The Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit (HMPS) has been held annually for the past 27 years. Established by The Forum for Healthcare Strategists in 1996, the stated purpose of the Summit is to “collectively and critically examine strategies for the delivery and financing of healthcare.”
This forum is made up of a network of leading senior healthcare strategists, and its members are “the visionary leaders of today’s healthcare.” These leaders represent a wide range of disciplines that include:
- Marketing
- Communications
- Business Development
- Physician Relations and Sales
- Physician Practice Marketing
- Digital, Social Media, and Web Strategies
- Strategic Planning
- Strategy Development and Implementation
- Public Relations
Along with The HMPS Summit (the event of the year for senior-level marketers, digital strategists, and physician relations executives across the U.S.), The Forum members get free access to live webinars and podcasts, its online newsletter, membership directory, and other exclusive resources.
How to Join The Forum
It’s easy to join The Forum online at www.healthcarestrategy.com/join or by printing and mailing their application form, along with a $225 membership dues to:
Forum for Healthcare Strategists
980 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1260
Chicago, IL 60611
Or fax the application form along with credit card information to 312-440-9089.
Once you’re a member, you’ll be able to search their website for job listings, book picks, white papers, articles, and other valuable content. You’ll also qualify for a discounted registration at the upcoming 28th Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit on April 17-19, 2023, in Austin, Texas.
Who Attends the Summit and Why?
According to The Forum for Healthcare Strategists, The Summit is designed for the “executives from hospitals, health systems, academic medical centers, integrated networks, and medical group practices” who work as:
- Chief Marketing Officers/Senior Marketing Executives
- Chief Communications Officers/Senior Communications Executives
- Chief Strategy Officers/Senior Strategists
- Business Development/Planning Executives
- Digital/Web/Social Media Strategists
- Physician Relations & Sales Executives
- Physician Referral/Outreach Directors
- Communications & Public Relations Executives
- Advertising Executives
- CRM Directors
- Consultants
If you’re an executive like the ones listed above, the Summit promises opportunities for you to connect with national healthcare organization leaders and “top decision-makers.”
You’ll hear about case studies that show “innovative solutions and strategies” and let you:
- Understand the current challenges in communications, marketing, and physician relations, along with new challenges on the horizon.
- Build a strategy so you can collaborate with any audience, whether they work in the healthcare field or not.
- Create and keep your brand strong by focusing on your core values, your easy-to-understand positioning, and one that has a long-term strategy.
- Improve the experience for everyone who receives or supplies healthcare under your care.
- Develop strategies for communication and working together.
- Get the best out of healthcare technologies and tools.
- Prioritize how to hire physicians and support them, so they don’t experience burnout and exhaustion.
- Develop a strong digital, mobile, and content strategy.
The HMPS Summit 2022 Agenda
In preparing for this year’s HMPS Summit, the Forum president, Judy Neiman, noted that a central theme came up multiple times while developing its agenda.
“Regardless of how our roles and organizations have evolved, the common thread is the importance of communicating and collaborating with those in other areas throughout the organization with the end goal of increased consumer engagement.”
Four of the conference planning committee members shared where they thought the industry sits in 2022 and where it needs to go.
David Parry, senior advisor at Stanford Health Care and principal/found at Perry IQ, reflected that one of the positive outcomes of having experienced a global pandemic is the breakthrough innovations that have come forward. Due to the urgent nature of the challenges these innovations addressed, technologies were fast-tracked for use.
“We’re trying to figure out what we learned from all that and what we’ll bring forward.”
Specifically, understanding how working remotely impacts teams. For example, in-person collaborations can’t easily be duplicated in a virtual world, and this still needs to be addressed even as there is a move back to working in the same physical location.
Along the same lines, the vice president of digital & marketing intelligence of Beth Israel Lahey Health, Chris Boyer, agreed that going forward doesn’t look like a return to a time where the assumption was everyone would commute to the office and work from there.
He envisioned a hybrid model that asks:
“…How do we engage in whiteboarding sessions and all the other things we do through digital mediums? Now we have to operate in ways that we haven’t before, that other industries have already embraced. But we are just beginning to determine the right way to accomplish this.”
This repositioning changed and elevated the role that marketing and communications have to play.
Susan Alcorn from Alcorn Strategic Communications and Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock sees this change as an opportunity to widen collaboration across divisions. She stressed the importance that communication and marketing “figure out how to work with… H.R. and I.T. colleagues.”
When it comes to physician relations teams, the traditional model was face-to-face meetings. Kriss Barlow, principal at Barlow/McCarthy, had this to say about the upcoming Summit:
“I think a whole lot of this conference for [physician liaisons] is going to be about the reboot. What does it look like?”
During the COVID-19 crisis, organizations were seen to be “fabulously nimble,” but now questions need to be asked as to how to keep that skill and adapt it to our new normal by using (and releasing) data in a way that serves everyone.
With more than 60 content-rich sessions listed in this spring’s brochure, a wide variety of workshops were set up to address these issues and more.
Benefits of Attending The HMPS Summit
With a two-year break from attending in-person conferences, this spring’s Summit gave a fresh perspective on how energizing it is to be in the same place at the same time with hundreds of your peers. “Sharing ideas, hearing case studies, and making new connections” is a tremendously helpful way to benefit from and lean into finding solutions for the challenges we all face.
Alan Shoebridge, CCO for Providence in Oregon, wrote a helpful recap on this year’s Summit, noting that while healthcare challenges are only increasing, the good news is that the mood of the Summit was focused on “finding solutions to help drive positive changes.”
A few of his key takeaways came from the conference sessions:
Conference Session: Disruptive and the Traditional: What do Consumers Say?
“The biggest disruptor of all might be that COVID has reset consumer expectations.”
