What if social marketers began tackling the really wicked problems around health and health care? Where might we start?
More than 100 CEOs were recently convened by The Wall Street Journal to discuss and prioritize the most pressing public policy and business issues. One of the task forces focused on remaking health care. Here are their top four recommendations.
Population Health Management
Explicitly gear our system around population health. Create public-private
partnerships to encourage healthy behavior, and identify specialty populations
with unique needs, such as the seriously mentally ill. Reshape financial
incentives to meet the goal of population health, and build capacity and
reimbursement systems to support it. Have the administration clarify how to
deal with the huge shift into insurance exchanges.
Transparent Standards
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services should develop, and require all
public-health programs to adopt, uniform standards for health-care service
quality, performance and price transparency so consumers can make value
choices. And it should encourage states to follow suit.
New Delivery Models
Use the full continuum of care givers, such as nurses and other professionals.
Create uniform standards for licensing care givers across the country, and
encourage more care in retail clinics, pharmacies and other sites. Require
patients' medical data to be available electronically.
Primary Care
Provide incentives to correct the imbalance of specialists to primary-care
doctors by changing reimbursement rates, increasing funding for undergraduate
and graduate medical education for primary care, and forgiving medical-school
loans. Increase focus on advanced nurses and nurse practitioners as care
providers.
If I were giving an essay final examination for advanced social marketers, it would look something like this:
- Assume this group of CEOs has asked you to help them design
an approach to address one of these four issues. Select one of them and draft
a situation analysis that includes important individual, organizational and
marketplace variables that are contributing to the current situation. What are some of the major competitive forces to consider? Identify
any existing practices, programs or policies that might shed light on possible
solutions to the puzzle. List up to five 3-5 year potential objectives. What are possible strategies to consider?
- Based on this analysis, identify up to five priority groups that would be the focus of your social marketing approach.
- Describe three research studies you would conduct to better inform your strategy and approach – especially questions they would each address and among what group(s).
- From what you currently know (given the results of your research projects are not yet available), outline a social marketing approach for at least three priority groups that moves towards solutions for this issue.
Yes, this would be a “take-home” and “open book” examination and you have a week to complete it. Are you ready?
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