Pitching Perfect: PR Advice in Healthcare

This past Tuesday we had the opportunity to sit in on Cision’s “Pitch Smart: Media Outreach” webinar by PR expert Michael Smart. In 60 minutes, punctuated by success stories and a brief Q/A session, Michael shared his top tips and tricks for effectively pitching to the media. These pieces of PR advice work in health care as well. For those of you who missed it, I will highlight and summarize a few of Michael’s pearls of wisdom.

Ever blunt, Michael cut right to the chase beginning the webinar by stating a few bleak facts about media pitching that we already know.

• Journalists and bloggers are incredibly swamped, so they’ve got less and less time to spend listening to pitches.
• Traditional approaches to media relations simply don’t work anymore.
• Sending the same pitch to your entire media list is less effective than ever before.

Given this information, it’s clear that it is our job as PR professionals to find new and exciting ways to frame “boring” stories if we want them to get picked up by the media. Michael pointed out that exploiting pop culture and using compelling content are the two most effective ways of adding value and flair to your story, thus increasing its likelihood of getting picked up by the media.

He used his past work for Brigham Young University as an example, where he took a story about BYU mathletes and turned it into a viral sensation. He did this by creating a rap video comparing the mathletes to BYU’s D1 basketball team, just as March Madness kicked off. The video linked a program that many people viewed as boring to both BYU’s successful sports team and a popular nationwide college event. Those things combined made more successful than BYU could ever have dreamed.

For most companies, however, trying to make your stories more exciting isn’t always enough to get them picked up by the media. Most companies—like ours—rely heavily on the pitch, which is why it’s so crucial that we do everything we can to perfect it.

According to Michael, good pitching revolves around something called the “80/20 Principle”, which basically states that you should spend 80% of your pitch time on the top 20% of your media list. If you’re a company that reaches out to more than 10 media contacts at a time, it’s unrealistic to think that you can devote the time and manpower necessary to customize each individual pitch. Taking this into consideration, you should select the top 20% of your media contacts and focus the majority of your time on fully customizing their pitches. For the next 30% of your media contacts it’s ok to decrease the amount of customization in your pitch, and for the bottom 50% of your media contacts it’s alright to use minimal customization when pitching.

If you’re having trouble figuring out who should be included in the top 20% of your media contacts, there are a few different things you can look for. Keep in mind your target audiences. Try to determine what types of media they’re consuming and the outlets that frequently reach them. Also, try to remember that at the end of the day, it’s all about the Benjamin’s where you’ll get your best ROI. All media relationships, specifically those in your top 20%, should either consistently drive revenue or drive valuation. These are important things to remember when trying to rank your media contacts.

Michael went on to describe exactly how PR professionals can customize their pitches. When pitching to your top 20%, make sure you do your research. Find out what industry they’re in, get to know their personal interests, go through and actually read their past work. The more you know about a media contact, the easier it will be to find ways of customizing your pitch specifically for them. As a rule, you should be both specific and sincere when pitching. Don’t just say, “I noticed you cover industry events”. Dig deeper. Actually read and reference their former work or their personal interests while finding a way to tie it to either yourself or your story. Forging these personal connections can help increase a media contact’s likelihood of picking up your story.

Michael also touched on the appropriate amount of information that should be in your pitch. If you’re pitching to someone at a top-tier organization such as The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal , make sure to keep your pitch short and sweet, giving just enough information to catch their attention. If your media contact is older he suggests ending with “would you like more information?” and if you’re pitching to a younger reporter then you’re better off ending with a link instead.

In closing, he leaves us with a few additional pieces of advice:

• Don’t pitch over social media
• Start following potential media contacts early, but never friend them on Facebook
• After pitching to someone, wait 24 hours before a response and then follow up if you don’t get one

Keeping this advice in mind, here are a few takeaways and tips:

• Find ways to reference pop culture and current events.
• Exercise the “80/20 Principle”.
• Follow the customization formula.
• Ensure that you include the appropriate amount of information in your pitches.

These are all smart ways to improve the quality of your overall pitch, give you a leg up on your competition and increase your chances of getting your story picked up by the media. We’re not sure if there will ever be a formula for “the perfect pitch”, but we think Michael Smart has definitely given us a great framework. The rest is up to you!

Transforming The Radiologist’s Role In Health Care

With 2014 coming to a close, many practices, hospitals and physician groups will be discussing what they can do to improve patient satisfaction and grow their businesses in 2015. They will be discussing the allocation of dollars in their marketing budget, launching new campaigns, making administration changes even focusing on company culture in order to see improvement. One Ohio hospital and their radiology group had a different idea.  These two groups recognized that bringing specialists, like radiologists, on as members of a hospital’s team could help improve patient satisfaction and care coordination, ultimately growing the hospital’s business.

