The Backstory

Do you know your local FBI agent? You should. John Mason is SVP and CIO at Quorum Health. He joined Reed Smith, our VP of Digital, here at the office to talk about healthcare cybersecurity. In this conversation, John and Reed discuss: Myths and misconceptions about healthcare cybersecurity and data breaches Who within a healthcare organization is responsible for dealing with cybersecurity incident...

Jarrard Inc. has had the great privilege of working with Faith Family Medical Center for the past couple of years. They are a community clinic with a mission to provide the residents of greater Nashville who are uninsured or underinsured with affordable, quality primary medical care. While the numbers don’t come close to describing the impact of their work on people from across middle Tennessee, y...

The end of life can teach us a lot about leading in high-stakes situations. Dr. Michael Fratkin was a burned-out palliative care physician in an under-resourced clinical setting. Fed up with the way things were going, he “had enough crazy or coffee” in him five years ago to step out of the typical healthcare box and build something new. The result was Resolution Care Network, a palliative care org...

Who knew a whiteboard cartoon character could change a hundred-year old organization… and the way people think about population health? Through both careful listening and clever storytelling, St. Luke’s Health System, an eight hospital, 200-clinic healthcare system based in Boise, Idaho, figured it out. And a simple solution is moving the health of an entire community. Learn more about your ad cho...

When Dr. David Pate retires at the end of January 2020, he will have led St. Luke’s Health System for a decade. During that time, the organization has undergone radical change and plenty of garden-variety change. Like any healthcare executive, Pate has been in the middle of constant evolution, making hard decisions on how to transform the organization and position it for a future built on value an...

Last week, several hospital groups filed lawsuits against HHS around the agency’s rule stating that payers and providers must reveal their negotiated rates. That rule was designed as part of the current administration’s push for price transparency. There’s been lots of excellent discussion about the lawsuits, and whether HHS even has the authority to create a rule forcing transparency around priva...

This idea that healthcare is doing digital marketing is absurd. Hospitals and health systems are just doing marketing. The execution may be digital, it may be traditional. And the weight of one or the other will be based on whom you’re trying to communicate with and your goals and resources. But it’s all just marketing. It’s not that we shouldn’t have subject matter expertise within a hospital mar...

Worrying about what people outside your hospital or health system think about you is important. Just as important? Ensuring your staff, clinicians and hospital leadership are on the same page. Done right, strong internal communications and message training will build a group of powerful advocates for your healthcare organization. Done wrong, they'll either be passive bystanders or - worse - devast...

When it comes to healthcare, everyone’s talking about care team collaboration. But that’s not the only place where hospitals need to focus on team dynamics. As our colleague Reed Smith has noted repeatedly, marcom departments have historically been distant from other groups within a hospital or health system. Marketers have been back in the corner, executing campaigns and measuring what they can w...

You can’t underestimate the power of one person’s healthcare story. Aaron Campbell, CPXP, leads Jarrard Inc’s Patient Experience work. Here, he talks about three things chief experience officers, CEOs and other leaders at hospitals and health systems can do to communicate more effectively, gain the trust of patients and caregivers, and improve the patient experience. While Campbell spends his prof...

Your hospital’s reputation is some of your most valuable currency. You have to monitor it, manage it and maintain it well. Leave it alone and things will be said about your facility that you won’t like. To that end, we recently hosted Aaron Clifford, SVP of Marketing at Binary Fountain, at the Barn for a firm-wide lunch-and-learn After Clifford’s talk – and some great barbecue – he and our VP of D...

Headlines about hospitals in hot water over their financial assistance policies abound, and health system executives are looking around wondering if they’re going to be next. In an earlier post, we outlined five steps you can take today to prevent your organization from being on the receiving end of negative attention regarding your collections and financial assistance policy (or at least being pr...

The stories are everywhere: Health systems using collection agencies and the courts to receive payment for care provided to patients. Are you prepared? Possibly not. You’re working on multiple fronts – helping a complex health system succeed and serving patients as well as you can, including those having trouble with bills. But getting ready is worthy of your time. It’ll take some detective work....

The latest edition of our book Healthcare Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships: An Insider’s Guide to Communications has just been published by HealthLeaders. Just in time. So much has changed since the first edition was released in 2013 yet the need for clear, compelling communications and smart relationship management has never been more timely. Organizations that provide care – who touch pat...

The cold truth: The average tenure of a hospital CEO is somewhere around four years. That’s right, just four years. And the process of replacing a CEO for a health system of any size is no easy feat. A recent study cited by HealthLeaders* found that half of hospitals and health systems lack a formal CEO succession plan. Knowing that, we’d safely bet that – beyond the obvious introductions – robust...

Each year we’ve seen an evolution at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network Conference that mirrors the evolution of the digital healthcare field. In the early days, if you look at it like the Gartner hype cycle, there was a big spike of amazement. Everybody was excited. Then everybody got depressed when Facebook’s algorithms changed, and marketing plans went out the window. Now we’re getting back t...

We answer the questions healthcare leaders are asking. High Stakes offers concise takes on the issues affecting healthcare providers today: strategic positioning, issue navigation, change management. mergers and acquisitions, marketing, digital transformation, patient experience, executive leadership and healthcare governance, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...