Providence Reflects on Marketing and Brand in a Digital World

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Original Publish Date: May 10, 2016

Karina Jennings is the Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing for Providence Health & Services. She leads the digital marketing organization at Providence as well as product marketing. Her team supports all consumer websites and the portals myProvidence and MyChart. Providence operates 34 hospitals, 600 physician clinics, a large health plan and various other health care businesses in Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington State.

Jeanne Chase Tiscareno of ChaseLane Consulting interviews her about digital marketing at Providence Health & Services in this exclusive article for the Healthcare News.

Jeanne: What are you offering to patients to improve health?

Karina: We are reimagining and simplifying the experience for people as they look for health care options and try to understand the health care system. In particular, we are addressing our provider directories and making sure people get the information they need to make service and provider decisions.

Our second goal is to streamline the consumer portals. Right now the patient entry points are separate. We aim to have patients access portals that have health insurance and medical record information together in one place: to have patients engage and understand what their doctor has recommended and be able to make appointments and communicate with their provider while also getting access to health plan information.

Over the last two years, a new team has formed at Providence – Digital Innovation – and they have been reimagining new tools and applications that can make health care information much more accessible using today’s technology. Through mobile applications and website experiences, patients will have ways to manage their health outside of the care environment, either before or after services are received. There are currently three pilots, one for new mom/maternity patients, another for joint replacement patients, and another for aging at home. We want to help patients stay healthy and live independently. We also want to reach out to people in new ways and allow them to manage their care and their lives in as easy a way as possible over time.

Jeanne: How is digital marketing permeating all of marketing within Providence?

Karina: There is no doubt that technology is changing the way we interact with consumers, build relationships, and market health care. We are midway through the process of looking at our marketing technology and how we can better deploy it within our organization to create personalized communications so we can be relevant at the right time for patients.

If you look at the history of health care marketing, mass media has been used for many years and the industry has put out very broad messages. Digital technology allows us to target and stay relevant to people in their moment of need. We are trying to really understand the journey of health care to help people access the right care at the right time.

Our aim is to simplify the experience of health care. It is so complex. Consumers want access when they want it, when they need it, and they want to know what is available to them at that moment in time. There is also a big push around convenience, particularly for primary care. For specialty services, consumers want to know what is available and the strength of the providers performing the services. There is a lot of information for us to provide to people, and we need to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for.

One of our biggest challenges is how we deliver consistent experiences on all online touch points and how they connect to the in-person touch points.

Jeanne: It’s a daunting task to simplify the digital experience. Where have you seen results?

Karina: There's definitely an aspirational element to it, and it requires us to review our marketing technology stack in a way that allows us to accomplish that. We have had success when launching new services such as Providence Express Care in Portland and Swedish Express Care in Seattle. In these retail clinics – a new model for us – we have freestanding locations, through the partnership with Walgreens. We developed this with a “mobile-first” approach to the experience.

In this case, the operations team had to look at the speed, quality, and timeliness of care that consumers are looking for. We opened our first location last October in Portland, and another in January. Then six additional sites opened in February. They are doing very well. We are seeing a high number of people scheduling online. There has been a lot of work inside the organization to make care seamless, accomplished by understanding the consumer and ensuring we build experiences from their perspective.

We are also now testing our ability to personalize communications as well as track and monitor our marketing. People who have expressed an interest or have gone to an educational seminar for a particular type of service can be targeted with more pertinent information. Hopefully this helps them to get to what they need more quickly. The ideas of personalization and dynamic content online are all things we are testing, evaluating, and implementing through our websites. We are seeing how they work, and if we are able to help people get what they need more quickly.

Jeanne: How is the digital landscape changing the whole notion of brand loyalty?

Karina: There is talk in the industry of brand loyalty as a differentiator in the future. If you look at health care today, there's a lot of vanilla out there. For the most part, health care organizations look and sound the same. There is not a lot of differentiation in terms of the messaging. We recognize that. We ask ourselves, "How do you break out?"

Finding a unique voice and providing a point of view, or reaching out in new ways, is something we are evaluating. Our view is that brand loyalty, at the end of the day, is really about relationships. Health care organizations like Providence have a wonderful opportunity to build relationships and strengthen those relationships over a lifetime. That is a tremendous opportunity, a tremendous obligation, and one that we know we can take better advantage of.

If you think about the digital world, the issues of convenience and access are really big forces. With the growth of primary care and of the physician organizations that have built up around the hospitals, the age of convenience and access definitely has become bigger for us. We look at it and say, "Let's start with the basics. We need to be found and connect people to the care they need when they need it."

Health care is not a product or a service that people typically use every day. It is something that you buy when you need it. That is why it is important to get search engine optimization right and search engine marketing for local listings. We need to be found at the time of need.

We also want to be personal and deepen relationships between the episodes of care. There are definitely times in a person's life when they need care, and then there are times when they are just looking to be healthy. We are looking at how we can help people be healthier through services, information, or classes. Through email marketing programs and personalized web experiences, we are helping people find the information and connect with providers. We are looking to partner with fitness organizations or nutrition services for people who are looking to stay healthy.

We want to help people find the information quickly, make appointments, and interact online. There is still a lot of the health care industry that is based on a phone call or, heaven forbid, a fax. There is a lot of opportunity to help people execute on their transactions more easily.

If we think about health care as a brand, it is about the care experience, and we feel if we can make the complex health system simpler and easier to use, we will gain loyalty. There are a lot of very, very challenging experiences for patients right now, and we are looking at strengthening our brands and using the power of digital technology to make healthcare easier.

Jeanne Chase Tiscareno is a marketing consultant that has spent significant time working for providers such as PeaceHealth, Swedish, Providence, and UW Medicine. Her work has taken her into technology and services businesses with clients such as Microsoft, Accenture, Ernst and Young, KPMG, IBM, Cisco, Verizon, and SAP. Jeanne can be reached at 206-799-2746 or jeanne@chaselaneconsulting.com