core documents and identification by the interviewees. All document types were within scope if produced/covered a period within 5 years (2017-2022), including documents in the public domain or not as well as documents pertaining to either a regional, local and neighbourhood level. This 5-year period was a pragmatic decision in line with the interviews and considered to be a balance of legacy and relevance. Attempts were made to include the final version of each document, where possible/applicable, otherwise the most up-to-date version or version available was used.

An Excel spreadsheet data extraction tool was adapted with a priori criteria [ 44 ] to extract the data. This tool included contextual information (such as authors, target area and document’s purpose). Also, information based on previous research on addressing socioeconomic inequalities in avoidable emergency admissions, such as who stands to benefit, was extracted [ 43 ]. Additionally, all documents were summarised according to a template designed according to the research’s aims. Data extraction and summaries were undertaken by L.M. and C.P.-C. A selection was doubled coded to enhance validity and any discrepancies were resolved by discussion.

Interviews and documents were coded and analysed independently based on a thematic analysis approach [ 45 ], managed by NVivo software. A combination of ‘interpretive’ and ‘positivist’ stance [ 34 , 46 ] was taken which involved understanding meanings/contexts and processes as perceived from different perspectives (interviewees and documents). This allowed for an understanding of individual and shared social meanings/reasonings [ 34 , 36 ]. For the documentary analysis, a combination of both content and thematic analysis as described by Bowen [ 47 ] informed by Braun and Clarke’s approach to thematic analysis [ 45 ] was used. This type of content analysis does not include the typical quantification but rather a review of the document for pertinent and meaningful passages of text/other data [ 47 ]. Both an inductive and deductive approach for the documentary analysis’ coding [ 46 , 47 ] was chosen. The inductive approach was developed a posteriori; the deductive codes being informed by the interviews and previous findings from research addressing socioeconomic inequalities in avoidable emergency admissions [ 43 ]. In line with qualitative epistemological approach to enquiry, the interview and documentary findings were viewed as ‘truths’ in themselves with the acceptance that multiple realities can co-exist [ 48 ]. The analysis of each set of themes (with subthemes) from the documentary analysis and interviews were cross-referenced and integrated with each other to provide a cohesive in-depth analysis [ 49 ] by generating thematic maps to explore the relationships between the themes. The codes, themes and thematic maps were peer-reviewed continually with regular meetings between L.M., C.P.-C., J.L. and S.S. Direct quotes are provided from the interviews and documentary analysis. Some quotes from the documents are paraphrased to protect anonymity of the case study after following a set process considering a range of options. This involved searching each quote from the documentary analysis in Google and if the quote was found in the first page of the result, we shortened extracts and repeated the process. Where the shortened extracts were still identifiable, we were required to paraphrase that quote. Each paraphrased quote and original was shared and agreed with all the authors reducing the likelihood of inadvertently misinterpreting or misquoting. Where multiple components over large bodies of text were present in the documents, models were used to evidence the broadness, for example, using Dahlgren’s and Whitehead’s model of health determinants [ 1 ]. Due to the nature of the study, transcripts and findings were not shared with participants for checking but will be shared in a dissemination workshop in 2024.

Patient and public involvement and engagement

Four public contributors from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Research Design Service (RDS) North East and North Cumbria (NENC) Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) panel have been actively engaged in this research from its inception. They have been part of the research advisory group along with professional stakeholders and were involved in the identification of the sampling frame’s key criteria. Furthermore, a diverse group of public contributors has been actively involved in other parts of the project including developing the moral argument around action by producing a public facing resource exploring what health inequalities mean to people and public views of possible solutions [ 50 ].

Semi-structured interviews: description

Sixteen participants working in health or social care, identified through the documentary analysis or snowballing, were contacted for interview; fourteen consented to participate. No further interviews were sought as data sufficiency was reached whereby no new information or themes were being identified. Participant roles were broken down by NHS ( n  = 5), local authority/council ( n  = 8), and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VSCE) ( n  = 1). To protect the participants’ anonymity, their employment titles/status are not disclosed. However, a broad spectrum of interviewees with varying roles from senior health system leadership (including strategic and commissioner roles) to roles within provider organisations and the VSCE sector were included.

Documentary analysis: description

75 documents were reviewed with documents considering regional ( n  = 20), local ( n  = 64) or neighbourhood ( n  = 2) area with some documents covering two or more areas. Table 2 summarises the respective number of each document type which included statutory documents to websites from across the system (NHS, local government and VSCE). 45 documents were named by interviewees and 42 documents were identified as either a core document or through snowballing from other documents. Of these, 12 documents were identified from both. The timescales of the documents varied and where possible to identify, was from 2014 to 2031.

