Delivering Exceptional Cancer Care… Hospital Administrators Be Damned
Client:
Jones Clinic
The Jones Clinic was the only independent oncology clinic in the region. The physicians at this clinic focus on personalized medicine, even utilizing genetic testing to tailor treatment plans to secure the most successful outcomes for their patients. The clinic also participates in approximately 20 clinical trials at a time, giving patients access to a broad spectrum of cutting-edge treatments that may not be available elsewhere.
T H E C H A L L E N G E
The Jones Clinic was feeling the squeeze of a near monopoly on the oncology field, as the market’s only remaining independent practice. As a result, primary care doctors across the city were being told to refer patients to their own hospital oncologists, for financial reasons, even if The Jones Clinic was far better for the patient. What’s more, their medical recommendations were also being driven by hospital administrators with the prime directive to make more money. The prime directive at The Jones Clinic was to do right by the patient — no matter the cost.
T H E D R E A M
RedRover was charged with educating the public and area physicians about the life-saving impact The Jones Clinic could make and inspiring them to take a different path than the one encouraged by hospital administrators. Why go to MD Anderson or Johns Hopkins when you have local oncologists trained at these two facilities — doctors whose only concern was for their patients’ well being? Our goals were to find growth opportunities and generate a strong ROI so that returns could be fed back into research and patient outcomes.
T H E S T R A T E G Y
Research & Messaging
The Jones Clinic has a variety of stakeholder groups: past patients, current patients, referring doctors, non-referring doctors, the greater medical community and the general public. Through deep qualitative and quantitative discovery research — which is part of our signature Growth Optimization (GO) strategic planning process, we not only determined the messaging strategies most likely to resonate with each of these stakeholder groups, but also the priority of those messages.
As just one example, the general public was most compelled by the fact that The Jones Clinic is the only remaining independent oncology practice not affiliated with a hospital (translation: medical decisions based on the patient’s best interest vs. hospital bottom line). This client initially believed the experience of its doctors to be the most important differentiator. Research allowed us to definitively re-prioritize those messaging points. The results were astounding.
Digital and Web
With messaging in hand, we rebranded the practice and then designed and executed a targeted digital marketing strategy to drive qualified traffic to the newly designed, responsive website through online ads and social media, including targeted landing pages for each campaign to improve lead generation and tracking.
Referral Generation
We also orchestrated a campaign to build brand awareness among referring physicians and consumers by identifying the best communication channels to reach each target audience with intentional messages that were most likely to resonate with them. These breakthrough messages had an area competitor calling our client requesting that the ads be pulled because they were “too honest” — a day the RedRover pack celebrated for cancer patients everywhere.
We also recruited and coached a new Physician Relations Manager to build relationships with referring physicians and create opportunities for the physicians at the clinic to further develop and strengthen existing relationships with referral sources.
Patient Experience
From there, we streamlined internal processes to improve the patient experience and support future growth by enhancing professionalism and strengthening on-site protocols.
T H E R E S U L T S
We exceeded annual patient referral targets by 141% in just 8 months and increased consumer leads through the website by 91%.
