|  Scott Regan

If you toss and turn at night wondering about the strength of your brand, well, you probably should. There are a handful of organizations shaping your brand, whether you know it or not. And if you pretend that the big four reporting organizations – CMS, HealthGrades, The Joint Commission, and Leapfrog – aren’t having a public impact, then your brand gets what it deserves.

Our research over the past three years has identified eight primary brand platforms that the vast majority of hospitals anchor themselves to. Currently occupying the top spot on that list is “clinical outcomes,” as hospitals in every major market fight to claim the title of “quality leader.” (The other seven brand platforms? Customer service, medical staff reputation, physician relationships, technology, teaching and research status, financial stewardship, and facilities.)

If you haven’t poked around CMS’s Hospital Compare website lately, then you are already in a dangerous place. The site(www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov) provides a plethora of comparative information covering all the core measures and then some (such as, likelihood to recommend the hospital – how is that for a brand maker or breaker?) So, if you were selecting a hospital for you elective knee replacement surgery, would you select the hospital that provides the right antiobiotic at the right time for the right duration 72% of the time, or the hospital that got it all right 98% of the time?

No billboard, no matter how good the location or how great the visuals, will overcome a deficiency such as that.

Experience = Brand.

Brand = Experience.

There is no getting around it. Data reporting has matured to the point that hospitals MUST monitor its publicly reported data and focus intensive resources on improving its scores. What makes data reporting even more tenuous is the length of time it sometimes takes to improve your scores. HealthGrades, for instance, uses a rolling three years of data. Thus, if your most recent year had some clinical anomolies that might be negatively impacting your brand, you have to live with those anomolies for three years.

All of this means that the marketing function in hospitals has to take on a bigger role than it currently has. Marketing professionals have to move beyond communications strategies and be involved in operational improvement strategies. They have to data mine various web sites to understand the true implication of publicy reported data, and then craft strategies to integrate that data into their organization’s brand.

This is not easy work. But for those who decide to manage their brand, despite what public data shows, they will certainly be better off for it. Let CMS manage your brand for you, however, and you put your entire organization at risk.