Aultman Hospital in Canton, Ohio’s CEO Christopher Remark commented on their decision saying, “We really felt that we had an opportunity to do something different because it was right in the heat of health care reform.” The reality of that statement is that radiologists have the opportunity to truly transform their role in the care process. Radiologists can become a part of this new healthcare landscape, something they will need to do to combat decreased reimbursement and utilization.

In hospitals like Aultman Hospital, an agreement to co-mange the radiology service line helped both parties to achieve their goals, grow their market presence and improve service-lines.

In other independent settings, radiologists have the opportunity to step up to the plate in other ways. One huge opportunity for radiologists is in the marketing of their centers. Finding an opportunity for the radiologist to go out with the physician relations representative to communicate with the referring community could make a huge difference in referrals. Additionally, there is a chance for radiologists to come out of the dark and be the faces of their practices without having to meet with the community face-to-face with video marketing.  Social Media marketing also gives physicians the opportunity to get more involved in the industry as thought-leaders. Participating in tweet chats or webinars for instance, is a great way for radiologists to make a name for themselves in their industry but also in their community.

So challenge your radiologists in 2015, to transform their role in the care your organization delivers. You might just be surprised by what they can help you achieve!

Peeling Away Health Care’s Sticker Shock

We loved this article by Andy Grove on Wired Magazines website from last month. If you didn’t get the chance to read it then, we’re giving you another chance!

Original Article by Andy Grove on 10/16/12 from Wired.com: Peeling Away Health Care’s Sticker Shock

 In the early 1950s, it was nearly impossible to know the value of an automobile. They had prices, yes, but these would differ radically from dealer to dealer, the customer a pawn in the hands of the seller. This all changed in 1958, when US senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma shepherded a bill through Congress requiring that official pricing information be glued to the window of every new automobile sold in the US. The “Monroney sticker,” as it came to be known, has been with us ever since. It became an effective means of disclosing the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, or MSRP, and a billboard for other data disclosures to the consumer: the car’s fuel economy, its environmental rating, and so on.

The sticker price was one of the triumphs of consumer-rights legislation and has made buying a car an easier—though never altogether easy—experience. What’s more, window stickers made automobile pricing rational and understandable. A customer who knows the base price going in will expect more value coming out. In economic terms, the sticker turned a failed market flummoxed by information asymmetry into something resembling a functioning, price-driven marketplace.

If there is ever an industry in need of a Senator Monroney today, it is health care, in which 1950s-era thinking still rules the day, and irrational and inexplicable pricing is routine. The health care industry plays a gigantic game of Blind Man’s Bluff, keeping patients in the dark while asking them to make life-and-death decisions. The odds that they will make the best choice are negligible and largely depend on chance. Patients need to have data, including costs and their own medical histories, liberated and made freely available for thorough analysis. What health care needs is a window sticker—a transparent, good-faith effort at making prices clear and setting market forces to work.

Exploding Health Care Costs

Since 1987, US health care spending per capita has more than doubled, and the cost borne by patients continues to rise.

Chart design: Luke Shuman
Sources: Archives of Internal Medicine, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

How bad is it? Uwe Reinhardt, a leading health care economist, described the pricing of hospital services as “chaos behind a veil of secrecy.” Chaos due to lack of predictability; veil of secrecy because many organizations take a proprietary attitude toward data.

Consider a recent study of the costs of routine appendectomies performed throughout California. Though the procedures were largely identical, the charges varied more than 100-fold—from $1,529 at the cheapest to $182,955 at the most expensive.

What accounted for this bizarre spread? Good question—but efforts to discover the answer turned out to be futile. Although the research highlighted how large the bills for these hospitalizations were, various costs were declared to be trade secrets. The providers (i.e., the hospitals) and insurers involved in the study would not share how much the insurers actually paid for the visits, only what the providers charged. To me, understanding the logic here requires a chain of reasoning that could appear only in Alice in Wonderland. We don’t just need an MSRP sticker—we need a medical Freedom of Information Act!

In business, as time goes on, weak industry participants will try to improve their status, and, of course, incumbents will attempt to protect their positions. Two common ways of imposing or maintaining market power are by forming coalitions or by outright acquisitions, and that’s what has happened in medicine. Consolidation among health care providers has resulted in a number of large organizations becoming even more powerful as they’ve started to use their size and reach. And they’ve wielded this power to keep a lid on some of the information that would make for better health care.

