The great news that Laura Kempke and Ross Levanto have been promoted to senior vice president at Schwartz Communications is satisfying and significant. It’s satisfying to me because I’ve had the good fortune to work with both of them for more than a dozen years here at the agency. Both are a sort of laboratory experiment: if you were to design the perfect strategic senior PR person you’d get Laura and Ross. They’re brilliant, omnivorously curious, able to pull the most important essence from mountains of complex information…and yet they still do hands-on work for their clients.
These promotions are significant because of what they say about the rapid changes and the new direction of the PR profession. Both Laura and Ross were early to recognize the importance of SEO, content marketing and the execute/measure/refine cycle. Several years ago they each took on the role of advocate/guru – educating the agency and encouraging (sometimes forcing) us to deploy these techniques for our clients. As a result – to the great benefit of our clients -- Schwartz was an early adopter of PR 2.0 techniques. Laura and Ross are still our go-to gurus, and every time I think I’ve finally figured it all out I hear about something else and I take the familiar walk down the hall to where they sit. “Hey, what do you know about this (fill in the latest online thing)?” They patiently take a few minutes to explain it to me, and usually show me how they’ve already used it for a client. Check out what they have to say for yourself.
To get some advice from Laura on closed loop marketing visit
http://web.schwartzcomm.com/closed-loop-content-marketing-services and if you want to hear Ross opine on the integration of PR and marketing check out http://web.schwartzcomm.com/the-integration-between-pr-and-marketing
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Promotions
Posted by Dave Close on December 2, 2010 at 9:44 AM
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The New York Times ran a short piece by Steve Lohr yesterday that highlighted a new study led by two doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital.
The study compared 3,000 hospitals at various stages of implementing and using electronic health records (EHRs). For those who see EHRs as a panacea for the healthcare system, the initial findings are disappointing. To quote from Lohr’s story: “In the heart failure category, for example, the hospitals with advanced electronic records met best-practice standards 87.8 percent of the time; those with basic computer records, 86.7 percent; and those without, 85.9 percent. The differences in other categories were similarly slender.
“Reducing the length of hospital stays, according to many experts, should be a big money-saving payoff from electronic health records — as better care aided by technology translates into less time spent in hospitals. For hospitals with full-featured digital records, the average length of stay was 5.5 days; for those with basic computer records, 5.7 days; and those without, 5.7 days. The differences, Dr. Jha said, were ‘really, really marginal.’”
So, at least by these two measures the return on the use of EHRs so far is pretty meager. But, as the study authors point out, the evidence for gains from EHRs so far has come from an “elite” group of high-performing providers that have spent years adapting to the technology. No surprise, with just 20 percent of U.S. physicians now using computerized health records (and less than 5 percent in very small practice groups) there’s a long way to go to meet the federal EHR usage goals, despite the financial incentives in the HITECH portion of the 2009 ARRA stimulus package.
That’s a macro view. But if you take a micro view, there are some stunning successes in the use of EHRs to improve physicians’ practice operations and patient care. Twice this year I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a presentation by Dr. Jim Morrow, formerly of the North Fulton Family Medicine Center. Dr. Morrow presented at HIMSS 2009 in Chicago, and a few weeks ago he presented at the HIMSS and Massachusetts Health Data Consortium Healthmart 09 conference in Worcester. Massachusetts. Morrow is a compelling presenter and he tells a detailed story about his small medical practice group implementing and using EHR technology, going back almost 10 years. Here are his slides.
To summarize some of the ROI from his four-physician practice:
- Transcription costs dropped from $110,000/year to zero
- Chart handling dropped from $30,000/year to zero
- Chart searches dropped from $16,000/year to zero
- Dictation dropped from $32,000/year to zero
- Reduced cost per patient visit from $112 to $79
- Full time employees per provider dropped from 4.7 to 2.8
Morrow estimates that EHR technology saved the practice 11,440 billable staff hours per year, which could go into serving more patients. His presentation has some compelling images of unreadable handwritten prescriptions next to clear, legible e-prescriptions – a key part of reducing medical errors.
Now, none of this is new. EHR vendors, HHS officials, Dr. David Blumenthal and many others have been pushing for widespread EHR adoption for years. And it’s not that surprising that a study would find that so far the measureable benefits are not compelling across the entire U.S. hospital system. But EHRs will help transform healthcare and it’s only a matter of time.
This study is like taking a snapshot of internet-enabled e-commerce in 1996. What looked like hype back then is now a critical underpinning of our economy. Many people have invoked the so-called Metcalfe’s Law (ie.: the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users) first postulated about communications networks, as something that will come into play as EHR usage reaches critical mass. Let’s hope that’s the case, and the findings of this new Mass General study are simply a realistic progress check.
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healthcare+pr EHR EMR physician+practice HITECH hospitals health+data
Posted by Dave Close on November 17, 2009 at 11:54 AM
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So it looks like the Boston Globe lives – for now – and probably will continue for some time. After weeks of brinksmanship and a couple of all-nighters, the Guild, the NY Times Company, the pressmen, the guy who drives that coffee truck with the siren that comes by every morning at 9:30…all the parties agreed to a brutal $20 million of cuts to keep the paper going.
I’ll avoid for now the predictable hand-wringing and solemn pronouncements about the death of mainstream media, disaggregation, social media and all the rest. It’s all been said. But on a more personal note, I’m relieved. A great city should have a great newspaper – preferably several. And although the Globe is certainly not the paper it was 15 years ago, it’s still a good-to-very-good daily paper. Even after endless rounds of layoffs and buy-outs, it still has some great reporters and great columnists. The photography has always been excellent and it still is. It’s impossible to imagine Boston with only the Herald as the region’s newspaper.
