Midwest Health System Reduces Online Marketing Competition Among Its Hospitals

by Mark S. Gothberg

OSF HealthCare is an integrated health sys­tem comprised of eight hospitals in north central Illinois. Service lines are structured to serve consumers at every hospital, but the market areas of many of the hospi­tals overlap. Consequently, hospital service-line marketing efforts are confusing and even frustrating for many consumers, inefficient from a marketing resources perspective, and fail to highlight and leverage the strength of the healthcare system.

“Unfortunately, our marketing structure doesn’t have us working together. We all report to different people and have different strategies and objectives based on our indi­vidual hospital. We don’t call each other and make sure we aren’t duplicating each other’s efforts,” says Vickie Parry, marketing manager at the Illinois Neurological Institute, a key service line of OSF HealthCare.

The neuroscience service line in 2011, followed by the cardiovascular service line in mid-2013, decided to do something about this situation by coordinating all online display and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns cen­trally, not on an individual hospital basis.

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