Overcoming Pandemic-Related Team Communications Challenges

Chris Pace, senior director of digital marketing, Banner Health

“Hospital and health system marketers and digital teams can stand tall at the end of 2021 and look back at a year in which they triumphed over some of their greatest challenges yet,” writes Jared Johnson of the Healthcare Rap podcast; he is also a member of the eHST Editorial Advisory Board. 

Here’s an excerpt from Johnson’s new article:

One of the biggest challenges to team-wide communications has been not having the opportunity to hear from other team members that normally had more face-to-face collaboration. Teams were forced to find ways to collect and share data among their teams and keep up with frequently changing information and priorities.

“Healthcare tends to be very platform-centric and vertically positioned,” says Chris Pace, senior director of digital marketing at Banner Health. “In communications, there’s a web team, a social team, a PR/earned media team, a paid media team, a contact center, etc. There needs to be a thread that connects everything.”

Pace explains that to overcome that challenge, Banner Health opened up a new discussion called cross-channel communications.

“There’s representation from all of the communication platforms on paid, earned, and owned, internal and external, and then we tie it all together so that there’s a synchronous messaging strategy and an understanding of what the goals are,” says Pace. “Under all of that, there is still the need for understanding results and listening to feedback from consumers, so for this to be successful, you have to understand what’s happening outside of your organization and know what customers are saying about you.

“But we don’t know unless we have the data to inform it. So, this has created a lot of new avenues for growth from a communication standpoint, where we can measure sentiment not just today, but then track it over time and see if what we’ve done has made an impact.”

Read the full article now for additional insights from Pace and other industry leaders:

Coming Together for Patients: 2021 Year in Review

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