Many PR people have mixed feelings about the Globe (to put it mildly). Our local and regional clients all want coverage in the area’s premier paper, yet it’s often a tough pitch. The business section has been shrinking for years. The editorial staff has been shrinking. Many PR people feel the Globe has a subtle anti-business stance and sometimes takes gratuitous shots at companies.
Still, I’ve been reading the Globe every morning for almost 30 years. I love it, I hate it, sometimes it makes me crazy, but I can’t imagine it disappearing. For now, it seems we’ve avoided that. But after years of reductions and this latest round of truly brutal cuts, let’s hope that in a year we’ll see a paper we’ll still care to read.
Posted by Dave Close on May 6, 2009 at 2:03 PM
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Guest post by Schwartz EVP Dave Close
In a badly damaged and worsening economy most marketing executives aren’t thinking about spending more money. The understandable tendency is to pull back, reduce spending, stop some marketing initiatives and try to ride out uncertainty with caution.
That’s the conventional wisdom in most corporate environments, but it’s wrong. When the economy turns bad and it seems like opportunities are shrinking, the winners will be the ones who face the gut-check, take a deep breath and pour it on in marketing. It’s easy to see why: when your competitors go silent you have a rare opportunity to fill the silence with your message.
The brave marketers – the confident, the bold, the risk-takers – will actually increase their branding and publicity efforts, although they may change their mix of marketing programs. They know their messages will get through more clearly and with wider exposure. They’ll also get more bang for their marketing buck because there’s downward pricing pressure on marketing services. The results may not show up immediately in increased sales – after all, the economy is bad. The short-term win may be to stay even and avoid declining sales. But the confident marketers are planning ahead, positioning their companies and their products to slingshot into the lead at the first signs of a recovery. This approach was discussed in a well-known Management Review article 15 years ago called “Fortune Follows the Brave,” and it holds true today.
I say this is a “gut-check” because truly confident marketing and communications executives face resistance in advocating for increased or stable spending. For example, a MarketingSherpa survey from February, 2008 (before the current disastrous economic problems took hold) showed the problem. In a tough economy, 43% of executive managers said they would cut marketing first, while just 9% said it was a time to invest in marketing. In large companies, 39% said they had seen marketing cuts already, and 21% expected cuts. In September MarketingSherpa updated the numbers and things had taken a turn for the worse. Most of these executives were reporting on advertising spending, which is the part of the communications mix that usually gets slashed during downturns. You have only to pick up your ever-shrinking newspaper to see that this is true.
Still, advertising is just one part of the communications mix. Once you’ve reduced or cut advertising, how do you keep your message in front of customers? As an executive at a PR agency I’ll take a courageous and selfless stand and say this is the time to increase your PR efforts. There’s a marketing saying: “it costs to advertise and it pays to publicize.” We know this from direct experience.
Our agency has been serving innovative technology and healthcare companies for almost 20 years. We started the company in the depths of the 1990-1991 downturn and we served a client based of technology startups when the tech bubble burst from 2000 through 2002. Those were times of severe spending cuts at most companies. We had clients simply stop their advertising and PR efforts. They saved money in the short term and crippled their companies over the long term.
In computing and networking technology – crowded markets with a fast pace of innovation – brand position and image are fragile things. Go into cryogenic suspension and the public will forget about you quickly. The most cost-effective way to keep your message current and to maintain or grow awareness of your products is through credible, disinterested, independent third-party coverage in the media stimulated by PR. That used to mean newspapers, magazines and broadcast. It still does, but even more important is the coverage in online information outlets, blogs, YouTube and all the other types of instant information sources. These actually amplify the impact of your PR budget by spreading coverage far and wide, beyond the original source of the story. People forward articles, but they seldom forward ads.
Some companies spend 100 to 200 times more on advertising than on PR, yet research shows PR to be just as credible a source of information to potential customers. We’ve made our reputation representing smaller, innovative companies. In good times or bad, the companies we represent see gains in awareness, positive brand image and sales leads. Think back to the 2001 downturn when Red Hat became the hottest story in the software industry. They were battling Microsoft. Our client Red Hat spent nothing on advertising; Microsoft spent hundreds of millions. Red Hat did it all through PR and word-of-mouth, and they leveled the playing field in the minds of software users.
The dynamics behind that situation apply in today’s brutal economy. PR costs much less than advertising, tradeshows or other parts of the communications mix. Along with direct marketing, it is the most effective, fastest, flexible and measurable way to communicate to your target audiences.
But it takes some courage for communicators to fight against cuts or even to secure more funding during these times. A 2005 study "Turning Adversity Into Advantage: Does Proactive Marketing During a Recession Pay Off?" presented results from a survey of 154 senior marketing executives. I like this quote from the paper:
"Athletes often choose times of stress to mount attacks: strong runners and bicycle racers may increase their pace on hills or under other challenging conditions. In a similar vein, proactive marketing includes both the sensing of the existence of the opportunity (a tough hill and fatigued opponents) and an aggressive response (possessing the necessary strength or nerve) to the opportunity.”
In a gut-check economy, the strong – and the bold – will win.
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public relations strategy
Posted by Chuck Tanowitz on December 15, 2008 at 10:16 AM
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