Great Experiences and Brand Promises – Lessons from Indigo Airlines

”It is time you packed-up and left for the airport. You are on Indigo and they always leave on time”, said my colleagues at work. I was in Bangalore and had a busy day at work. I was trying to cram in as much as I possibly could in the day and I guess, I was getting late for my flight to Delhi. In any case, with the way the Bangalore traffic these days is, reaching the airport is akin to a lottery.

The Gods were kind that day, Mr David managed to get me to the airport well in time and, sure enough, Indigo boarded right on the dot. However, much to our chagrin we learnt that there would be some delay before we took off. Soon after being air-borne we had the captain on the PA system, proudly telling us that though we had departed Bangalore 10 minutes behind schedule (and it was all because of the congestion at the airport), he was quite hopeful of getting us into Delhi on time. He explained the benefits of a friendly tail-wind assisting us in the journey and also how he would try his best to get us on ground in Delhi on schedule.

It was soon evident that we had a chatty captain, who would tell us that we could see the lights of Hyderabad towards our right and that we were over Jaipur and were cruising over 33000 ft. The captain kept us engaged. He was never intrusive, but I did observe that in almost all announcements that he made, he did refer to the fact that we were likely to reach our destination on time. The crew also kept reminding us that an ón-time’ performance was their paramount goal. They urged us not to leave any waste around, so that they can turn around the aircraft faster for the next flight. It seemed that the crew was really focused and keen to get us to Delhi on time.

As soon as we touched down in Delhi, the crew announced that we have indeed arrived a little before schedule. They seemed to be genuinely pleased with their performance and wore big smiles. As I headed out of the aircraft, I noticed the captain standing just outside the door of the flight deck, wishing passengers the time of the day and amicably chatting with his crew. The captain and the crew looked like a wonderful team to me, who had enjoyed flying us to Delhi that evening and were genuinely happy that they managed to get us to our destination well in time.

This episode left me wondering how difficult it really is to conjure up this kind of experience every time Indigo takes flight, day in and day out. This would mean hundreds of flights everyday, flying thousands of passengers and ensuring a steady and consistent experience delivered through thousands of employees. No wonder, Indigo is one of the most successful airline in the country and their brand promise is synonymous with timely flights.

And since, I work for in healthcare, where a great experience is perhaps so much more important, it left me wondering, why most hospitals in India fail to deliver a consistent experience that can become their calling card. Unfortunately, we still do not have hospitals, which can deliver some if not all experiences in a pre-defined and consistent manner. Is there any hospital in India, which can claim that the OPD’s in its hospitals always begin on time, or where patients with prior appointments don’t have to wait or where physicians see off patients at their doors? Or, where patients are uniformly greeted by the staff at the front office, always treated with courtesy and where compassion counts for more than anything else?

I am aware that this is no easy task. Unlike passengers in an aircraft, patients are sick people, some are in life threatening situations, many are in the hospital for the first time in their lives and are truly unsure of what to expect. I also understand that unlike the airline, patients in a hospital will be staying for several days, they will be interacting with a multitude of people (doctors, nurses, paramedics,housekeeping, F&B services, general maintenance, billing etc.) and it is so much more difficult to synchronize all of these interactions into one great experience, which can be crystallized into a succinct and powerful brand promise.

However, hospitals, which hope to build a brand for themselves must start looking at ways and means of doing this. They must meld their varied customer interactions into one great experience that a customer can expect even before she enters the hospital. The true power of a hospital brand will only be unleashed, when it will learn to deliver that one experience again and again, every time that a patient walks through its door.

 

Marketing a Cancer Service

Can a cancer service be effectively marketed?

Well, to someone who has dealt with cancer either as a patient or a caregiver, the very idea of marketing a cancer service is appalling, even grotesque. Cancer is often looked upon as the ultimate misfortune, a death sentence if ever there was one and juxtaposing a ‘commercial’ term like marketing with it sounds revolting. Yet, we know that in India there are cancer hospitals aplenty, many of them with great expertise and technology at their disposal, but sadly not many effectively engage with their patients beyond the mandatory sessions of chemo or radiation therapy.

