Advertising of the highest order?
The hospital I work in recently launched a high profile marketing and re-branding campaign. Such a move was unprecedented for our hospital and caught some by surprise. After all we are the only academic hospital, the largest regional referral center and to we already operate at greater than 100% capacity. So what was the need for a glitzy, aggressive advertising campaign? Even more surprising was that the first adds went on TV during the Superbowl. Yes, you read that correctly. The academic medical center I work in, a non-profit institution, now had its own Madison Avenue campaign along side the biggest of American big business.
The adds were slick and quite dramatic: critically ill patients, determined staff and a narrative of hope and conquest set amidst griping religiously themed music. So I was essentially looking at myself on TV, but clearly that is not what the hospital feels like both for patients and employees. This discrepancy between reality and its representation in marketing campaigns is all but expected in popular culture. But hospital advertising is relatively new. Should the same licence to embellish your product by granted by default to hospitals that also advertise. I don’t think so.
Physicians in addition to helping patients get better also have the less glamorous job of guiding people through illness, disability and severe loss. In this second mission, setting expectations to reality is so important it can not be under-emphasized. So what I struggled with, is that where society often tends to have already unrealistic expectations of physicians, here we have a multimillion dollar campaign that for the sake of name recognition and referrals is willing to further inflate expectations. That is not a responsible policy.
For example an add shows a mother looking at her sleeping child and asks, “what does it take to conquer the challenges that seem most unfair?”. Great diagnoses, team work and technology can make a difference, but not infrequently, and especially in a tertiary care centers, families bring their loved ones and there is nothing that can be done to conquer these excruciatingly unfair challenges. In fact, despite our best efforts much can be done to make these challenges worse through iatrogenic disease.
Another spot asks “what does it take to make a child believe everything will be OK?” when showing a pediatric patient without hair due to chemotherapy. There are types of pediatric leukemia that can be curred, and in these occasions I would tell the family that the chances of cure are good. However, when I saw a child in the pediatric ICU a few weeks ago, with recurrent leukemia after chemotherapy and 2 stem cell transplants that was now unresponsive from a large stroke, I am not sure there is anything that make the child or the family believe that everything is going to be ok.
A more recent add touches on a disease I deal with a lot as a neurology trainee and asks “what does it take to keep a stroke from stealing away your life?” The hard facts about stroke is that while there is excellent prevention, there are no proven outstanding treatments right now. Even with the most high technology clot busting medicines, only 12% of patient are better in 3 months, while 6% get bleeding in the brain as a drug related complication. Commercials like this invariably make it harder for me to tell families that after the stroke in addition to lifestyle and medication changes the only treatment is rehabilitation.
Finally an add asks “what does it take to give the whole world, brand news reason for hope?”. Well maybe our stem cell researchers are on the way, and I certainly hope so, but on a day to day basis from my medical intern year I will tell you that many residents felt that they shuffled sick patients from one ICU to another, to the OR and then on. Sorry for the cynicism, but that job did not feel like giving the whole world, brand new reasons for hope. If you go work at an average ICU in the United States, you will probably not feel like a beacon of hope.
So what do you do in today’s market conditions where there is competition for patients. Well how about constructing an add campaign that is less emotionally driven and focuses on telling the truth? For example adds can promote name recognition but also focus on health statistics, services offered or specific achievements attained recently such as a vaccine that was recently discovered at our center. Ideally a better brand of adds, instead of promising cures that do not exist yet, would ask more substantively what does it take to prevent a stroke, or what does it take to prevent a prevent a cardiac catheterization as opposed to delivering one.
For an academic medical center that promises to deliver medicine of the highest order, adds should be elevated to the highest order of social responsibility. It is odd but apparently acceptable to advertise next to Taco Bell, and Victoria’s Secret. This is a market based society. What should not be acceptable is advertising that distorts what physicians can do and is not in keeping with physician professional goals of truthfulness and social responsibility.
Tags: cancer, commercialism in medicine, hospital, hospital advertising, Madison Avenue, pediatrics, stroke, Superbowl, Taco Bell
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