Health system marketing chiefs have been increasingly adding "experience" to their titles, reflecting a shift in healthcare toward a more consumer-friendly approach prevalent in other industries.
Marketing leaders from some of the biggest health systems in the country told Becker's they've been taking on patient experience duties or incorporating "consumer" or "customer" into their monikers as the executives aim to follow patients through their entire care journeys.
"We at Advocate Health have Disney guests, Delta passengers and Amazon shoppers who all engage with us — and increasingly the expectations coming from other fields of your life are coming into healthcare," said Kevan Mabbutt, chief marketing, communications and consumer experience officer of Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health. "We've got to continue to recognize that and to continue to raise the bar, not least because some of those organizations, of course, are coming into healthcare."
Tanya Andreadis, chief marketing officer and vice president of patient engagement at Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine, said it's cheaper for health systems to retain patients by providing a good experience than spending money on marketing to attract new ones.
"At least 40%-50% of what we do is try to drive the right patients into the right setting of care," she said. "And we can't be successful in that if — after they're driven into our doors — the experience isn't positive all the way through to when they actually come in and see someone."
Enhancing patient engagement is "better for the people. It's better for us as a business. And it just makes good sense," she added.
Ms. Andreadis was an associate chief marketing officer for Penn Medicine starting in the early 2010s before leaving to become marketing chief at Los Angeles-based UCLA Health in 2018. One thing that brought her back was the opportunity to take on patient experience.
"They actually made this a much more formal role, which was this joint marketing-and-patient-engagement hat at a C-level," she said. "It was more official now that in the role you were not just responsible for the traditional things that marketing people do, like brand and patient acquisition. You are also responsible for patient experience and how people experience our brand. And that's why I was really honestly so excited to come back and help execute on that work."
Several months after she became chief marketing and communications officer of Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health, Julie Spencer Washington's CEO asked her to take on patient experience duties (the experience chief had recently departed). Ms. Spencer Washington thought it would be a natural fit.
"I'm over here with the megaphone telling you, 'Trinity Health will do this,'" she said. "Who better than the person who told you what we would do to ensure that we deliver on what I said we would do?"
From the time she joined Trinity, Ms. Spencer Washington worked with fellow C-suite leaders like the CIO and chief clinical officer, so she had a good feel for patient experience strategy, already.
"Knowing the two of them actually helped with the transition. It wasn't a shock to the system, because I was already talking to them as the mar-comm leader," she said. "So when I then added the experience piece I was connecting dots to our EHR platform, to how we were doing online scheduling, because I already knew those leaders and what their cadence was around tools and solutions."
The marketing chiefs say they expect more of their counterparts to become responsible for consumer experience as the industry keeps meeting patients where they're at.
"If you think about where healthcare is going, we continue to compete on slimmer margins, to take on the challenge of new entrants, and to figure out models based upon value, population health, care at home, virtual health, wellness," Mr. Mabbutt said. "And to do that, it's really no longer a game of 'build it and they will come.'
"We have to understand consumer behaviors, expectations in these new spaces, and then figure out how to create the right experience, which will likely be different from the experience of healthcare traditionally. I think this is natural work for marketing to take the lead on in partnership with clinicians, operators, patient experience departments, IT, and so on."