Viewing health system marketing as a revenue driver

Salt Lake City - Eric Steinberger has sought to help reimagine the role of marketing in a health system.

Steinberger is the vice president and chief marketing officer of Atlantic Health, which operates six acute care hospitals, a children’s hospital and more than 500 healthcare locations in New Jersey.

He spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the changing role of marketing at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit.

He says part of his goal is trying to change marketing “from this idea of a cost center to really being a revenue driver.”

At Atlantic Health, Steinberger talked about the efforts to get more data to help devise better ways to connect with patients and help them access care more easily. He says the goal has been to build a 360-degree view of patients to deliver more personalized care messages and to help drive better outcomes.

He also says he is working to help Atlantic Health to see a broader role for marketing.

“The biggest thing I'm focused on is creating a cultural change in the organization,” Steinberger says.

“I think there's still very much a legacy mindset that if your job title is marketing, you're the guy, or the female, who buys the billboards and works on the creative and comes up with that, you know, snappy tagline that we're all gonna love, and handles all our debates about logos,” he continues.

Steinberger says marketing certainly still involves building brand reputation and relevance.

But he says it’s time to view marketing as “a measurable engine for growth, an economic engine for growth.”

As Steinberger says, “How do you think about communication and engagement from a marketing landscape as a way to build the experience that both consumers want and will make our physician and administrative staff's lives easier? And today marketing has all the people with the skill sets to contribute to that. There's many other multifunctional teams that need to be a part of building that, but we have a very specific set of skills.”

Steinberger says he has worked to help get more data to help improve the patient journey and make it easier to access the system. He described it as a painstaking but invaluable effort with great partnerships and detailed conversations.

“If I don't have visibility, I'm blind … Literally everything just becomes an opinion. Do you think this worked? I don't know,” Steinberger says.

“It's a never-ending journey. We have a true north, but we're always going to find ways to use data in cleaner and better ways. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and that's what paralyzes a lot of people,” he says.

In getting better data to help improve scheduling systems, Steinberger says Atlantic Health uncovered capacity that wasn’t being utilized. And that’s critical, with many people waiting to get appointments.

“The very act of cleaning up the data before we even turned any marketing spend on drove volume up,” Steinberger says. “Because we were already sending people to the site who couldn't find appointments, but now we had more availability. And then we turned the marketing engine on, and then we get more of the inventory flowing through.

“And our system is now essentially an engine. They're marrying capacity at practices, specialty, individual doctor level, to marketing that's happening out there, geo-located to people searching for that care, who are within five miles, or would go to a location like that, and only advertising when we have that availability. Otherwise you're just wasting money,” he says.

Atlantic Health has also incorporated AI into more of its efforts to reach patients.

The system has begun using AI-based call agents to confirm appointments and go over information with patients to make sure they are prepared. Atlantic started with colonoscopy patients to ensure that they knew what they needed before appointments and to avoid cancellations. If a patient shows up for a colonoscopy without the proper prep, the patient gets frustrated and the organization also loses a slot that could have gone to someone else.

Atlantic is expanding call agents for other procedures after finding good results with colonoscopy appointments.

“It's improved compliance rates, so more patients are showing up getting the care they need, and it's freed up operational staff to focus on actually real work that can deliver care to patients, and not the administrative stuff that they don't want to spend, that no one wants to spend their time on,” Steinberger says. “And so that's one example of a big success.”