The past several decades have seen major strides in technology of all kinds. Improvements in semiconductors have allowed faster computation and communications, as well as the construction of databases that outdo themselves every year. In many industries, technology development has spurred further improvements in efficiency—a virtuous cycle. In health care, this process is happening at a much slower rate. It has taken decades to complete even relatively simple tasks such as digitizing medical records.

Out-of-Reach Insurance

As the number of uninsured Americans has risen (today more than 15 percent lack coverage), basic care has become out of more people’s reach. This means that costs like additional emergency room visits must be borne by the rest of the population.

Chart design: Luke Shuman
Source: US Census Bureau

What’s more, in most industries technology has served to automate processes and reduce costs. At Intel, we worked to introduce and deploy technologies in a variety of industries. The most difficult to penetrate was the field of medicine. The paradox of health care is that technology has driven costs higher. In fact, half of the increase in medical spending is related to the deployment of new medical technologies.

Part of the problem has been due to well-established prejudices. Consider a recent encounter: A friend of mine, a professor at a major medical school who is in charge of the clinical training of doctors, described a spirited exchange with his students about their choice of a psychoactive drug. There are many such medications. Generic versions apparently show no significant difference in efficacy from newer, branded drugs. An FDA review published in 2009 confirmed this. However, they do show huge differences in cost, with the new medications, by virtue of their patent protection, being much more expensive. Try as he might, my friend could not persuade the residents to prescribe any of the older, less expensive alternatives. The residents insisted that if a new drug was available, even at a much higher price, it would be unethical to not use it.

Investment patterns in health care reinforce this tendency. The largest single spender on medical research and technologies development—more than $30 billion annually—is the National Institutes of Health. Though NIH emphasis has been on new research, not cost, it has made some effort to address the issue. In 2000, a new agency, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, was created to exploit emerging technologies with an eye toward economic benefit. But this effort has been largely marginal and is under constant attack by vested interests: The 2013 fiscal year budget currently circulating in the House of Representatives, for instance, would limit pragmatic funding throughout the NIH.

This cultural bias being baked into policy is not new. In 2009 Congress approved funds aimed at identifying the comparative effectiveness of various treatments. But language opening the door to “comparative cost-effectiveness” was deemed too radical and was cut from the bill. That’s like comparing the performance of a Ferrari to a Kia without knowing which one costs more.

Widely Varying Fees

The price charged for any given medical procedure seems to defy logic. For example, a 2009 study found that the amount billed in nearly 20,000 uncomplicated appendectomy cases in California ranged from less than $2,000 to close to $200,000.

Chart design: Luke Shuman
Sources: Archives of Internal Medicine, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In a transparent health care market, pricing and other patient data can be consolidated and analyzed to yield new insights. A previous head of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Leslie Michelson, once said that every clinical examination contains the elements of a clinical trial. “Life itself is the greatest clinical trial of them all,” he said. “It’s just a little too big.” But new database tools could speed up the processing of information and allow a clinician to gain useful information from a single patient—in real time. Managing comparisons of data matrices, unthinkable just a few years ago, is entirely practical today. With computers developed for this purpose, correlations could be analyzed, relationships between diseases and treatments studied, and individual treatments generated. In short, the “blinded” patient would benefit from technology, with results much more easily obtained. Meanwhile, every new patient changes the database by adding real-life data elements to the collection. The resulting “digital sticker” would play a major role in bringing order to chaos. It could potentially have just as much impact on the health care business as the MSRP had on the automotive business.

This opportunity will flourish only if a new mindset spreads throughout the health care industry, starting with doctors. The use of new technology, its cost and deployment, all must be taken as seriously as the technology itself. Today it is not. I have particular interest in the nascent discipline of translational medicine, which moves discoveries from the proverbial lab to the bedside. I helped initiate one such effort in this field: a graduate program offered jointly by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. The curriculum took off in record time, but disappointingly 91 percent of the students registering for it are engineers and scientists, not doctors. This limits the special value of this effort.

The health care business is about patients. But the patient population has been largely powerless and remains so even as the members of the medical community—hospital chains, nationwide insurers, large employers—have become much more powerful. Over time, the patient—the raison d’être of the health care business—has been reduced to merely another raw material.

This should not last. What technology can do is change the game—change the basis of competition, change what it takes to win in the health care marketplace. In time, some players will compete better than others by making good use of technology. In this competitive environment, patient use of the available pertinent information, with all its benefits, is going to be critical, giving them more economic power. They will likely demand to know more about their various conditions and what their dollars are being spent on. That’s how American consumers have always operated, and I predict they will here as well.

But what they’ll need is transparency in treatment, cost, and institutions—in other words, a digital sticker. Getting that transparency has to be Job One.

Andy Grove, senior adviser to Intel, was the company’s chief executive officer or chair from 1987 until 2005.