Integrative analysis of the documentary analysis and interviews

The overarching themes encompass:

Understanding the local context

Facilitators to tacking health inequalities: the assets

Emerging risks and concerns

Figure 1 demonstrates the relationships between the main themes identified from the analysis for tackling health inequalities and improving health in this case study.

Diagram of the relationship between the key themes identified regarding tackling health inequalities and improving health in a local area informed by 2 previous work [ 14 , 51 ]. NCDs = non-communicable diseases; HI = health inequalities

Understanding the local context was discussed extensively in both the documents and the interviews. This was informed by local intelligence and data that was routinely collected, monitored, and analysed to help understand the local context and where inequalities lie. More bespoke, in-depth collection and analysis were also described to get a better understanding of the situation. This not only took the form of quantitative but also considered qualitative data with lived experience:

‛So, our data comes from going out to talk to people. I mean, yes, especially the voice of inequalities, those traditional mechanisms, like surveys, don't really work. And it's about going out to communities, linking in with third sector organisations, going out to communities, and just going out to listen…I think the more we can bring out those real stories. I mean, we find quotes really, really powerful in terms of helping people understand what it is that matters.’ (LP16).

However, there were limitations to the available data including the quality as well as having enough time to do the analysis justice. This resulted in difficulties in being able to fully understand the context to help identify and act on the required improvements.

‘A lack of available data means we cannot quantify the total number of vulnerable migrants in [region]’ (Document V).

‛So there’s lots of data. The issue is joining that data up and analysing it, and making sense of it. That’s where we don’t have the capacity.’ (LP15).

Despite the caveats, understanding the context and its data limitations were important to inform local priorities and approaches on tackling health inequalities. This understanding was underpinned by three subthemes which were understanding:

the population’s needs including identification of people at higher risk of worse health and health inequalities

the driving forces of those needs with acknowledgement of the impact of the wider determinants of health

the threats and barriers to physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing

Firstly, the population’s needs, including identification of people at higher risk of worse health and health inequalities, was important. This included considering risk factors, such as smoking, specific groups of people and who was presenting with which conditions. Between the interviews and documents, variation was seen between groups deemed at-risk or high-risk with the documents identifying a wider range. The groups identified across both included marginalised communities, such as ethnic minority groups, gypsy and travellers, refugees and asylum seekers as well as people/children living in disadvantaged area.

‘There are significant health inequalities in children with asthma between deprived and more affluent areas, and this is reflected in A&E admissions.' (Document J).

Secondly, the driving forces of those needs with acknowledgement of the impact of the wider determinants of health were described. These forces mapped onto Dahlgren’s and Whitehead’s model of health determinants [ 1 ] consisting of individual lifestyle factors, social and community networks, living and working conditions (which include access to health care services) as well as general socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions across the life course.

…. at the centre of our approach considering the requirements to improve the health and wellbeing of our area are the wider determinants of health and wellbeing, acknowledging how factors, such as housing, education, the environment and economy, impact on health outcomes and wellbeing over people’s lifetime and are therefore pivotal to our ambition to ameliorate the health of the poorest the quickest. (Paraphrased Document P).

Thirdly, the threats and barriers to health included environmental risks, communicable diseases and associated challenges, non-communicable conditions and diseases, mental health as well as structural barriers. In terms of communicable diseases, COVID-19 predominated. The environmental risks included climate change and air pollution. Non-communicable diseases were considered as a substantial and increasing threat and encompassed a wide range of chronic conditions such as diabetes, and obesity.

‛Long term conditions are the leading causes of death and disability in [case study] and account for most of our health and care spending. Cases of cancer, diabetes, respiratory disease, dementia and cardiovascular disease will increase as the population of [case study] grows and ages.’ (Document A).

Structural barriers to accessing and using support and/or services for health and wellbeing were identified. These barriers included how the services are set up, such as some GP practices asking for proof of a fixed address or form of identification to register. For example:

Complicated systems (such as having to make multiple calls, the need to speak to many people/gatekeepers or to call at specific time) can be a massive barrier to accessing healthcare and appointments. This is the case particularly for people who have complex mental health needs or chaotic/destabilized circumstances. People who do not have stable housing face difficulties in registering for GP and other services that require an address or rely on post to communicate appointments. (Paraphrased Document R).

