Mass General Brigham works to understand changing patient behavior

Salt Lake City - Mark Bohen says he wants to understand consumer behavior.

Bohen, the chief marketing and communications officer of Mass General Brigham, says that the system is placing a lot of emphasis on the consumer and the patient. He spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit earlier this month.

“Consumer behavior is always changing, and I like to focus on the changing consumer and understand consumer insights,” Bohen says.

Mass General Brigham is placing a lot of emphasis on how consumer behavior is changing with new digital and AI tools.

“We've innovated a lot in our value chain to drive new patients into our programs at Mass General Brigham, so there are a lot of steps in that value chain, and in each area there's opportunity to innovate and get better,” Bohen says.

“For example, in the upfront parts of the value chain, there's lots of opportunity to think about how we get better at segmenting, how we listen to patients and gather insights, and use those insights for growth, how we target patients for particular programs. So we've done a lot of good work in that area, in particular,” he says.

• Read more: Mass General Brigham’s strategy is enabled by AI

To be sure, many patients seek out Mass General Brigham to get cutting-edge care, Bohen notes.

“Mass General Brigham has the largest health system-based research organization in the country, and the amount of medical and scientific discoveries that come out of our research organization is unbelievable,” Bohen says.

“When you come to Mass General Brigham, whether it's for something very routine or life-saving treatment or very complex treatment, you know you're getting care that's informed by the latest research,” he adds.

Even with Mass General Brigham’s reputation as a leading institution, the system faces competition in the Boston area. Bohen says the system focuses less on its rivals and more on patients.

“There are a lot of health systems who offer good care,” Bohen says. “We think more, much more about the patient than we do about the competition. That's been something that I've always thought about since early on in my career. If you focus more on the consumer needs, the jobs that need to be done, you tend to get better performance than if you only focus on the competition.”

Like other systems, Mass General Brighmam sees increasing financial pressure, particularly with rising operating costs that have been a fact of life since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Post pandemic, everyone has seen their expenses rise a lot faster than their revenue, which is putting a lot of pressure on everyone,” Bohen says. “In marketing communications, we are good financial stewards of the organization, so we make good decisions with respect to how we spend the money, but I think more importantly, we focus on what are the opportunities. If you only focus on dealing with the financial pressure and not the opportunities you're going to miss out. So we focus on a lot of opportunities where we can grow the organization as well.”

Mass General Brigham is also launching a new consumer-facing website in June. He says the site has been designed to meet the needs of people using search engines and the growing number of people who are using AI tools for answers to questions.

“It's optimized for SEO, but it's also optimized for AI search, and we know a lot more people are looking for AI-generated search results,” Bohen says. “And so, like many healthcare organizations, we're seeing fewer people go to the front door of the website. They're entering using their AI search results, and looking to do a particular task, so really focusing on what the consumer or the patient is looking to do, and helping them do that is what we're focused on.”

Bohen draws on lessons from earlier in his career, when he worked in consumer packaged goods.

“What gets drilled into your head when you're in the consumer packaged goods role and managing a consumer brand is understanding the consumer,” he says.

Bohen also cites lessons from Vijay Vinderrajan, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. He points to Vinderrajan’s “simple but powerful” framework: manage the present; selectively forget the past; and create the future.

“We brought that framework here to Mass General Brigham, and we're using it right now to innovate in a number of ways,” Bohen says.