People must deliver on its promises and they are the embodiment of your ACO’s brand. They must live up to the expectations created by your brand organizers.
If they don’t, your ACO will soon reflect it and suffer grave consequences.
To simply say you your providers and healthcare facilities are known for exceptional quality and safety means you can back it up with exceptional outcomes in patient care. Unfulfilled promises and buzz words on websites and press releases will eventually catch up with you.
When you understand and accept that your brand is the way people interpret your promise and place value on the treatment and services you deliver, it’s easy to see why some healthcare organizations command premium prices and a steady stream of new business and attract the best doctors and nurses. You can also understand why other providers seem to face an unending struggle to attract top doctors and employees, rise to strong market positions, and negotiate the best contracts.
What’s worse is if your team breaches its promises of compassion, compliance, clinical outcomes, customer delight, community service, competency, or quality and safety accreditation standards, those acts can give rise to breach of contract, misfeasance, nonfeasance, and significant public relations nightmares. This is true in contracted relationships with healthcare buyers whether they are individual consumers, employer-sponsored health benefit programs, private health exchanges, managed care plans, or travel accident insurers.
INSIDE & OUTSIDE VIEWPOINTS
Different people can have different views of your ACO’s reputation and visibility. One difference is how the outside world sees perceive your reputation and how the folks that work there perceive it. Consider these differences as your external brand and your internal brand. Both are very important. If the people who work for you have little or no perception of your brand’s reputation or the promises made to the public, there’s no way to drive exceptional service to the level of customer delight.
If these two perceptions are out of sync, your brand will suffer and you’ll risk damage to your brand’s image. On the other hand, when marketing communication of your brand’s reputation and promise aligns and raises visibility within your target market, you start attracting patients and insurers who are looking for a healthcare provider just like yours.
When my team and I work with ACOs, IPAs, and PHOs, we dig deep, we ask probing questions, and we work to understand the existing internal and external brand reputation if one has been developed. We learn what has been promised, and then we look outside the organization to determine if the promises are being kept. We also look at what your competitive rivals are promising and what they are delivering. Only then can we start to work on a brand building strategy that focuses on managing your reputation, visibility, the way you communicate your promises and the way your people work to deliver on them.
From the outcomes of that environmental review, we can determine what needs to be done to develop a contracting strategy that promises certain levels of performance to insurers. Without that, why should insurers even bother to negotiate? They might as well send the final draft and expect the ACO to simply sign and be happy they were invited to participate.
About Mercury Advisory Group
Mercury Advisory Group is a full-service, global consultancy with an exclusive focus on healthcare.
We make it easier for providers to be in the business of healthcare by helping hospitals, clinics, ACO’s, pharmaceutical and device manufacturers companies and concierge physicians create, manage, and strengthen, measure their brands and their value.
Whether you’re launching a new product or just went through a merger, we have the expertise and tools to help you maximize your brand’s impact. We offer a full spectrum of branding guidance and services for healthcare providers, manufacturers and service partners. Since 1993, Mercury Advisory Group has developed, organized and launched more than 200 IPAs, PHOs, MSOs, ACOs and other integrated health systems in the USA and abroad, including the world’s first and only Globally Integrated Health Delivery System® granted a trademark registration for this new term of art in 2010 from the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington, DC.
