Taking over the world

In November 2006, former Delta Airlines CMO, Paul Matsen joined Cleveland Clinic as Chief Marketing, Planning and Communications Officer, in order to take care of their new international marketing strategy. His previous experience at Delta, although completely different, has translated extremely well to the healthcare industry. Almost a year in he seems to have picked up the basics and is focusing on developing the Cleveland Clinic as a national and international healthcare brand. “If you go back 30 years healthcare was less than one percent of the economy. Today, it is 16 percent, and that makes it a truly exciting industry to be involved in,” exclaims Matsen. “It’s a very important service to people all across the country but it is also a large business for the US as well.”

Prior to Matsen’s arrival, Cleveland Clinic already had a national reputation as one of America’s top hospitals, particularly known for its leadership and heart care. What Matsen, along with the rest of the team, hope to achieve is international awareness and recognition of the clinic. Historically there has been around a 30 percent awareness of Cleveland Clinic and Matsen is just one who hopes to push this figure higher. “Our primary local market is northeast Ohio, and it’s a market that isn’t growing – we’ve reached capacity – so we are trying to build our national brand in order to bring more patients in from around the country,” explains Matsen.

Focusing on innovation

Matsen highlights the fact that Cleveland Clinic have been focusing on some innovative ideas, from web and online marketing to employee communication. He has been concentrating on the website and online marketing as they are a tremendous portal into the clinic’s services, and as Matsen himself says, “it is really the first place that people turn when they make a decision to come to a national health center like the Cleveland Clinic.”

Secondly, Matsen has been focusing on employee communications because the clinic have 37,000 employees all over the world and he feels it is important to make them aware of what is happening. “Just this morning I came from our quarterly employee meeting that was broadcast for the first time to Abu Dhabi,” Matsen remarks. “We’ve also been rolling out a new employee internet site and leveraging some leading edge communication tools like our new CEO blog that we’ve just rolled out for Dr. Cosgrove.”

The majority of Cleveland Clinic’s inpatient discharges come from the seven-county area around the organization’s campus in Ohio but as time goes by they seem to be attracting more patients from around the country. How are they doing it? “We’ve benchmarked our case mix in comparison to other leading academic medical centers and health systems, and we are now one of the top healthcare systems in the country doing this.” Matsen goes on to explain that although their primary market is the seven county region around Cleveland, the rest of Ohio is a strong secondary market. “The next ring we compete in is then the six states that surround northeast Ohio – western New York, Pennslyvania, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan, and we do well in that,” remarks Matsen.

The clinic also draw around seven to 10 percent of their business from the rest of the US and internationally, making them very competitive with institutions like the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins. Matsen says that the focus of their direct marketing is extremely important as they concentrate on appealing and approaching physicians who refer patents (in the hope they will refer to Cleveland Clinic), and patients who may have an interest in specialty care for their particular disease or condition.

Referral physicians

A key part of outreach to physicians and building a referral network is leading continual medical education programs and bringing physicians to the facilities in Cleveland, says Matsen. “We have state-of-the-art conference faculties and education facilities where people can observe the latest procedures, surgeries and hear information from the Cleveland Clinic doctors. We do those around the country but also here in Cleveland, and that’s key to reaching referring physicians.”

The Cleveland Clinic also issue publications to specialty groups throughout the year to keep their referring physicians up to date on the latest advancements in medical research and technology happening at the clinic. Matsen believes that the Cleveland Clinic are one of the leading edge healthcare systems in the country in publishing their clinical outcomes. This year alone they have published more than 30 outcome books providing specific data on how they’re performing. “What we hear from referring physicians is,” adds Matsen, “what they really want to know is the latest in research and what’s happening from quality and outcomes perspective.”

Technology platforms are key to managing referring physicians according to Matsen, who points to Dr Connect, a web-based portal used at the clinic. Part of the e-Cleveland Clinic suite of services, Dr Connect allows a physician to track the progress of the patient they have referred and pull the medical record off when that patient returns to their care after having receiving treatment at the clinic.

Lastly, the clinic employ two virtual services, Virtual Visit and My Consult. My Consult is basically an ‘e’ second opinion service that an individual patient can use. The Virtual Visit is used in certain areas where you can actually conduct a virtual examination of a patient without a physician having to be present. “It can be conducted with a nurse and a patient connected virtually through a high-speed internet connection to a physician at the Cleveland Clinic, which is a very exciting, lead-edge technology,’ explains Matsen.

International business

After 9/11 international healthcare visits to the US took a precipitous drop, however, Matsen remarks that international business has now been rebuilt to pre 9/11 levels, which the clinic are obviously very pleased about. Matsen believes this has been done simply by drawing patients to the clinic and meeting their needs.

“We now have a Cleveland Clinic consulting team on the ground in Abu Dhabi, under the leadership of Dr. Ken Oriole, who was previously head of surgery at the clinic, who are working with the health ministry in Abu Dhabi to run the Sheikh Khalifa Medical City,” says Matsen. He goes on to explain that they are also working with the Mubadala Development to develop a new hospital to be called the Cleveland Clinic. Closer to home an executive health and wellness center has been opened in Toronto.

Branding the clinic

Before Matsen took on the role of Chief Marketing, Planning and Communications Officer, the clinic worked together with a well-known corporate identity agency to update the brand and unify the logo across their entire health system. This gave a contemporary, global image to coalesce all the elements of the health system, which gave the clinic a strong, foundational element to work with.

Since Matsen started the Cleveland Clinic have begun a very targeted national advertising campaign in print, broadcast and online.

Challenges

As well as concentrating on their new international marketing strategy, Matsen suggests that Cleveland Clinic are targeting other important areas as well. He points to the challenge of informing patients, not only locally but around the world of the services and quality that they offer. Developing awareness of service and how to access those services to various populations are top of the pile for Matsen.

Another emerging challenge for the clinic is embracing the change from sick care to well care, which as Matsen explains is really about wellness and prevention. “We’ve been innovative in our approach to wellness and have, for example, led a major no smoking initiative in northeast Ohio,” says Matsen, “actively helping to get legislation passed for the prevention of smoking. We’ve offered partnership to other community organization programs to have people quit smoking and we’ve had great success with that for patients as well as employees.”

Future

The Cleveland Clinic is clearly going through a period of tremendous growth and it doesn’t stop yet. In 2008, the healthcare organization is planning on opening two major new facilities on the main campus, which will become the home for the Heart and Vascular Institute, and will be the largest single-purpose medical building in the world. At the same time they will be opening the Glickman Tower, which will be home to the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. Currently ranked number two for urology in the US News and World Report, it will give the Cleveland Clinic leading edge facilities both in heart care and in urological and kidney urology to enable them to continue their excellence in those areas.

“With the opening of the new facilities there will be a lot of opportunity for additional growth on the main campus,” Matsen summarizes. “You will also continue to see us expanding internationally and findings ways to take our expertise and brand reputation around the world.”