Cary Bynum has built his career on breakthrough creative rooted in measurable purpose. A strategist, a creative and the president of 9Rooftops Health, he specializes in helping brands match what they do with what stakeholders want. In conversation with AdForum, Cary discusses the challenges and opportunities facing healthcare brands today, the role of digital transformation in patient care, and how the industry is navigating the intersection of innovation and consumer expectations.
Please provide an overview of the clients and categories you work with in the healthcare and or wellness space. What kind of media channels are you using?
On the provider side, 9Rooftops Health works with academic medical centers, integrated health systems, community hospitals, specialty hospitals and multi-specialty clinics. On the payor side, we work with Medicare advantage plans. We also have considerable experience in the medical device space.
What challenges do they face in marketing, and how are you positioning brand narratives?
For academic medical centers, the primary challenge is a disruption in the traditional funding model. Fewer dollars are coming in from the State, yet the burden of maintaining their tripartite mission, co-funding their medical school partner, and, oftentimes, being a safety net hospital, continues to grow. This means, they are challenged with competing for lower-acuity procedures, which requires a whole different value proposition and care delivery model than they were built for.
For community hospitals, the challenge is multi-fold:
Financially, reimbursement continues to tighten while the demand to maintain high performance in quality measures persists.
Retailization, although a now tired, almost antiquated term, continues to be a thing for many, if not most health systems. Rising to the challenge of competing in a consumer-driven market by creating a better consumer experience is still difficult. The need to truly embrace digital transformation as it applies to becoming more seamless, accessible and personalized for the consumer is largely still in its infancy.
Another issue that all provider organizations are facing is COVID hangover in the form of staff burnout. Much of the work we are asked to do includes helping rejuvenate employee engagement and retention.
Given the growing market for wearables and overall innovation in consumer health, what are the opportunities for healthcare brands? Is new technology and social media helping people move to better health?
There is certainly some progress in this area as health systems attempt to improve their abilities to incorporate and utilize consumer-driven health technology as part of standard care practices, but in our opinion, with the exception of the players who were born in other spaces like retail, tech, and non-traditional healthcare, i.e. the Googles, Apples, Amazons, Wal-Marts, etc., most are still lagging in their ability to take advantage of the tech solutions that are available. As an example, it is still common to find health systems that are struggling with true on-line scheduling as an offering.
What trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on your clients in the next few years?
Using data to identify individuals who are on a clear path to developing a specific diagnosis, such as cancer, diabetes, orthopedic and neurological conditions, etc., and doing so years before there are symptoms, or in some cases, before the disease actually occurs. This ability to predict disease exists to a large degree now but is only now being somewhat considered in any meaningful way in the discussion of personalized medicine. This will change quickly as discussions move farther away from early diagnosis to redefining what it means to “early prevent.”