Yet, I believe good cancer centres, need to have an effective engagement program with cancer patients and the care-givers. More than anything else, they need to connect with patients and help them understand their disease better, engage with them as partners in the fight that lies ahead and inspire them to beat the great odds  stacked against them. They also need to connect with the care-givers, help lighten their burden of fear and doom at the likely loss of a near and a dear one. Most of all, cancer centres need to give hope and courage to both the patients and care-givers in a world suddenly drained of light and good health.

A good cancer service should aim to constantly engage with its local community. It should help educate about the preventive aspects of the disease. Many oral cancers are completely preventable. Shunning tobacco, eliminates cancer – a simple message if communicated effectively can prevent almost all oral cancers. Extended exposure to known carcinogens such as pesticides, heavy metals or radiation also causes cancers. Avoiding these by taking sensible precautions can help reduce the incidence of cancer.Similarly, the chances of having cervical cancer can be significantly reduced by early vaccination against the disease.

Yet, I have not come across many hospitals running effective mass campaigns against tobacco use or creating awareness about cervical cancer vaccinations. I believe, in the fight against cancer, that is an opportunity wasted.

There are of course, cancers, which have nothing to do with lifestyle factors. They can hit unexpectedly (like the Germ Cell Carcinoma, that ravaged Yuvraj Singh) and there is little one can do to prevent them. However, in our arsenal are now medicines that can effectively combat these deadly cancers, if only we could diagnose and treat them early. Fortunately, we now also have advanced scanners that can detect tumours the size of a few cells, and raise a red flag. Yet, not many cancer services talk about early detection and encourage people to go for regular testing. A good cancer service must connect with the local community and relentlessly drive home the point that a cancer can be beaten by detecting it early.

The cancer service must also understand the fear that the word cancer causes in a person. Many people have an irrational fear of getting themselves screened for cancers. Good cancer services should develop engagement programs, which gently nudge people to shed their fear of the unknown and go for these screenings.

Fighting cancer requires true courage, uncommon grit and determination. The treatment regimen is often debilitating and painful. More than the physical pain, the sheer magnitude of the struggle against a deadly foe, with unknown odds is often difficult to bear. Cancer patients undergoing therapy, need hope and courage to overcome the disease. A good cancer service must realize that even if the disease succeeds in breaking a man, it must not be allowed to break his spirits. A cancer service, which offers hope and a steady hand is the one, which will connect with cancer patients the best.

Cancer Hospitals owe it to themselves as well as their local communities to constantly engage with each other and fight cancer. At Fortis Hospitals in Mumbai, we have for the last couple of months been doing exactly that. The hospitals recently completely a very successful campaign on cervical cancer screenings called ”Teal to Heal” (http://www.fortishealthcare.com/india/Teal_to_Heal.php), are presently running a cancer campaign, which features cancer survivors, sharing their inspiring stories of early struggle and success in beating back cancer. The stories are true and full of hope. The next phase of the campaign, will take up the fight against tobacco.

I do wish, there were more hospitals joining the fight against cancer by engaging their local communities. We can only win, if we fight together.

 

The Story of a World Record on the World Heart Day

World Heart Day was on Sept 29th this year and I was on tenterhooks.

Fortis Healthcare was aiming to create a Guinness World Records (GWR) record of the maximum cholesterol tests done in a city on a single day and I was nervous. We had been preparing for this day for the last four weeks and the day of reckoning was here.

The previous night I had slept late, mentally going through a check-list of things that we had closed, wondering about all that which may go wrong and hoping for the best the next day. Once, I had ticked off most things on  my mental check-list, I slept well and was up bright and early. It was time to see how the last 4 weeks of intense effort would now fructify.

The idea to attempt a world record of cholesterol tests came from Dr. Ashok Seth, the Chairman of Cardiac Sciences, at Fortis in New Delhi. Dr. Seth knows how to throw a challenge to the team. My colleague Jasrita and I had met him to discuss about the World Heart Day and Dr. Seth immediately threw down the gauntlet. He got us excited and committed. He got us thinking and wondering. A simple cholesterol test can serve as a warning sign for heart disease, we can use the test as a marketing device to create awareness about the disease. We hoped to get a few thousand people to come (fasting) to our hospitals on a warm Saturday morning to get their cholesterol levels checked.