A structural threat regarding support and/or services for health and wellbeing was the sustainability of current funding with future uncertainty posing potential threats to the delivery of current services. This also affected the ability to adapt and develop the services, or indeed build new ones.

‛I would say the other thing is I have a beef [sic] [disagreement] with pilot studies or new innovations. Often soft funded, temporary funded, charity funded, partnership work run by enthusiasts. Me, I've done them, or supported people doing many of these. And they're great. They can make a huge impact on the individuals involved on that local area. You can see fantastic work. You get inspired and you want to stand up in a crowd and go, “Wahey, isn't this fantastic?” But actually the sad part of it is on these things, I've seen so many where we then see some good, positive work being done, but we can't make it permanent or we can't spread it because there's no funding behind it.’ (LP8).

Facilitators to tackling health inequalities: the assets

The facilitators for improving health and wellbeing and tackling health inequalities are considered as assets which were underpinned by values and principles.

Values driven supported by four key principles

Being values driven was an important concept and considered as the underpinning attitudes or beliefs that guide decision making [ 52 ]. Particularly, the system’s approach was underpinned by a culture and a system's commitment to tackle health inequalities across the documents and interviews. This was also demonstrated by how passionately and emotively some interviewees spoke about their work.

‛There's a really strong desire and ethos around understanding that we will only ever solve these problems as a system, not by individual organisations or even just part of the system working together. And that feels great.’ (LP3).

Other values driving the approach included accountability, justice, and equity. Reducing health inequalities and improving health were considered to be the right things to do. For example:

We feel strongly about social justice and being inclusive, wishing to reflect the diversity of [case study]. We campaign on subjects that are important to people who are older with respect and kindness. (Paraphrased Document O).

Four key principles were identified that crosscut the assets which were:

Shared vision

Strong partnership

Asset-based approaches

Willingness and ability to act on learning

The mandated strategy, identifying priorities for health and wellbeing for the local population with the required actions, provided the shared vision across each part of the system, and provided the foundations for the work. This shared vision was repeated consistently in the documents and interviews from across the system.

[Case study] will be a place where individuals who have the lowest socioeconomic status will ameliorate their health the quickest. [Case study] will be a place for good health and compassion for all people, regardless of their age. (Paraphrased Document A).

‛One thing that is obviously becoming stronger and stronger is the focus on health inequalities within all of that, and making sure that we are helping people and provide support to people with the poorest health as fast as possible, so that agenda hasn’t shifted.’ (LP7).

This drive to embed the reduction of health inequalities was supported by clear new national guidance encapsulated by the NHS Core20PLUS5 priorities. Core20PLUS5 is the UK's approach to support a system to improve their healthcare inequalities [ 53 ]. Additionally, the system's restructuring from Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and formalisation of the now statutory Integrated Care Systems (ICS) in England was also reported to facilitate the driving of further improvement in health inequalities. These changes at a regional and local level helped bring key partners across the system (NHS and local government among others) to build upon their collective responsibility for improving health and reducing health inequalities for their area [ 54 ].

‛I don’t remember the last time we’ve had that so clear, or the last time that health inequalities has had such a prominent place, both in the NHS planning guidance or in the NHS contract. ’ (LP15). ‛The Health and Care Act has now got a, kind of, pillar around health inequalities, the new establishment of ICPs and ICBs, and also the planning guidance this year had a very clear element on health inequalities.’ (LP12)

A strong partnership and collaborative team approach across the system underpinned the work from the documents and included the reoccurrence of the concept that this case study acted as one team: ‘Team [case study]'.

Supporting one another to ensure [case study] is the best it can be: Team [case study]. It involves learning, sharing ideas as well as organisations sharing assets and resources, authentic partnerships, and striving for collective impact (environmental and social) to work towards shared goals . (Paraphrased Document B).

This was corroborated in the interviews as working in partnership to tackle health inequalities was considered by the interviewees as moving in the right direction. There were reports that the relationship between local government, health care and the third sector had improved in recent years which was still an ongoing priority:

‘I think the only improvement I would cite, which is not an improvement in terms of health outcomes, but in terms of how we work across [case study] together has moved on quite a lot, in terms of teams leads and talking across us, and how we join up on things, rather than see ourselves all as separate bodies' (LP15).

‘I think the relationship between local authorities and health and the third sector, actually, has much more parity and esteem than it had before.' (LP11)

The approaches described above were supported by all health and care partners signing up to principles around partnership; it is likely this has helped foster the case study's approach. This also builds on the asset-based approaches that were another key principle building on co-production and co-creation which is described below.

