Healthcare Case Studies

SMDC Health System is a healthcare leader headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota. The system includes a downtown healthcare campus and three neighborhood clinic locations in Duluth Minnesota, as well as 4 hospitals and 12 community clinics throughout northeastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin.

North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale, Minnesota rightly wanted to announce some impressive HealthGrades awards it had just won. The problem was the hospital had advertised very sparingly over the past few years.

After investing heavily in the technology and clinical talent it needed to transform itself from a community hospital to a regional tertiary care center, Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin found itself continuing to be perceived as the region’s warm, compassionate community hospital. While its major competitor, a Mayo Health System affiliate, enjoyed a reputation as the leader in technology and innovation.

In May 2009, we were given the opportunity to create a Web site for Maple Grove Hospital, the first new inpatient hospital to be built in Minnesota in more than two decades. The Web site would launch two months before the opening of Maple Grove’s December 2009 opening. When we first met with the hospital’s leadership construction on the hospital was still underway.

While Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Marshfield, Wisconsin’s reputation for exceptional care was well-known, the over 20 children’s specialty services available at its children’s hospital—a hospital within a hospital—were less so. Perception among a percentage of parents in the hospital’s service area was that they needed to travel to Madison, Milwaukee or Minneapolis/St. Paul to find the expert services and physician specialists they sought.

Flying under the radar, Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin had consistently delivered outstanding patient care, earning Top 1% patient satisfaction scores for three years in a row from 2006 through 2009. They had even become a training center for administrators and other healthcare leaders from all over the country. Despite all of that, survey’s revealed the competition, a Mayo-affiliated facility, was seen as “more preferred for all health needs.”

Praxis International, a renowned, nonprofit organization working to end violence against women, received federal funding to develop a national public awareness campaign to help stop domestic violence in very rural areas and looked to us for help.

SMDC Health System in Duluth, Minnesota wanted to proactively address a reoccurring seasonal lull in orthopaedic consults and procedures between October and February.

The employees, volunteers and physicians of the Miller-Dwan Medical Center have always been a generous group, though not necessarily to the Miller-Dwan Foundation.