Conference Session: The CMO/CIO Partnership: Focus on the Consumer
“Think abundance. There is enough for everyone. Let other parts of the organization lead the way.”
Conference Session: Building Strong Employee Relationships
“Agility, transparency, follow-through, and authenticity are the key to effective internal communication.”
Conference Session: Strategic Resilience: Winning in the Post-COVID, Value-Based Environment
“What matters to [sick people]: access/convenience; service; optimal outcomes; affordability.”
Conference Session: Embrace Transparency to Transform the Experience
“Combining the patient experience function into the marketing/communication structure helps drive change and improve understanding.”
And finally, here are some of the anticipated trends for 2022-2023:
- More outpatient services.
- More telehealth (aka video visits).
- Leveraging technology to improve the experience.
- System consolidation.
- A slow move from volume to value.
- Payers will still be big players.
- “Hospital at home” will be a thing.
- Generational changes will drive new expectations.
- Disruptors are going to disrupt, but hospitals will have a key role in the future of health care.
Key Takeaways from the HMPS Summit 2022
A few weeks after the end of the Summit, Aaron Neinstein, MD, penned a blog post with 6 Takeaways from the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit. Dr. Neinstein was one of the speakers at the event and is a digital health leader.
As a presenter and attendee, he identified six takeaway themes from the conference, which could easily be distilled down to three takeaways:
Cross-functional collaboration. Rather than working as isolated “silos,” marketing, I.T., and operations departments need to work together. The CIO and CMO at Cleveland Clinic described cross-functional teams as the “rhythm section, the bassist and drummer working in sync to enable so much more together.”
The same integration was also seen as needed for data sources and provider directory data. With help from A.I., data surveys, call center data, and customer reviews and ratings can be made available to all internal departments.
Academic Medical Centers were seen as “particularly challenged” to move toward a unified system and away from the fragmentation of platforms and data.
Post-pandemic hiring scarcity. Just like in every other sector, healthcare is suffering from a lack of new hires. Whether it’s in departments that need digital marketing talents, data science, analytics, design, or in attracting doctors and nurses and keeping them.
The rising power of user-generated content. 72% of patients Google and read online patient reviews before contacting a physician or healthcare facility. The general public will inform your potential customers before they’ll check out what you say about yourself or your organization.
Coffey Communications had four top takeaways, easily distilled down to three, from a series of spring 2022 healthcare conferences, including HMPS 2022:
Providing an excellent web experience is critical. While other websites may offer valuable content, the goal of a healthcare site is to find “something of value.” Transactional rather than content.
Suggestions included scaling back on content and helping consumers complete their “transaction” within three clicks. Find a provider, find directions, or apply for a job.
It matters where you place any call to action (CTA). Trips from Johns Hopkins Medicine covered:
- Put CTAs on the landing page.
- Place them within the body copy.
Use multiple channels, not just digital. Rather than sinking your entire focus and budget on digital channels, ensure you understand your target audience’s demographics and think through how they prefer to be communicated.
How you say something is as important as what you say. Whether you’re communicating internally or externally, tone matters. “Be empathetic, caring, and genuine.” This applies whether your communication is verbal or written.
“I took home so many terrific nuggets, many of them focused on new ways to approach age-old issues.” – Christina Deidesheimer, VP, Communications & Outreach, Chief Communications Officer, Beebe Healthcare.
“I really enjoyed HMPS22! Not only were the presenters knowledgeable, but they were also good listeners. And the event was set up to make it easy to network with my peers.” – Chad Woehrle, Physician Liaison, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Looking Forward to The HMPS Summit 2023
The planning for next year’s Summit is already underway. While the deadline for applying to be a speaker has just passed, there’s still time to become a sponsor or an exhibitor.
Some of next year’s conference’s early sponsors include:
Actium Health is a leader in the field of AI-driven CRM intelligence, working to improve retention, manage high-risk patients and drive service-line growth with a “clear and prioritized activation plan for every individual healthcare consumer.”
Modea has concentrated solely on healthcare since 2015 and helps its clients build a digital customer experience by transforming their current websites into “modern, consumer-focused engagement platforms.”
NCR Health focuses on collecting healthcare consumer data and has been creating healthcare products and “subscription-based solutions (analytics, program, and insights)” in the U.S. and Canada for over 40 years.
Lion Share Marketing has been in business for 27 years, guiding healthcare organizations “link data to decision insights, executive automated marketing campaigns and drive better outcomes across the healthcare continuum.”
Prairie Dog is a healthcare marketing agency. They’ve been in business since 1996, building brands with health systems, academic medical centers, community hospitals, and healthcare organizations.
Early Registration
Register early for the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit, starting April 17th, 2023, and ending on April 19th, held at the JW Marriott Austin.
The hotel is located in the heart of downtown Austin, close to the city’s top attractions and entertainment options. It features:
- On-site spa
- Seven bars
- Three restaurants
- Starbucks
- Largest guest rooms in the city with floor-to-ceiling windows
A block of rooms has been reserved for conference attendees at the special meeting rate of $295 single/double. This rate is guaranteed through March 24th or until the room block is full.
You can register online or by calling 512-474-4777. Just note that you’ll be attending the Healthcare Marketing and Physician Summit to get the special rate.
Known for its diverse and flourishing food “scene,” Eater Austin has put together The 38 Essential Restaurants guide to give you some ideas of where to eat while you’re in the city.
Also known as the “live music capital of the world,” you’ll find lots of live music attractions over the course of the event. Check out this live music in Austin guide by Visit Austin and combine a little extra pleasure with a lot of exciting work.
There are lots of demands on everyone working in the field of healthcare. Sometimes, part of a necessary personal strategy is to take time to invest in gathering together with others in the same field and come together to talk about the state of our industry.
The HMPS Summit lets you do that well!