We begin with people : instead of doing things to people or for them, we work with them, augmenting the skills, assets and strength of [case study]’s people, workforce and carers. We achieve : actions are focused on over words and by using intelligence, every action hones in on the actual difference that we will make to ameliorate outcomes, quality and spend [case study]’s money wisely; We are Team [case study ]: having kindness, working as one organisation, taking responsibility collectively and delivering on what we agreed. Problems are discussed with a high challenge and high support attitude. (Paraphrased Document D).

At times, the degree to which the asset-based approaches were embedded differed from the documents compared to the interviews, even when from the same part of the system. For example, the documents often referred to the asset-based approach as having occurred whilst interviewees viewed it more as a work in progress.

‘We have re-designed many of our services to focus on needs-led, asset-based early intervention and prevention, and have given citizens more control over decisions that directly affect them .’ (Document M).

‘But we’re trying to take an asset-based approach, which is looking at the good stuff in communities as well. So the buildings, the green space, the services, but then also the social capital stuff that happens under the radar.’ (LP11).

A willingness to learn and put in action plans to address the learning were present. This enables future proofing by building on what is already in place to build the capacity, capability and flexibility of the system. This was particularly important for developing the workforce as described below.

‘So we’ve got a task and finish group set up, […] So this group shows good practice and is a space for people to discuss some of the challenges or to share what interventions they are doing around the table, and also look at what other opportunities that they have within a region or that we could build upon and share and scale.’ (LP12).

These assets that are considered as facilitators are divided into four key levels which are the system, services and support, communities and individuals, and workforce which are discussed in turn below.

Firstly, the system within this case study was made up of many organisations and partnerships within the NHS, local government, VSCE sector and communities. The interviewees reported the presence of a strong VCSE sector which had been facilitated by the local council's commitment to funding this sector:

‘Within [case study], we have a brilliant third sector, the council has been longstanding funders of infrastructure in [case study], third sector infrastructure, to enable those links [of community engagement] to be made' (LP16).

In both the documents and interviews, a strong coherent strategic integrated population health management plan with a system’s approach to embed the reduction of health inequalities was evident. For example, on a system level regionally:

‘To contribute towards a reduction in health inequalities we will: take a system wide approach for improving outcomes for specific groups known to be affected by health inequalities, starting with those living in our most deprived communities….’ (Document H).

This case study’s approach within the system included using creative solutions and harnessing technology. This included making bold and inventive changes to improve how the city and the system linked up and worked together to improve health. For example, regeneration work within the city to ameliorate and transform healthcare facilities as well as certain neighbourhoods by having new green spaces, better transport links in order to improve city-wide innovation and collaboration (paraphrased Document F) were described. The changes were not only related to physical aspects of the city but also aimed at how the city digitally linked up. Being a leader in digital innovation to optimise the health benefits from technology and information was identified in several documents.

‘ Having the best connected city using digital technology to improve health and wellbeing in innovative ways.’ (Document G).

The digital approaches included ongoing development of a digitalised personalised care record facilitating access to the most up-to-date information to developing as well as having the ‘ latest, cutting edge technologies’ ( Document F) in hospital care. However, the importance of not leaving people behind by embedding digital alternatives was recognised in both the documents and interviews.

‘ We are trying to just embed the culture of doing an equity health impact assessment whenever you are bringing in a digital solution or a digital pathway, and that there is always an alternative there for people who don’t have the capability or capacity to use it. ’ (LP1).

The successful one hundred percent [redacted] programme is targeting some of our most digitally excluded citizens in [case study]. For our city to continue to thrive, we all need the appropriate skills, technology and support to get the most out of being online. (Paraphrased Document Q)

This all links in with the system that functions in a ‘place' which includes the importance of where people are born, grow, work and live. Working towards this place being welcoming and appealing was described both regionally and locally. This included aiming to make the case study the place of choice for people.

‘Making [case study] a centre for good growth becoming the place of choice in the UK to live, to study, for businesses to invest in, for people to come and work.’ (Document G).

Services and support

Secondly, a variety of available services and support were described from the local authority, NHS, and voluntary community sectors. Specific areas of work, such as local initiatives (including targeted work or campaigns for specific groups or specific health conditions) as well as parts of the system working together with communities collaboratively, were identified. This included a wide range of work being done such as avoiding delayed discharges or re-admissions, providing high quality affordable housing as well as services offering peer support.

‘We have a community health development programme called [redacted], that works with particular groups in deprived communities and ethnically diverse communities to work in a very trusted and culturally appropriate way on the things that they want to get involved with to support their health.’ (LP3 ).