Jasrita, Arnab and I got down to serious work. We had to plan and organise the campaign, get the hospitals excited and aligned, find a media partner who can drive home the message and have a diagnostic lab join hands with us in doing the physical testing. Fortis has more than half a dozen hospitals in the National Capital Region, who had to come on-board to participate in the activity. Most importantly, we had to find the money for a big campaign like this.

The Partners

Crayons

We roped in our advertising agency in Delhi as the key partner in developing the communication and for media planning. Crayons, has been working for many years and the CEO of Crayons, Ranjan has been a personal friend for over a decade. The Fortis team and the Crayons team met in their office for a detailed briefing. We took them through the idea, they loved it and saw great possibilities. They were raring to go. Two weeks later, Jasrita and Arnab trooped into my office with the first set of creatives, neatly printed and mounted on boards. The agency was surely putting its best foot forward. Also, they had churned out a lot of work. We had 4 different communication routes and tonnes of creatives. Jasrita, Arnab and I went through all the material calmly, debated and discussed each route and decided to sleep on it. I also asked Arnab to leave it lying around in my office overnight. We also agreed that, while we were attempting a World Record, it would not be appropriate for us to talk about it in our advertising.

The next morning we again went over the entire pile. We discarded two routes and shortlisted two for further discussions with Dr. Seth and Ashish, who is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Fortis. We met them on a Wednesday afternoon in Ashish’s office and took them through the ideas and the creatives. We unanimously agreed on a creative route. The die was now cast. Jasrita, Arnab and I would later fine tune the communication, pour over commas and full stops and agonize over every word written in the copy of the communication. We needed to get it just right and we knew that even a single word left out-of-place can leave a bad taste in the mouth.

The Hindustan Times

The Hindustan Times group is the second largest media company in the country and they rule Delhi. We called in the HT team for a briefing early on. They loved the idea as well. Of course, they were keen on our business as these are lean times for folks in the media business, but I would like to believe that they liked the idea more than the commercials. I have always believed that a partner delivers the best, when they buy in an idea. This is exactly what we did with the HT team. Of course, it helped that I knew them well as HT is my former employer and these guys are friends. While we negotiated hard, they eventually gave us a great deal.

SRL Diagnostics

SRL Diagnostics is a subsidiary of Fortis and is the largest diagnostic chain in the country. Jasrita worked hard with them to agree to collecting more than 10000 samples from 20 odd locations spread across the NCR. They were really a difficult bunch and the logistics of the exercise had to be meticulous. The last thing we wanted was to have people having a bad experience while giving samples, or the samples getting mixed up or reporting going haywire. Jasrita nailed everything down. Our favorite term during these days was ”idiot-proof”. We planned to make the entire process idiot-proof, dumb it down so that even the last person in the line should have no difficulty in understanding the process and following it. We meticulously calculated the number of phlebotomists needed at all the sample collection facilities, provided each of them with clear directions and fervently hoped that all will turn-up at the appointed hour. Jasrita wrote mails after mails detailing out a simple process over and over again so that everyone understood.

Guinness World Records (GWR)

Guinness World Records has a process for every record. They sent us reams of information about what all they needed to certify our record. They made us go nuts with their demands about arranging assessors, video-recording of all the sessions, the strict time-keeping, physical inspections of the sites and finally collection and evaluation of all the data. Boy, they are really thorough. They made us go through hoops but we complied on every single count. Jasrita, handled them adroitly, understood their detailed instructions and passed them on faithfully to the operations team. We were always fearful that we may fall foul of their elaborate process and miss out on the record on a technicality. What a pity that would have been.

The BTL Folks

We had a couple of ”Below the Line’ marketing agencies supporting us. They promoted the concept of a free cholesterol test directly to consumers. They went around parks looking for morning walkers, spread awareness in the hospital neighborhoods by distributing pamphlets and getting people to sign on for the test. Thus, one afternoon my wife and I were accosted by a young man at a Barista Coffee Shop, who explained to me what a cholesterol test was and how I can get one done free on Sept 29th at a Fortis facility. Bravo!, we both gladly registered.

Salt Mango Tree

You may wonder, what they are. Salt Mango Tree is in fact our agency for digital advertising. They trawl the internet for us. They also run our digital campaigns. For World Heart Day they promoted us on the Google sites, Facebook and Twitter. They created excitement in the digital world and got us a huge fan following on the net.

