Boston Medical Center Health System is building a "unified and cohesive brand" through a new marketing campaign and by integrating two former Steward Health Care hospitals, an executive told Becker's.
Rachel Felix became senior vice president and chief marketing and growth officer in 2023 after joining the safety-net health system a year earlier. Becker's caught up with Ms. Felix, fresh off earning a female leadership award from the Great Boston Chamber of Commerce, about her recent marketing successes and obstacles.
Question: What has been your biggest marketing win of late at Boston Medical Center?
Rachel Felix: Ultimately with marketing, we're trying to connect with our patient population, really inspire them to seek care. Some of our patients may have other priorities, and so we're trying to make care and preventive care top of mind so they can truly thrive.
We aim to achieve this through impactful campaigns. It's not something historically that BMC has invested much in, and we knew that to be successful we needed to build more trust in our clinical excellence, in our differentiators, that we truly understand the needs of our patients in a culturally sensitive way and in a holistic way.
One of our latest big wins is with our service line reputation campaign. We launched a campaign last year called "Rewriting Healthcare" that highlighted the value proposition of clinical excellence and holistic care, where we focus on several areas, including cancer, sickle cell disease and orthopedic surgery.
Our early performance has been strong. We find it resonates with our audiences. It's tested well, and it continues to tell this story for us, of how we're able to provide this care, through our experts, to anyone who walks in our doors, regardless of the acuity of the need, of the circumstances and surrounding challenges for them.
Q: What is the biggest challenge in healthcare marketing nowadays? How do you overcome it?
RF: There are a lot of challenges. Several involve breaking through the noise and finding new ways to connect with our audiences and engage with them.
We seek to differentiate our hospital and system through thoughtful messaging that connects and stands out in our market, where there are a ton of healthcare providers and a lot of saturation.
Another challenge would be the financial headwinds everyone is facing and demonstrating our value. In many instances marketing can be seen as a cost center, but we're able to deliver volume and ROI. So we're constantly looking for ways to demonstrate that value, partnering with our operations team, partnering with our finance team, to measure our impact on volume and revenue.
Q: What role does AI play in your marketing strategy at Boston Medical Center?
RF: AI is definitely a tool for us to drive efficiency in our work. We're still in the earlier stages of adopting the technology, but we do know it has a role and can be a great enabler of our work. So we're consistently evaluating new opportunities around that.
Most recently, we've been using it for translations. Thirty percent of our population speaks a language other than English, so it's critical for us to speak to our patients in their language. And so we've been able to drive a lot of efficiencies through that.
We also use it for initial content development. It's a tool for getting us started, but we rely on humans to review, to edit, not only within our team, but our partners on the clinical side and the administrative side.
Q: I saw you worked in other industries prior to healthcare, particularly media. How has that experience informed your healthcare marketing strategy? How is healthcare different?
RF: Having experience in other industries has helped me have a unique perspective and a fresh perspective and approach helps us break through that noise. With this "Rewriting Healthcare" campaign, we went with an agency that had no healthcare experience. As we laid out some of our choices and pros and cons, we thought that was a pro, because in a market as busy as ours, we wanted to break through and stand out.
Another benefit to me, coming from other industries, was learning that advertising is not the only way to connect with audiences. So how we engage with employees and connect with them, because they are great brand ambassadors for us, is critical to the work we do. The most critical thing is how we're in the community. BMC does that very, very well. We are always in the community. We have two-way dialogs. We're building relationships and trust, and that has been very effective in connecting with our patients and having them stay with us over time.
Q: Which marketing project are you most looking forward to in 2025?
RF: We acquired two new hospitals as part of the Steward Health Care bankruptcy: St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton, Mass., and Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.
I'm looking forward to the brand integration work around that, which will be coming this spring. We want to bring them together as part of the BMC Health System family, and have that unified and cohesive brand.
We're really looking forward to how that strengthens our presence in the market, builds those connections in the communities that we talked about, and expands our footprint and amplifies our mission, which is to deliver clinically excellent care that's accessible and equitable.