It is worth noting that reducing health inequalities in avoidable admissions was not often explicitly specified in the documents or interviews. However, either specified or otherwise inferred, preventing ill health and improving access, experience, and outcomes were vital components to addressing inequalities. This was approached by working with communities to deliver services in communities that worked for all people. Having co-designed, accessible, equitable integrated services and support appeared to be key.

‘Reducing inequalities in unplanned admissions for conditions that could be cared for in the community and access to planned hospital care is key.’ (Document H)

Creating plans with people: understanding the needs of local population and designing joined-up services around these needs. (Paraphrased Document A).

‘ So I think a core element is engagement with your population, so that ownership and that co-production, if you're going to make an intervention, don't do it without because you might miss the mark. ’ (LP8).

Clear, consistent and appropriate communication that was trusted was considered important to improve health and wellbeing as well as to tackle health inequalities. For example, trusted community members being engaged to speak on the behalf of the service providers:

‘The messenger is more important than the message, sometimes.’ (LP11).

This included making sure the processes are in place so that the information is accessible for all, including people who have additional communication needs. This was considered as a work in progress in this case study.

‘I think for me, things do come down to those core things, of health, literacy, that digital exclusion and understanding the wider complexities of people.’ (LP12)

‘ But even more confusing if you've got an additional communication need. And we've done quite a lot of work around the accessible information standard which sounds quite dry, and doesn't sound very- but actually, it's fundamental in accessing health and care. And that is, that all health and care organisations should record your communication preferences. So, if I've got a learning disability, people should know. If I've got a hearing impairment, people should know. But the systems don’t record it, so blind people are getting sent letters for appointments, or if I've got hearing loss, the right provisions are not made for appointments. So, actually, we're putting up barriers before people even come in, or can even get access to services.’ (LP16).

Flexible, empowering, holistic care and support that was person-centric was more apparent in the documents than the interviews.

At the centre of our vision is having more people benefiting from the life chances currently enjoyed by the few to make [case study] a more equal place. Therefore, we accentuate the importance of good health, the requirement to boost resilience, and focus on prevention as a way of enabling higher quality service provision that is person-centred. [Paraphrased Document N).

Through this [work], we will give all children and young people in [case study], particularly if they are vulnerable and/or disadvantaged, a start in life that is empowering and enable them to flourish in a compassionate and lively city. [Paraphrased Document M].

Communities and individuals

Thirdly, having communities and individuals at the heart of the work appeared essential and viewed as crucial to nurture in this case study. The interconnectedness of the place, communities and individuals were considered a key part of the foundations for good health and wellbeing.

In [case study], our belief is that our people are our greatest strength and our most important asset. Wellbeing starts with people: our connections with our friends, family, and colleagues, our behaviour, understanding, and support for one another, as well as the environment we build to live in together . (Paraphrased Document A).

A recognition of the power of communities and individuals with the requirement to support that key principle of a strength-based approach was found. This involved close working with communities to help identify what was important, what was needed and what interventions would work. This could then lead to improved resilience and cohesion.

‛You can't make effective health and care decisions without having the voice of people at the centre of that. It just won't work. You won't make the right decisions.’ (LP16).

‘Build on the strengths in ourselves, our families, carers and our community; working with people, actively listening to what matters most to people, with a focus on what’s strong rather than what’s wrong’ (Document G).

Meaningful engagement with communities as well as strengths and asset-based approaches to ensure self-sufficiency and sustainability of communities can help communities flourish. This includes promoting friendships, building community resilience and capacity, and inspiring residents to find solutions to change the things they feel needs altering in their community . (Paraphrased Document B).

This close community engagement had been reported to foster trust and to lead to improvements in health.

‘But where a system or an area has done a lot of community engagement, worked really closely with the community, gained their trust and built a programme around them rather than just said, “Here it is. You need to come and use it now,” you can tell that has had the impact. ' (LP1).

Finally, workforce was another key asset; the documents raised the concept of one workforce across health and care. The key principles of having a shared vision, asset-based approaches and strong partnership were also present in this example:

By working together, the Health and Care sector makes [case study] the best area to not only work but also train for people of all ages. Opportunities for skills and jobs are provided with recruitment and engagement from our most disadvantaged communities, galvanizing the future’s health and care workforce. By doing this, we have a very skilled and diverse workforce we need to work with our people now as well as in the future. (Paraphrased Document E).

