Employee Engagement in Healthcare Marketing

In your paper, Define a contemporary marketing problem and its effect on your chosen example. Analyze the provided data or your researched data regarding your chosen example. Explain the rationale behind the suggested marketing solution in your chosen example. Compare and contrast the suggested marketing solution with your suggested solution. The Strategic Marketing Solutions paper must be 3 to 5 double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA Style as outlined in the Writing Centers APA Formatting for Microsoft Word resource. Marketing ProblemThe Cleveland Clinic Found it Needed to Improve Employee Engagement to Earn Value-Based Incentives from CMS. CMS announced a 1% holdback of Medicare inpatient DRG reimbursement, beginning in 2012, to fund a financial incentive pool. Hospitals could earn their holdback, plus a value-based incentive bonus, through improving their performance on 12 clinical process outcome measures and on eight patient experience measures. The Cleveland Clinic analyzed its clinical results (e.g., infection rates), patient perceptions (e.g., satisfaction scores), and employee engagement (e.g., lower employee turnover, higher productivity) in preparation for earning incentives. The health system discovered that superior clinical outcomes and more positive patient perceptions had strong correlations with high employee engagement scores. Unfortunately, aggregate Cleveland Clinic employee engagement scores ranked below the 40th percentile according to a national health care benchmarking database. Marketing SolutionUse Hospital Employee Marketing Strategies to Increase Employee Engagement. Cleveland Clinic conjectured that if they could improve employee engagement, then better clinical outcomes, patient experience scores, and reimbursement would follow. The first step was to identify employee engagement best practices. This included helping employees to understand what engagement is, what are the benefits, how to be engaged, and how to improve engagement. Second, Cleveland Clinic initiated cultural change and a more inclusive management style. All 42,000 employees were invited to attend focus group sessions to discuss employee and consumer engagement. These focus groups were small, diverse, half-day sessions. It was the first time that a mix of all types of Cleveland Clinic employeesfrom food service workers to volunteers, to physiciansmet together. They talked about organizational culture, values, priorities, and vision. Physicians learned that they had more impact on employee and consumer engagement than they realized. An important discovery was that administrative and other non-clinical employees really wanted to feel part of the care team that delivered and improved patient health at Cleveland Clinic. In order for the health systems top management to effectively transform the culture, they needed to build on the Cleveland Clinics reputation for world-class outcomes by communicating the how and the why behind having a culture of strong employee engagement. The Cleveland Clinic Experience employee marketing strategy was created to make each of the 42,000 hospital employees a patient caregiver regardless of their job title. Employees were educated on what it meant to be a caregiver. Managers and teams created employee engagement plans with accountability measures designed to hone employee competence and confidence. Employees were then coached to meet their engagement objectives by their managers. Managers were also given access to substantial financial incentives to support increased engagement in their units and departments. Cleveland Clinic also created its own pulse surveys to determine if managers were working on, and making progress on, their action plans. This accountability measure effectively channeled feedback to managers throughout the year and kept the executive team informed about how the organization was progressing and what areas needed improvement. Overall employee engagement scores increased in the first year of the program, and HCAHPS data showed an improvement in the hospitals patient safety and experience ratings. Some Cleveland Clinic teams, however, were not improving. The human resources department began a special effort to educate and coach managers in the bottom 25% of employee engagement. Cleveland Clinic stepped up employee recognition by implementing Caregiver Celebrations, special events where high performing caregivers were recognized by their peers and managers. Cleveland Clinic created new training opportunities and introduced the concept of employee engagement and coaching to their remote facilities. Managers became accountable for their employee engagement scores in a way that was less tactical and score-oriented than it had been. The value of employee engagement became both more institutionalized and conversational with the emphasis on communicating and understanding the importance of being engaged and less about data and reports.58 Employees contributed to MyTwoCents, an online forum to provide feedback and make suggestions for improvements. More than 6,000 ideas were submitted, over 800 new ideas were implemented, and 4,500 employees throughout the enterprise participated in 150 projects. These submissions resulted in cost savings of over $2.5 million and in projected future savings of $3.5 million. Clinically, another offshoot of the program was a radical redesign of the organization around disease symptoms instead of departments or service lines. For example, consumers presenting with a headache may need to be seen by a psychologist, a neurologist, or a neurosurgeon. Cleveland Clinic created a neurologic system in a neurologic institute where consumers are evaluated for headaches in a central location. Different neurological providers are now within close proximity and more effectively confer with each other immediately. This fundamental organizational change was made throughout the enterprise and saved consumers time moving between departments, increased management efficiency, reduced costs, and improved employee engagement.59 Internally marketing the caregiver culture at the Cleveland Clinic was a disruptive innovative. This employee marketing strategy resulted in enhanced employee engagement, a positive consumer experience, and improved financial results.