Resources from today's episode

• Health workers, stuck in the snow, administer coronavirus vaccine to stranded drivers 
• Washington state hospital apologizes for prioritizing top donors for COVID-19 vaccine 
• Framing What We Do with a Noun or a Verb: Are we “___ing”? 
   

Takeaways

Need for speed

• COVID-19 has accelerated change, requiring health systems and their marketers to find new ways to move faster. Safety protocols and legacy processes can make it challenging to adapt to change.  
• Health systems can apply some agile marketing principles such as prioritization and iteration to serve COVID-19 demands but should be calculated in each iteration. 
• Because the stakes are so high for healthcare communications, each iteration must carefully balance exactness and speed, as each iteration could potentially reverse public trust.

Setting expectations for responsive branding

• Faster change means our brands need to evolve faster to remain relevant and avoid sounding out of touch. Continually test messaging to see what’s working and what’s not.  
• Health systems should consider diversity equity and inclusion as a central pillar of every branding conversation. Incident-based branding efforts can translate as insensitive and self-serving.  

On the horizon for healthcare marketers 

• COVID-19 has increased public demand for quality communications, and consumers will likely maintain these expectations in a post-COVID-19 world.  
• Informative, relevant, actionable content marketing will be an essential function for health system marketing and communications, and consumer expectations for quality content will rise.  
• Marketers may play a more strategic role in health systems because of familiarity with new technology and the ability to bring data to the table.  
• We will have to continue to act as technology educators as virtual care becomes more embedded in today’s healthcare system.