An action identified for the health and care system to address health inequalities in case study 1 was ‘ the importance of having an inclusive workforce trained in person-centred working practices ’ (Document R). Several ways were found to improve and support workforce skills development and embed awareness of health inequalities in practice and training. Various initiatives were available such as an interactive health inequalities toolkit, theme-related fellowships, platforms and networks to share learning and develop skills.

‛We've recently launched a [redacted] Fellowship across [case study’s region], and we've got a number of clinicians and managers on that………. We've got training modules that we've put on across [case study’s region], as well for health inequalities…we've got learning and web resources where we share good practice from across the system, so that is our [redacted] Academy.’ (LP2).

This case study also recognised the importance of considering the welfare of the workforce; being skilled was not enough. This had been recognised pre-pandemic but was seen as even more important post COVID-19 due to the impact that COVID-19 had on staff, particularly in health and social care.

‛The impacts of the pandemic cannot be underestimated; our colleagues and services are fatigued and still dealing with the pressures. This context makes it even more essential that we share the responsibility, learn from each other at least and collaborate with each other at best, and hold each other up to be the best we can.’ (Document U).

Concerns were raised such as the widening of health inequalities since the pandemic and cost of living crisis. Post-pandemic and Brexit, recruiting health, social care and third sector staff was compounding the capacity throughout this already heavily pressurised system.

In [case study], we have seen the stalling of life expectancy and worsening of the health inequality gap, which is expected to be compounded by the effects of the pandemic. (Paraphrased Document T)

‘I think key barriers, just the immense pressure on the system still really […] under a significant workload, catching up on activity, catching up on NHS Health Checks, catching up on long-term condition reviews. There is a significant strain on the system still in terms of catching up. It has been really difficult because of the impact of COVID.’ (LP7).

‘Workforce is a challenge, because the pipelines that we’ve got, we’ve got fewer people coming through many of them. And that’s not just particular to, I don't know, nursing, which is often talking talked [sic] about as a challenged area, isn't it? And of course, it is. But we’ve got similar challenges in social care, in third sector.’ (LP5).

The pandemic was reported to have increased pressures on the NHS and services not only in relation to staff capacity but also regarding increases in referrals to services, such as mental health. Access to healthcare changed during the pandemic increasing barriers for some:

‘I think people are just confused about where they're supposed to go, in terms of accessing health and care at the moment. It's really complex to understand where you're supposed to go, especially, at the moment, coming out of COVID, and the fact that GPs are not the accessible front door. You can't just walk into your GP anymore.’ (LP16).

‘Meeting this increased demand [for work related to reducing ethnic inequalities in mental health] is starting to prove a challenge and necessitates some discussion about future resourcing.’ (Document S)

Several ways were identified to aid effective adaptation and/or mitigation. This included building resilience such as developing the existing capacity, capability and flexibility of the system by learning from previous work, adapting structures and strengthening workforce development. Considerations, such as a commitment to Marmot Principles and how funding could/would contribute, were also discussed.

The funding’s [linked to Core20PLUS5] purpose is to help systems to ensure that health inequalities are not made worse when cost-savings or efficiencies are sought…The available data and insight are clear and [health inequalities are] likely to worsen in the short term, the delays generated by pandemic, the disproportionate effect of that on the most deprived and the worsening food and fuel poverty in all our places. (Paraphrased Document L).

Learning from the pandemic was thought to be useful as some working practices had altered during COVID-19 for the better, such as needing to continue to embed how the system had collaborated and resist old patterns of working:

‘So I think that emphasis between collaboration – extreme collaboration – which is what we did during COVID is great. I suppose the problem is, as we go back into trying to save money, we go back into our old ways of working, about working in silos. And I think we’ve got to be very mindful of that, and continue to work in a different way.’ (LP11).

Another area identified as requiring action, was the collection, analysis, sharing and use of data accessible by the whole system.

‘So I think there is a lot of data out there. It’s just how do we present that in such a way that it’s accessible to everyone as well, because I think sometimes, what happens is that we have one group looking at data in one format, but then how do we cascade that out?’ (LP12)

We aimed to explore a system’s level understanding of how a local area addresses health inequalities with a focus on avoidable emergency admissions using a case study approach. Therefore, the focus of our research was strategic and systematic approaches to inequalities reduction. Gaining an overview of what was occurring within a system is pertinent because local areas are required to have a regard to address health inequalities in their local areas [ 20 , 21 ]. Through this exploration, we also developed an understanding of the system's processes reported to be required. For example, an area requiring action was viewed as the accessibility and analysis of data. The case study described having health inequalities ‘at the heart of its health and wellbeing strategy ’ which was echoed across the documents from multiple sectors across the system. Evidence of a values driven partnership with whole systems working was centred on the importance of place and involving people, with links to a ‘strong third sector ’ . Working together to support and strengthen local assets (the system, services/support, communities/individuals, and the workforce) were vital components. This suggested a system’s committed and integrated approach to improve population health and reduce health inequalities as well as concerted effort to increase system resilience. However, there was juxtaposition at times with what the documents contained versus what interviewees spoke about, for example, the degree to which asset-based approaches were embedded.

