Providence Portland Medical Center: Marketing and Patient Experience

Executive Summary

Providence Portland Medical Center's marketing and planning strategies have concentrated on attracting exceptionally talented physicians, staff, and administrators, while at the same time balancing a mission of serving a low-income, below-poverty-line area of Portland, Oregon. Initially this appears paradoxical, yet the Center's mission, once clearly defined (Patmas, 2006), successfully galvanized the entire value chain to exceptional service and quality levels. This was accomplished through change management initiatives including peer reviews (Dancer, Johnson, Zauner, & Burch, 1997), a redefinition of key service processes across the three specialty units of Adult and Pediatric, Coronary Care, and Intensive Care, and a revised set of metrics to evaluate overall performance (Patmas, 2006).

In addition to these factors, the Center also began instituting more effective management of treatment claims when patients had coverage, and when they did not, better-managed claims for Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of government payment. The Center also began sourcing and procuring locally grown food, produce, supplies, and services (Weisberg, 2002), which contributed to lower costs through greater operating efficiency and stronger community connection.

Marketing and the Patient Experience

All of these factors may initially appear unrelated to marketing and planning strategy, yet on reflection they are the essence of delivering exceptional patient experiences — the most powerful catalyst for creating effective marketing strategies (Papanikolaou & Ntani, 2008). Empirical studies further show that the degree to which a healthcare center deliberately re-engineers its internal processes to better support exceptional customer experiences is the degree to which its brand will be perceived as authentic, honest, and trustworthy (Otani et al., 2009).

Having been established primarily as one of 25 Diagnostic Related Group (DRG) hospitals in Portland, the Center's core business model is to provide charity care to patients requiring adult and pediatric, coronary care, and intensive care services, while collecting Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of payment (Gee, 2006). For DRGs to be effective from a marketing and customer experience standpoint, they must be exceptionally efficient internally to manage the wide variation in cases they treat, while simultaneously reaching out to the community to promote these efficiencies through successful treatment programs.

For Providence Portland Medical Center, the focal point of their marketing strategy continues to be the promotion of individualized patient success stories crafted to illustrate expertise across the three major practice areas. The Center has successfully personified the services it delivers by sharing the stories of heart disease patients who have recovered and are enjoying life, pediatric patients whose childhoods have been restored through quality care, and intensive care cases where lives were saved. Underscoring all of these stories is a dual commitment: delivering exceptional patient experiences consistently (Papanikolaou & Ntani, 2008), and continually improving internal processes — from billing to patient onboarding — to ensure that the commitments made in marketing can actually be kept (Patmas, 2006).

What is distinctive about Providence Portland Medical Center is its approach to integrating a strong internal focus and commitment to continuous quality and process improvement as the foundation for exceptional patient experiences, alongside an authentic and highly credible approach to telling patient stories as its core marketing message. From a planning perspective, the Center must keep both of these initiatives continuously improving in order to remain in step with its patient base. The Center's staff has also introduced technology selectively — only to the extent that it supports the customer experience and reinforces continuous process improvements — ensuring that marketing commitments can be fulfilled (Earnshaw, 2002). This is itself a differentiating aspect of the marketing strategy, as it concentrates on developing the internal capacity to execute at a consistently high level first, and then promotes this process- and experience-based expertise to the broader community.