Healthcare

Case Study

Reputation Management/Healthcare

Overview
Pendulum PR was hired as a reputation management consultant by a local healthcare system in the spring of 2021 to help them manage current patient and community communications and expectations during a contract dispute with an insurance company.

Client Challenge
The dispute resulted in the client going out of network with the insurer, leaving nearly 100,000 patients in limbo with their trusted physicians. The client had several challenges, including:

  • Managing its brand value during the dispute
  • Keeping patients informed of the ongoing network situation
  • Keeping employers from switching doctors to stay in network
  • Managing public emotions and ensuring its side of the story was being told accurately

Client Objectives
While each crisis or reputation management situation is different, this client had four main objectives through crisis and public communication strategy:

  • Manage patient expectations and provide guidance through consistent, clear direct communications
  • Sway public sentiment to its side of the issue by highlighting the trusted doctor/patient relationship and local ties to the community
  • Convince businesses and individuals to switch insurance carriers rather than switching doctors
  • Gain contract leverage through media pressure

Our Process:

We use a five-step process to help clients manage crisis communication:
Analyze – Strategize – Train – Execute – Amplify

Analyze: We always start any crisis or reputation management campaign with a quick but thorough analysis of the issues and assess current messaging and communication methods.  In this case, we evaluated:

  • Current communication methods
  • Communication frequency
  • Most recent messaging
  • Target Audiences
  • Letters, Press releases and other communication tools
  • Media coverage over the previous 12 weeks

From that evaluation, we identified the client’s core Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats connected to the dispute to help us understand areas of focus for creating a crisis communication strategy to specifically target and resonate with target audiences

Strategize: Once we identified the client’s strongest and weakest positions and analyzed how they were being talked about in traditional and social media networks, we began to lay out sets of messaging that holistically and proactively address the issue along with messaging subsets targeted at various audiences- in this case: patients, business owners, community leaders.   

Once a messaging foundation was in place, we identified and built a strategy that utilized our client’s ability to be more nimble and proactive than the insurer to quickly and proactively reach target audiences through several communication vehicles including direct mail and email, in-person communication through public meetings and media tools including letters to the editor, existing paid media opportunities and general media outreach.

Train:  Simultaneous to the strategy development, we worked with the client to identify 2-3 main voices that would speak publicly on challenging issues in various settings and conducted media training that helped them become more familiar with the messaging and their delivery through mock media interviews with refinement. The interviews were videotaped and played back so each subject could watch themselves and identify areas to refine.

Execute: Once the strategy was built and media training complete, we immediately transitioned into the execution phase by identifying strategic media targets and audience channels to effectively communicate with.  Once we found an interested media outlet, we worked with them to develop a series of stories that helped focus attention on the value of protecting high quality local healthcare.   At the same time, a series of direct mail and email communications were crafted and sent to patients on a strategic schedule.   A series of meetings with business and community leaders was also scheduled and executed to let them hear the client’s side of the story and the irreplaceable value the client provided to its community.

Amplify: Once a steady stream of organic and current event media opportunities began to flow, we then turned our attention to creating ways to amplify the client’s story to business owners and decision-makers through social media channels.  Working with the client, videos were created that supported the message of protecting local healthcare in the community.

Results:

Implementing a crisis strategy that was proactive and utilized a variety of public communication tools enabled us to saturate the market with the client’s story quickly reaching the largest portion of several targeted audiences.  These strategies put the client in a position to better leverage more favorable contract terms and gain more trust with its own community resulting in more businesses and employees choosing to stay with their current physician.