HUB23 speakers helped conference attendees engage and transform healthcare together. Here’s a look at how our Consumer Track presentations provided strategies for organizations engage consumers and elevate the voices necessary to co-design care.

To Move Business, You Must Move People, presented by Nicole Baxter, VP of Marketing and Brand Strategy at HCA Healthcare, and Jason Brown, CEO of Brown, Parker & DeMarinis Advertising

Consumers want security above all else. Patients feel fear, loss of control, confusion, and stress, so providing security in a time of confusion and chaos is critical. To that end, providers must offer confidence, trust, respect, and support—so the question becomes, how can healthcare organizations express the concept of security and safety in a marketing approach that inspires from the inside out? 

One of the pieces of work HCA partnered on with BPD Advertising was to triangulate a unique point of view, specifically focusing on the market to ask where data and insights converge to become a game-changer. They asked how HCA is currently viewed in the market, how they want to be viewed, and what the market wants. 

“How do we put the consumer and their peace of mind first?” says Baxter. “We are in an industry where we have reluctant customers. Nobody wakes up and thinks, I hope I visit the ER today. Historically, we’ve always been very functional in our messaging, but now we are shifting toward that emotional element. Brand is not a department. I think it’s important to shift from the mentality that there is a brand department to thinking that branding is everyone’s department and responsibility.” 

In this captivating presentation, attendees got an in-depth look at brand building and sales activation work over time, what to look for to leverage data for a powerful point of view, how to ensure a message is landing, and best practices to stay the course.  

From 3 to 30,000: Ditching PFACs and Amplifying Diverse, Activated Patient Voices to Co-design Care, presented by the UC Davis Health team of Jennifer Baron, Chief Experience Officer; Jeff Mansfield, Organizational Consultant for Voice of Consumer; and Cindy Ricciuti-Brown, Director of Experience Design & Insights

“COVID created a perfect storm for our organization to be ready to do something different in this space,” says Baron. “We found ourselves in a pandemic—in a crisis situation where we needed the voice of the people we serve more than we ever have in the history of the organization. And we didn’t have a single channel for outreach. Today, two years later, we have more than 35,000 voices we are co-designing with.” 

Leaders say a patient community opens a wide door to learning where and how to improve your organization. Some ways PFACs can help include: 

• Identifying ways to improve existing initiatives 
• Understanding how it feels to be a patient in your care 
• Understanding what patients want/need/desire/hope from your organization 
• Capturing feedback while initiatives are being designed 
• Using human-centered design to map where patients experience friction points within a service or experience 

The leaders discussed their best methods and capabilities of engaging a PFAC, but also the pitfalls to avoid in the first year, which include: 

• Too many requests, too fast (start slowly, expand as panel grows) 
• Over-surveying (try to limit research to two engagements per month) 
• Low-impact/high-risk engagements (don’t let the ease of gathering insights create less-than-ideal requests) 

“Every single one of these projects has led to tangible change for the organization,” says Mansfield. “It’s been a really neat opportunity.”