What does Authentic Healthcare Marketing mean in the context of payor/provider issues?
We recently published Unlock’s first book, Authentic Healthcare Marketing: Build Trust, Engage Patients, and Succeed in the Post-Truth Era, and it’s important to carefully consider how the book’s principles apply to the difficult situations that emerge from contract negotiations between payors and healthcare providers. While the book was written primarily for marketing executives who are building brands and acquiring patients, the subject matter could not be more relevant to the complex and difficult issues that plague health systems every few years.
What does Authentic Healthcare marketing mean in this context? How do we help people understand how to deal with a contract dispute and a trusted hospital or healthcare provider forced out of network?
We identified four elements of Authentic Healthcare Marketing, and you will quickly see how this filter applies to payor/provider issues:
“Does it speak a human truth to our audience?”
“Is it meaningful for our audience?”
“Is it believable?”
“Can our audience trust this?”
Payor/provider issues are absolutely meaningful to patients and employers, and the human truth is real — if a contract expires, access is impacted. Appointments get cancelled, surgeries get delayed, people become terrified of big out-of-network bills. People are scared of uncertainty, they don’t understand health insurance, and they are afraid of their insurance company.
Applying all Authentic Healthcare Marketing principles to payor/provider issues meets people where they are, it helps them understand why this is happening, and it helps them understand how to advocate for themselves and the quality of their insurance coverage. The right payor/provider campaign empowers patients and employers to stand up for themselves and protect access to the physicians and hospitals they trust and rely on.
We understand that talking about financial issues feels foreign and awkward, and talking about contract negotiations can be even more so. Yet an authentic approach means leaning-in to this awkwardness, both because we owe it to the people we serve but also because we know it works. It helps get these issues resolved faster than when they are handled quietly behind closed doors.
The authentic approach means acknowledging that access can be impacted without a new contract, and it also means acknowledging that self-insured employers could pay more for certain services. Yet it’s also critical to put any impacts into context, explain the priorities we are funding with any rate increases, and why they are necessary.
Ultimately, Authentic Healthcare Marketing means crafting and communicating your healthcare brand’s message, so it is genuinely rooted in your mission, values, and strategy. The goal is to help the right audience connect with, believe in, and trust your message so people can connect to the care they need to improve their lives.
Authentic Healthcare Marketing focuses on helping people know and believe the right things, make better choices, and ultimately live out better health behaviors. Nowhere is this more true than in payor/provider contract issues.