While, we had the partners lined up, a big challenge was to get each hospital charged up. We called meetings of the sales people from all the hospitals and, explained to them what we were attempting and asked them to contribute. Each hospital came up with ideas on getting folks to come to the hospital to give their samples. We met many times as a group, discussed progress, new ideas and revised plans. Goals were set, targets were mutually agreed upon and shared. The teams came together. The Corporate Sales teams too joined in. The word spread. We loved it. Aditya Vij, who is the CEO of Fortis Healthcare spoke with me. His big concern understandably was not the record but the customer experience that we were geared to deliver the next day. I assured him that we were ready.

Sept 29th 2012

I reached Fortis Escorts Heart Institute at around 0630 in the morning. I ran into Ashish, who too was wandering in. We had asked him to be the first donor of the day. The program was to begin at 7 in the morning and end at 1230. Even at 0630, we had the waiting area full, with people waiting for the tests. We began with Ashish and there was no looking back. Soon, I started receiving reports of a large turnout at almost all our facilities. The campaign had created a huge amount of excitement. We had people trooping in everywhere. Yet, the processes held up. We did not encounter any chaos anywhere.Everything went according to plan and by 11 we knew we were ahead of the existing record.

By the time we stopped at 1230, we were confident of having set a new GWR record. The GWR assessor took the entire afternoon in ascertaining our claims. He went through reams of physical data, the forms that we had collected and footage from across all our 20 locations. It was a mammoth exercise.

In the evening we assembled for a small function. The GWR representative asked Ashish to hazard a guess about the number of people who came for the test. Ashish who is usually ahead of the curve answered with a broad smile ”14161”. The GWR assessor looked a little abashed, smiled and said ”a very well-educated guess indeed”.

 

Medical Travel Must Come of Age

Medical Travel to India has now reached a certain level of maturity and business size and it has started getting serious attention from all manner of people. Back of the envelope calculations indicate that the opportunity today is approx. USD 500 mn and growing at least 30% or more pa. And these numbers are only the revenue that Indian Hospitals generate from patients traveling to India for medical treatment. Add to this the possible revenue from their stay in hotels in India and the airfare, we are perhaps staring at a business opportunity worth close to USD 1 bn today.

Strangely, for a business opportunity of this size, we still do not have organised players in the market. Almost all the patients traveling to India are being facilitated by small time medical travel operators, who make a commission in the process. Sadly most of these facilitators are completely unorganized, bring in patients through their personal contacts in places like Iraq and Nigeria and have very little resources to support or provide a vow experience to the patients. Many of them started as translators, who were hired by the hospitals as they received the first wave of foreign patients. They interacted with these hapless patients and earned their trust, branched off on their own and started getting patients referred by those who had come earlier.

While, these folks have so far done a reasonable job of patient facilitation, the time is ripe for the advent of the new generation of medical travel operators. These would in all likelihood be young entrepreneurs, tech-savvy and more in tune with the needs of our ”experiences” driven service economy. They would probably be initially supported by some of the larger Indian Hospitals, who would of course benefit immensely from foreign patients reaching their doors much better looked after. They would also hope to benefit from more patients coming through.

At Fortis Healthcare, which is India’s largest healthcare company and where I work, we are encouraging this trend. We would like to work with and support medical travel operators, who are professionally driven and are much better organised in joining us in sourcing international patients. We are identifying potential partners in various parts of the world and beginning to work with them in an effort to create a new and a different kind of eco-system. Hopefully, this would allow for a far better and a completely seamless experience to the patients who are traveling to us from all parts of the world.

I also believe that very soon we will have large travel operators also entering the business. The business case is so compelling that they can not really afford to stay out. Recent reports have indicated that Thomas Cook has decided to enter the market and I have had several discussions with Abercrombie and Kent, who are already setting up the medical travel infrastructure that they need, to roll out the business across multiple continents. They are exploring markets as far as Eastern Africa and Middle East where they are setting up information and patient facilitation centres to help connect patients to hospitals.

At the global level with medical travel destinations like Jordan and Turkey in Asia, Costa Rica and Panama in Central and Latin America, China and South Korea in the far East emerging as the new medical travel destinations (Thailand and India being there for several years now) the sky is really the limit. A global operator can easily facilitate patients into hospitals in any of these countries. Moreover, this would also provide their existing travel businesses a significant bump up as patients traveling to hospitals are usually accompanied by family and friends. Thus more air tickets and more hotel nights will directly contribute to their existing travel businesses.