Furthermore, despite having a priori codes for the documentary analysis and including specific questions around work being undertaken to reduce health inequalities in avoidable admissions in the interviews with key systems leaders, this explicit link was still very much under-developed for this case study. For example, how to reduce health inequalities in avoidable emergency admissions was not often specified in the documents but could be inferred from existing work. This included work around improving COVID-19 vaccine uptake in groups who were identified as being at high-risk (such as older people and socially excluded populations) by using local intelligence to inform where to offer local outreach targeted pop-up clinics. This limited explicit action linking reduction of health inequalities in avoidable emergency admissions was echoed in the interviews and it became clear as we progressed through the research that a focus on reduction of health inequalities in avoidable hospital admissions at a systems level was not a dominant aspect of people’s work. Health inequalities were viewed as a key part of the work but not necessarily examined together with avoidable admissions. A strengthened will to take action is reported, particularly around reducing health inequalities, but there were limited examples of action to explicitly reduce health inequalities in avoidable admissions. This gap in the systems thinking is important to highlight. When it was explicitly linked, upstream strategies and thinking were acknowledged as requirements to reduce health inequalities in avoidable emergency admissions.

Similar to our findings, other research have also found networks to be considered as the system’s backbone [ 30 ] as well as the recognition that communities need to be central to public health approaches [ 51 , 55 , 56 ]. Furthermore, this study highlighted the importance of understanding the local context by using local routine and bespoke intelligence. It demonstrated that population-based approaches to reduce health inequalities are complex, multi-dimensional and interconnected. It is not about one part of the system but how the whole system interlinks. The interconnectedness and interdependence of the system (and the relevant players/stakeholders) have been reported by other research [ 30 , 57 ], for example without effective exchange of knowledge and information, social networks and systems do not function optimally [ 30 ]. Previous research found that for systems to work effectively, management and transfer of knowledge needs to be collaborative [ 30 ], which was recognised in this case study as requiring action. By understanding the context, including the strengths and challenges, the support or action needed to overcome the barriers can be identified.

There are very limited number of case studies that explore health inequalities with a focus on hospital admissions. Of the existing research, only one part of the health system was considered with interviews looking at data trends [ 35 ]. To our knowledge, this research is the first to build on this evidence by encompassing the wider health system using wider-ranging interviews and documentary analysis. Ford et al. [ 35 ] found that geographical areas typically had plans to reduce total avoidable emergency admissions but not comprehensive plans to reduce health inequalities in avoidable emergency admissions. This approach may indeed widen health inequalities. Health inequalities have considerable health and costs impacts. Pertinently, the hospital care costs associated with socioeconomic inequalities being reported as £4.8 billion a year, mainly due to excess hospitalisations such as avoidable admissions [ 58 ] and the burden of disease lies disproportionately with our most disadvantaged communities, addressing inequalities in hospital pressures is required [ 25 , 26 ].

Implications for research and policy

Improvements to life expectancy have stalled in the UK with a widening of health inequalities [ 12 ]. Health inequalities are not inevitable; it is imperative that the health gap between the deprived and affluent areas is narrowed [ 12 ]. This research demonstrates the complexity and intertwining factors that are perceived to address health inequalities in an area. Despite the evidence of the cost (societal and individual) of avoidable admissions, explicit tackling of inequality in avoidable emergency admissions is not yet embedded into the system, therefore highlights an area for policy and action. This in-depth account and exploration of the characteristics of ‘whole systems’ working to address health inequalities, including where challenges remain, generated in this research will be instrumental for decision makers tasked with addressing health and care inequalities.

This research informs the next step of exploring each identified theme in more detail and moving beyond description to develop tools, using a suite of multidimensional and multidisciplinary methods, to investigate the effects of interventions on systems as previously highlighted by Rutter et al. [ 5 ].

