How to integrate your population health strategy into your brand strategy.

If you’ve made significant progress on a population health-focused care delivery model and a value-based care operational model, you have likely built competitive advantages that should be reflected in your brand strategy.

This is especially important if you are among the one-third of health systems that are past the “Dabbler” stage of value-based care adoption, based on Advisory Board data. And as physicians are growing more confident in their ability to succeed under risk-based models, also according to Advisory Board research, the need for strategies to assimilate value-based care and population health into health system brand strategies will continue to grow.

We at Core have the unique vantage point of having recently worked with two highly successful population health-based health systems to reflect their approaches in their brand strategies and creative platforms. Below are our observations on how that has been successfully done in our partnerships.

TriHealth built an emotional connection through excellent patient experience and outcomes.

Two of the pillars of the population health model — and two of its biggest benefits — are an improved patient experience and better health outcomes. TriHealth, a Cincinnati-based integrated system with over 14,000 team members, is delivering these benefits in spades and is consistently rated among the top accountable care organizations in Ohio and the United States. They formed their population health organization in 2016 and began a cultural transformation that would support their population health strategy, under the leadership of CEO Mark Clement. They partnered with Core in 2023 to develop a new expression of their brand.

In strategic discovery work, Core and TriHealth identified an essential brand truth: the depth to which TriHealth meets the all-too-often unmet emotional needs of consumers — helping them feel seen and heard as people, a necessity to reassure them that they are realizing the best health outcomes. This insight drove the creation of the “Be Seen. Be Heard. Be Healed.” brand platform.

You can view the TriHealth brand work and its results here.

Now, with the “Be Seen. Be Heard. Be Healed.” campaign established, we are working with TriHealth to evolve their advertising and create exciting consumer activations to tell the deeper, underlying stories of population health and increase consumer understanding of how TriHealth’s model is different from other systems.

A regional health system connected with audiences based on shared purpose and engaged communities in a unified “movement” to improve health and wellbeing.

In 2021, a Midwest regional health system and Core partnered on a new campaign to express the brand mission and vision. For an organization deeply inspired by its population health-driven purpose, the campaign was the ideal reflection of their brand aspirations. In our brand strategy work, we believe that brand expressions should be just “aspirational enough”; that is, aspirational enough to be inspiring, and not so aspirational that they aren’t true. This brand campaign lives right in the “sweet spot” for the health system.

So, how should YOUR system approach branding population health?

There’s more than one right way to peel an orange, and more than one “right” way to approach branding population health. Population health is, of course, a complex topic, and no single ad or campaign can say it all effectively. It becomes a strategic choice as to the right way for your system to roll it into its brand communications.

The best strategy for your system is dependent on many factors, foremost among them being your stage of population health adoption, organizational mission and vision, strengths (e.g. patient experience, health outcomes, access, affordability) and community and consumer needs.

We at Core deeply understand and admire value-based care and population health and love this particular branding challenge. We’d love to speak with you if you share our passion for it.