Successful Specialty Marketing Campaign Launched on a Shoestring

by Peter Hochstein

Lynn Ricci faces a problem that many hospital marketers might wish for. At the Hospital for Special Care (HSC) in New Britain, CT, where Ricci is Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, patient traffic for a recently added autism center is growing so fast that the hospital is scrambling to keep up.

“I can tell you that the traffic in the autism center, in terms of referrals, has just exploded since the spring of [2014],” says Ricci. “We continue to bring on staff to meet the needs. We are actually scheduling appointments for August [2015].”

There are a number of factors behind this boom, not least among them a rising incidence of autism cases around the world. But the unique story here is how, after spot- ting a need generated by the trend and creating a new department to deal with it, a marketing campaign for the department was successfully launched on a shoestring budget after two years of planning.

The Internet-focused marketing has also created significant media attention, attracted substantial funding from the state of Connecticut, helped create a training center for medical professionals dealing with autism, and built an online meeting place for families of autistic children in not only in Connecticut but also in other states. And all of these outcomes seem to be operating synergistically.

A bit of background is in order. HSC, with 200 beds on its main campus, reports on its website that it is “one of the five largest, freestanding long-term acute care hospitals in the United States and the nation’s only long-term acute-care hospital serving adults and children.” In addition to its expanding autism practice, it offers expertise in a variety of advanced care and rehabilitation specialties, among them pulmonary care, neuromuscular disorders, spinal cord injury, and comprehensive heart failure.

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