Honestly, I have been quite baffled that large travel companies have so far not stepped in. My best guess is that they haven’t really looked upon medical travel as a large enough a business for them to get into. Medical travel in India has grown quietly. Not many people outside the healthcare industry, fully know about the extent of the business today even less about its potential. Also, they are is still a serious lack of awareness about the profile of medical travelers. Today we have patients in our hospitals at Fortis who have traveled thousands of miles and have come for extremely high-end medical procedures such as transplants and challenging paediatric cardiac surgeries.

Something in my bones tells me all this is about to end. Patients, should now be able to choose their hospitals and doctors anywhere in the world a lot more transparently, have their travel arrangements done professionally and receive the world’s finest medical care without the worries of a rickety and unreliable system which exists today.

Patients should be able to travel to their doctors and their hospitals a lot more sure about what they truly are getting into free of worries from everything except their medical condition.

 

The Importance of the Culture of Caring

Last year my father was diagnosed with cancer. The doctors devised a treatment plan, which included chemotherapy and radiation therapy. As a caregiver, I had to take my father to the hospital for his radiation sessions. I opted for an early morning slot, which would have us in the hospital at around 7 every morning. I would drive up to the porch of the hospital, find a wheel-chair, get him on the chair, leave him for a while to go and park my car and would wheel him over to the radiation department for his sessions to commence. While, the hospital employed General Duty Assistants (GDA’s), who would normally wheel patients around the hospital, their duty hours began from 8 in the morning. My routine lasted only a couple of days as I soon discovered helpful hospital security staff, who would happily wheel my father as I went to park my car.

This simple act of caring and kindness spoke eloquently about this hospital’s shared culture. Here, even the security guard at the hospital’s door exhibited behaviour, which showed that he and the hospital cared. Thus to me, he repeatedly demonstrated that in the life of the hospital, it is not only the medical folks, the doctors, the nurses and the paramedics that deliver care, it can almost be anyone.

I believe for a hospital to be successful, it is imperative it has a culture of ”caring” ingrained in its very DNA. A hospital apart from being a repository of cutting edge technology, monumental medical knowledge and expertise must essentially be a caring institution. It is true that one goes to a hospital only when laid low by a debilitating illness, that one often needs the high-end diagnostics and surgical technology that modern hospitals are crammed with, the fact remains that more than anything else, one craves for great care during this period of uncertainty.

This is largely because most patients do not understand the intricacies of their scans or the technical difficulties of their surgeries, what they do understand are simple gestures of caring and support at a difficult time in their lives.

Healthcare organisations must aim to build a distinct culture of caring. This is far easier said than done. A culture of caring must flow from the top. Every individual in the organisation must understand that aside from whatever role they have in the hospital, the biggest role that they all have is to care for the patients in the hospital. The medical folks of course grasp this naturally, they are trained to care for their patients and they are also at the forefront of the delivery of care in the hospitals. However, it is not all that easy for others. The senior management team of the hospital, must ensure that there is clear communication down the line to everyone that they have a role to play in patient care.

The hospital leadership team should also step up and demonstrate their roles in patient care. The hospital policies formulated by the leadership team should have patient care policies right at its core. The patient care initiatives should be highlighted and communicated often, and those who go the extra mile in caring for the patients should be recognized and rewarded without hesitation.

Everyone who works in the hospital should fully understand what is expected of them vis-a-vis patient care. The folks at the front office should know that they must speak with the patients politely, demonstrate caring by helping and guiding patients to various part of the hospital. The F&B service should understand that they can demonstrate care by ensuring that the food served is piping hot, tastefully presented, delivered on time and served with a smile. An extra portion of desert for a patient with a sweet tooth (and of course no Diabetes!) will also help demonstrate patient care. The house-keeping detail too can underline care by keeping the room spick and span and by dusting the corners and those hard to reach places, that hide many unseen specs of dirt.

