Dec. 24, 2007 at 1:28pm

Saving lives, the ultimate metric

Posted by Kathleen Deakins in Declassified, Measurement
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How was your day today, dear? Great, I saved a life.

Not too many marketing or communications professionals can make that claim – or could we? Imagine if we decided our job was to save lives. Here are three ways you can do just that.

1. Increase hand washing among providers. Busy nurses, doctors and other providers don’t always wash their hands before each patient contact, contributing to the deaths of nearly 90,000 hospital patients per year and $4.5 billion in medical expenses, according to the Hand Hygiene Resource Center. The Washington State Hospital Association thought effective internal marketing could make a difference. WSHA tested in-hospital patient-safety campaigns. Among the findings: patients were reluctant to “challenge” their doctors to wash their hands, but patients were receptive to posters visible to providers and visitors encouraging guests to wash hands. Engaging visuals, careful messages and sound market research might make the difference in adopting lifesaving behavior.

2. Help boards uphold quality goals. Board members without clinical backgrounds might find safety and quality data unintelligible. That makes it tough for them to influence quality performance. We can help by presenting data simply and graphically with brief plain-language analysis – in the same format, meeting to meeting. The more they understand, the better discussions they can have at board meetings. Alice Gosfield, JD, and James Reinertsen, MD, writing in HHN Magazine, recommend focusing on “Are we getting better?” rather than on “How good are we?” to help overcome physician resistance to specific performance measures. And imagine how much more effective presentations to the board could be if public relations and marketing staff coached the presenters during a practice session.

3. Educate patients who are not health literate so they can better care for themselves. The Center on an Aging Society estimates low health literacy skills increase annual health care expenditures by $73 billion. If you have asthma and you can’t read, chances are you don’t use your inhaler properly, according to one study. Authors Michael Villaire and Gloria Mayer, writing in Trustee Magazine, recommend writing to a fifth-grade level with ample graphics, white space and subheads – good advice for communicating to all patients. (And don’t overlook the need for patient-education materials in languages other than English.) The authors also have important advice for talking with patients. Don’t ask, “Do you understand?” or risk shaming the poor reader or patient unfamiliar with medical terms. Better to say, “I want to make sure I’ve done a good job communicating with you. Can you tell me now, in your own words, how you are going to do X?”

Saving lives. Now that’s ROI on your public relations and marketing budget.

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