Several people from Greystone.Net attended the 21st Annual Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit in Chicago earlier this week. From all reports, the conference was a success – and the weather was fabulous, too!
We asked Kathy Divis, Mike Schneider, Farrah Hunt-Thompson and Megan Wellborn for their key takeaways from the conference. Their feedback:
- The attendee group is growing in both raw numbers and level of sophistication. Fun to connect with old friends and make new ones, and just see the vibrancy of the industry.
- There was a high number of very thoughtful and insightful presentations with a high level of educational content.
- The level of expertise in the exhibit hall was impressive, as is the diversity of the vendors who are supporting the industry.
- Watson by IBM will be huge for healthcare. It has the potential to change the speed and accuracy of healthcare decisions.
- At times “human moments,” or honest mistakes, can be explained by satire instead of defended with a logical argument. In healthcare, this will not always be possible but it is a method that can be utilized in moments of crisis response.
- Website customers are more responsive when the content speaks to the patient’s point of view, versus talking to patients from the institution’s point of view.
- Integrating your digital/social strategy with the rest of your strategy.
- CRM is very much on the minds of most healthcare marketers. In particular, organizations seem to be struggling with choosing the right tools, identifying ways to get the most out of their CRMs and leveraging CRM with limited resources. They see huge potential from CRM, but they have finite resources and are trying hard to identify which things to tackle vs. what to leave on the table because they cannot do it all and do it all well. It seems like CRM will remain a hot topic for years to come and hospitals are looking for a good replicable model and case studies to learn from.
- Organizations seem to be struggling with how to tackle Marketing Automation. It seems to be very early in the game for marketing automation, and a few hospitals seem to be digging in, but most of the people we talked to are just now getting MA on their radar and trying to get an understanding of the vendors, their options, how to budget for it and how to implement it.
- Content Strategy has been out there for a while, but it remains a very hot topic. Most organizations seem to really be struggling with the volume of content that their digital footprint requires and they feel like they can’t keep up. They are looking for guidance on what content will give them the greatest marketing and brand exposure and what content are their digital visitors looking for.
- Compared to other years, it feels like digital metrics and analytics are ramping up. There were several presentations and a lot of providers who are now generating pretty sophisticated data for internal constituents demonstrating the value of their efforts. It seems that CRM is to be thanked for the mounds of data coming out, but the demand for data will only continue to rise.
- And finally: Who knew Chicago weather could be so perfect!