The most important element in building a culture of caring in the hospital is by communicating. Nothing showcases the culture of caring better than a little chat, whether it is the doctor stopping by for one after her rounds, or a nurse delivering a message of hope as she goes about her work. A GDA can demonstrate care by engaging with the patient as he wheels him around the hospital, a billing clerk can do so by explaining the components of the bill and listening to patients, who believe they have been over-charged and even a valet parking service attendant can demonstrate caring by bringing over a shiny car, when the one he received from the patient was caked with dirt.

A culture of caring is also rooted in a culture of empowerment. As far as patient care goes, every individual in the hospital should be empowered to act and help deliver great care. There should be no ifs and buts here and those so empowered must clearly know, without an iota of doubt that as long as their actions  result in better patient care, they will only be appreciated.

All good hospitals know that their success and even their profits are derived from the care that they deliver. A culture of caring and empathy must be a  hospitals most cherished and enduring asset. Unlike everything else, it can not be bought, it has to be built, brick by brick, over a long period of time and then it has to be zealously guarded from complacency, which often is, ironically a by-product of the hospital’s success.

 

Lessons from Erbil

Earlier this month, I was in Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Erbil along with Dohuk and Sulemaniya have emerged as prominent cities sending patients to various Indian hospitals. Most Indian hospitals are actively wooing patients from these cities and I had traveled to Erbil for official meetings with our partners and government officials.

Erbil and Sulemaniya have International airports and are fairly well connected to the gulf countries as well as to Turkey and many European cities. Erbil is the administrative capital of the region and the seat of power of the regional government of Kurdistan, which is fairly autonomous. Kurdistan region, which suffered tremendously under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein has moved on. It is peaceful and the government is busy building the infrastructure that they never had in the past.

Kurdistan lacks hospitals. They also do not have enough doctors, who can run the few hospitals that exist. To make matters worse they are desperately short of anesthetists, thus surgeons have to sit idle waiting for the anesthetists, so that they can operate. Thus, most people from Kurdistan prefer to travel abroad for their healthcare needs and Indian hospitals, with their low costs and high quality care attract a lot of people from this region.

While at the Erbil airport, waiting for my flight, I noticed that many of my co-passengers on the flight were patients. I started interacting with them informally and learnt how difficult it is for them to make this journey.

For many patients, who were ready to travel, this journey was a great leap of faith. I met a gentleman, who was traveling with his wife and daughter. The wife needed spine surgery and they were traveling to Fortis Hospital in Vasant Kunj. Without revealing that I work at Fortis, I inquired from them about the surgeon, who was to operate on the lady, they had no clue. Needless to add that they did not know what the surgery was, all they knew that they will be required to stay in New Delhi for 10 days and the ‘wife would be as good as new”, guffawed the old man. The surgery had been arranged by a lady, who is a Kurdish refugee living in Delhi and all these people had was her phone number, which they were to use on arrival in New Delhi. Scary, to say the least.

Another interaction with a co-passenger yielded information that they were headed for Apollo Hospitals. The young man’s mother needed a gynecological surgery and they believed that Apollo Hospitals will be able to perform the surgery. They had been recommended to Apollo, by someone they knew and who had had undergone a surgery at Apollo Hospitals many years ago.

Another co-passenger informed me that he was going to ”BKL” Hospital and that he has been told that this is the ‘best’hospital in New Delhi. I did not disabuse him of this notion and gently corrected the name of the Hospital to BLK Hospital.

As we boarded the flight I was truly appalled by the primitive facilities at the Erbil airport. There were no ramps for patients on wheel-chairs and they had to be awkwardly maneuvered to reach the boarding gates. At the boarding gates, they were unceremoniously hauled into a hydraulic lift, which took them to the aircraft. Logically, the patients should have been allowed to board first and they should have been occupying the front end of the aircraft. This was not the case. Passengers boarded the aircraft as they normally do, followed by patients on wheel-chairs, with many being wheeled to the back. The width of wheel-chair was such that it could hardly be moved in the aisle. Thus many, patients had to literally carried by their attendants to their seats.This to say the least is embarrassing and extremely undignified. And lest you wonder, which airline this was, we are talking about Etihad Airways, one of the leading and sought after airline of the world!

The lessons for healthcare companies and the airlines are self evident. With the burgeoning demand for medical travel, hospitals, who wish to attract patients from far corners of the world, must invest in establishing information centres, which provide patients with correct and timely information about the patient’s condition, treatment, prognosis and costs. They centres should be manned by local staff, trained by the hospitals, who should be able to build a relationship with patients and their attendants.

