Month: December 2020

A nationally-recognized hospital was studying the concept of combining orthopedic and neurological rehabilitation services in one community clinic — and coordinating the care associated with both. Working with a healthcare communications firm, they turned to ANR to uncover perceptions of the combined services, clinic location, naming options, and value to the community.

The results were positive. Many people were already patients at more than one rehabilitation clinic, so the idea of a “one-stop shop” was appealing. It offered coordinated care for different services and the convenience of pre-authorization and insurance verification. Affiliation with our well-recognized client was also seen as appealing and relevant. When it came to naming options, the participants offered clear opinions as to what worked and what didn’t.

A federally-funded healthcare program serves medical professionals throughout the country and needed to prioritize its many features. The trouble is, a single practitioner in rural Kentucky needs something very different than a large clinic in St. Louis, and a new physician’s office has different needs than an established practice. How can the government communicate the best program features for each kind of doctor?

It gets even more complicated than that. The features being offered to providers are all essential and desirable. More income? Better practice hours? Greater independence? They’re all important. The trick is discovering which are most important to each different kind of practice.

Our research revealed different physicians’ underlying preferences, which helped our client understand the most important characteristics to communicate about their program.

A health system with more than 10,000 employees wanted to improve internal communications. From doctors to administrators to truck drivers, the organization had a wide range of employees spread across multiple locations. They wanted to know how to talk to the right people at the right time in the right place.

The need to prioritize, filter for importance, and consolidate employee communication channels was a clear finding from the research. Employees told us they were frustrated and overwhelmed by their employer’s use of multiple communication platforms, which included email, texts, pagers, and posters. They were also dissatisfied with the timeliness and relevance of the information they received.

New technology is good. But for medical practices and hospitals, the shift to electronic health records posed more than a few challenges.

Working with a global public relations firm, ANR used qualitative and quantitative studies to look at the challenges firsthand. We discovered how crucial practice managers would become to the successful implementation of EHR systems. We learned how quickly physicians, administrators, and managers moved from one task to another. We uncovered the hidden schedules of doctors and nurses.

Since our early studies, Electronic Health Records have become the norm in today’s medical community. As the focus of EHR research has switched from adoption to implementation and refinement, ANR continues to work with federal agencies and media partners to understand the most effective ways to speak to healthcare professionals about this technology.