Steven Altschuler Talks CHOP Strategy
April 3, 2011
Posted by chcablogadmin in : Growth, Innovation, Leadership
(Note: Read article first for full information.)
Steven Altschuler
Q: In the Philadelphia Inquirer article, you talk about less revenue per patient as a reality in the current and future environment. What does that mean to your bottom line? Do you have additional revenue diversification strategies that you could share with other children’s hospital CEOs?
Steven Altschuler: As we look ahead, we must continue to plan for a number of challenges, including the uncertainty of health care reform; the growing demand for increased value; transparency and accountability; stricter and more regulated reimbursement models; the emergence of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that manage individual health and wellness through team-based growth with less revenue. No one can actually predict what the future will bring, but we can anticipate, plan and act in order to influence and shape the future.
Q: Can you share any cost reduction initiatives to address lower revenue-per-patient realities?
Altschuler: We are seeing more patients and continuing to deliver high-quality care while dramatically improving our outcomes in terms of safety and quality of care. These are some of the defining aspects that make CHOP stand out. It is also clear to me that if we are to thrive in a new health care environment, we will have to focus on the cost of our services as much as we focus on quality and outcomes. We are beginning to see insurance companies building incentives into their reimbursement plans. I see this as a new trend that will likely impact where patients receive care based on cost of services.
As a children’s hospital, CHOP has a cost structure that tends to be higher in the market and it’s clear that to compete we will have to understand our costs more critically than we do today, so that we can develop new models that will lower our cost structure. Over the past two years, we have participated in meaningful cost reduction that has solidified the financial stability of this institution and it is critically important that we continue to manage costs appropriately.
Q: How do you retain the brand other than keeping the same treatment protocols and IT infrastructure? Is there a marketing awareness campaign, renaming the current brand with a CHOP affiliation or a strategy around having breadth and depth of services to compete locally and regionally?
Altschuler: We have worked very hard in recent years to streamline and instill consistency into our institutional branding, evolving both how we present ourselves visually, through logos, marks and images, and how we speak about our vast offerings to our numerous constituents.
Within the past two years we have rebranded both our research organization and our care network to better leverage the name of the institution. And we have introduced new partnerships such as “CHOP at Virtua,” fully leveraging the equity and awareness of our brand name. These evolutionary brand changes have been made to add clarity and consistency to our communications which we believe promotes stronger awareness and understanding of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia among our audiences.
While the majority of CHOP’s marketing efforts are multi-dimensional and targeted to current and potential referring clinical audiences nationally and internationally, we have recently begun advertising to consumers in our regional markets to increase awareness of our growing network presence (50 sites in the region) and luminary clinical programs which draw from across the country and around the globe. In addition, public relations and social media have become increasingly important components of our marketing mix, enabling us to both expand our presence and engage with audiences in new and impactful ways.
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