The airlines must realize that the segment of medical tourists will grow significantly in the days ahead. They must also invest in systems, which allow people with special medical needs to travel in relative comfort and adequate safety. they should have proper equipment to manage patients on wheel chairs and perhaps stretchers, trained people who can make the patient’s journey smooth and hassle-free.

Essentially, we must see a collaborative approach involving hospitals and airlines emerge. They must start talking to each other to help patients make these life saving journeys with ease and comfort.

 

The Sales Vs. Marketing Conundrum in Healthcare

The Sales and Marketing functions in many hospitals in India still work independently of each other. There are invisible boundaries that separate the two and often it is considered heretical to get the twain to meet. The Marketing folks are the smart and savvy guys, who sit in their cloistered offices working on the holy grail that is called ‘strategy’, while the sales guys are the lowly folks, who need to sweat it out in the ‘field’. They are the ones who chase ”numbers” and perpetually suffer from their tyranny, while the Marketing folks grapple with the subtle nuances and the neat turns of phrase of advertising communication and the like. The sales folks are street smart, the Marketing guys worldly wise, the sales folks are rough at the edges, the Marketing guys are all suave and well rounded, the sales folks are the ones with their sleeves rolled-up and with their hair in the eyes, while the Marketing guys are impeccably turned out with neatly gelled hair, all in the right place…you get the drift.

Well, while one can go on in this vein, citing their differences, the fact remains that unless the Sales and Marketing folks work together, neither can really achieve great success. Yet, in many hospitals they hardly interact, leave alone work together.

The blame for this sorry state of affairs lies at both the ends of the spectrum. The sales people are programmed to chase, they are given no respite from the continuous and if I may add mind numbing quest for revenues. They do not have the time and even the inclination to sit back and think. A sales person, sitting idle, would soon enough invite the wrath of his supervisor. He would be labeled as a lazy day-dreamer who lacks ‘drive’ and ‘initiative’. On the other hand a Marketing person will have all the time in the world to think through each and every piece of communication that passes through his hands. He will weigh the pros and cons of the ‘copy’ and the way it is laid out in the ad. He will hold forth on the relevance of the ‘image’ that adorns the ad and of course the smallest detail like a misplaced comma or the uneven size of the font will not escape his attention. After all, he has been taught that God lies in the details.

In all this he will forget that the purpose of the advertising is perhaps to help the sales person drive in a few more customers through the hospital doors!

On the other hand this is what happens when sales guys try their hands at Marketing. Some time back I had the occasion to attend a sales review meeting at a hospital. The sales guy was holding forth on launching a few specialized clinics and the idea was to create communication informing the local community about the introduction and the benefits of these clinics. I recall one of the clinics to be launched was the ‘Heart Failure Clinic’, which offered specialized advise and support to patients in Heart Failure. The sales head briefed the Marketing team about the clinic and requested an ad. The Marketing team, sent out an ad, which talked about Heart Failure and exhorted patients suffering from heart failure to come to the clinic. The communication failed to inform the readers how to identify their condition as ‘Heart Failure’ and when exactly to approach the clinic. Strangely, it was also not very clear as to how a ‘Heart Failure Clinic’ was different from a routine consult with a cardiologist! ”If I am having a Heart Failure, wouldn’t I call the Emergency and rush to the hospital rather than wait for an appointment at the Heart Failure Clinic” asked a baffled HR person sitting in the review.

It was a mindless piece of communication done at the behest of the sales person, who was in a hurry to launch the clinic and a lazy Marketing guy, who wasn’t too bothered with the outcome of such inane advertising.

Now if only the Sales and Marketing teams had sat down together and looked at the issue at hand, which was how to drive cardiac patient volumes in the hospitals and come up with a plan, things could have been very different. Maybe a ”Heart Failure Clinic” might still have come up and the Marketing guy would have pointed out that it was best to market a Heart Failure Clinic to referring doctors rather than consumers in general. After all, isn’t Heart Failure a condition that will be identified by a local community doctor and would subsequently be referred to a ”Heart Failure Clinic” in a larger hospital.

If only the Sales and Marketing teams in hospitals forgot their differences and worked together, they could achieve so much more…together.