Strengths and limitations

Documentary analysis is often used in health policy research but poorly described [ 44 ]. Furthermore, Yin reports that case study research is often criticised for not adhering to ‘systematic procedures’ p. 18 [ 41 ]. A clear strength of this study was the clearly defined boundary (in time and space) case as well as following a defined systematic approach, with critical thought and rationale provided at each stage [ 34 , 41 ]. A wide range and large number of documents were included as well as interviewees from across the system thereby resulting in a comprehensive case study. Integrating the analysis from two separate methodologies (interviews and documentary analysis), analysed separately before being combined, is also a strength to provide a coherent rich account [ 49 ]. We did not limit the reasons for hospital admission to enable a broad as possible perspective; this is likely to be a strength in this case study as this connection between health inequalities and avoidable hospital admissions was still infrequently made. However, for example, if a specific care pathway for a health condition had been highlighted by key informants this would have been explored.

Due to concerns about identifiability, we took several steps. These included providing a summary of the sectors that the interviewees and document were from but we were not able to specify which sectors each quote pertained. Additionally, some of the document quotes required paraphrasing. However, we followed a set process to ensure this was as rigorous as possible as described in the methods section. For example, where we were required to paraphrase, each paraphrased quote and original was shared and agreed with all the authors to reduce the likelihood to inadvertently misinterpreting or misquoting.

The themes are unlikely to represent an exhaustive list of the key elements requiring attention, but they represent the key themes that were identified using a robust methodological process. The results are from a single urban local authority with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage in the North of England which may limit generalisability to different contexts. However, the findings are still generalisable to theoretical considerations [ 41 ]. Attempts to integrate a case study with a known framework can result in ‘force-fit’ [ 34 ] which we avoided by developing our own framework (Fig. 1 ) considering other existing models [ 14 , 59 ]. The results are unable to establish causation, strength of association, or direction of influence [ 60 ] and disentangling conclusively what works versus what is thought to work is difficult. The documents’ contents may not represent exactly what occurs in reality, the degree to which plans are implemented or why variation may occur or how variation may affect what is found [ 43 , 61 ]. Further research, such as participatory or non-participatory observation, could address this gap.

Conclusions

This case study provides an in-depth exploration of how local areas are working to address health and care inequalities, with a focus on avoidable hospital admissions. Key elements of this system’s reported approach included fostering strategic coherence, cross-agency working, and community-asset based working. An area requiring action was viewed as the accessibility and analysis of data. Therefore, local areas could consider the challenges of data sharing across organisations as well as the organisational capacity and capability required to generate useful analysis in order to create meaningful insights to assist work to reduce health and care inequalities. This would lead to improved understanding of the context including where the key barriers lie for a local area. Addressing structural barriers and threats as well as supporting the training and wellbeing of the workforce are viewed as key to building resilience within a system to reduce health inequalities. Furthermore, more action is required to embed reducing health inequalities in avoidable admissions explicitly in local areas with inaction risking widening the health gap.

Availability of data and materials

Individual participants’ data that underlie the results reported in this article and a data dictionary defining each field in the set are available to investigators whose proposed use of the data has been approved by an independent review committee for work. Proposals should be directed to [email protected] to gain access, data requestors will need to sign a data access agreement. Such requests are decided on a case by case basis.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to our Understanding Factors that explain Avoidable hospital admission Inequalities - Research study (UNFAIR) PPI contributors, for their involvement in the project particularly in the identification of the key criteria for the sampling frame. Thanks to the research advisory team as well.

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This research was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), grant number (ref CA-CL-2018-04-ST2-010). The funding body was not involved in the study design, collection of data, inter-pretation, write-up, or submission for publication. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR, the Department of Health and Social Care or Newcastle University.

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Charlotte Parbery-Clark

Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Lorraine McSweeney

Senior Research Methodologist & Public Involvement Lead, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Joanne Lally

Senior Clinical Lecturer &, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Honorary Consultant in Public Health, Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

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Conceptualization - J.L. and S.S.; methodology - C.P.-C., J.L. & S.S.; formal analysis - C. P.-C. & L.M.; investigation- C. P.-C. & L.M., resources, writing of draft manuscript - C.P.-C.; review and editing manuscript L.M., J.L., & S.S.; visualization including figures and tables - C.P.-C.; supervision - J.L. & S.S.; project administration - L.M. & S.S.; funding acquisition - S.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Charlotte Parbery-Clark or Sarah Sowden .

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Parbery-Clark, C., McSweeney, L., Lally, J. et al. How can health systems approach reducing health inequalities? An in-depth qualitative case study in the UK. BMC Public Health 24 , 2168 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-19531-5

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