Healthcare Case Studies

What happens when a 1,500-year-old tradition isn’t getting the attention it deserves? More specifically, when people who are interested in learning, knowing and most importantly—engaging in your tradition—don’t have you on their radar?

For the Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery, the answer was found in an increase in social media publishing and a new, more strategic website.

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.

When the hospital’s regional director for marketing communications recommended we create a paperless report and house it on the hospital’s new website, we ran with it. Instead of offering the report on the site as a traditional PDF download, we suggested using a format that would be truly intriguing and interactive to make the report come alive. We also suggested driving our wide and varied target audience to the site by teasing them with advertising containing a taste of the rich visuals in the report, as well as copy touting the people and spirit of the Eau Claire community.

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.

The Miller-Dwan Foundation (MDF) is the largest independent, public, medical foundation in northeastern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin and northern Michigan. Recently, MDF envisioned and raised funds to build and maintain the region’s only hospice house. The foundation’s current project includes a campaign to raise funds to construct a groundbreaking, new child and adolescent mental health facility.

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.

A regional tertiary care center, Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is equal parts leading-edge technology and genuine patient-centered care. While its website was packed full of important information for consumers and referring physicians, that information was either screaming for attention on the site’s home page or hidden within the confines of the site’s inner pages.

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.