The North West Ontario Health Authority (NW) is changing its processes as an organization. Over the last three years the government agency has tried to operate more like a business. Since it has a monopoly on healthcare services in north west Ontario, this has been a difficult transition. They have implemented changes to their Human Resources and Information Technology departments and are now creating a "Marketing" department which used to be called "Communications".

The need for change was precipitated by the pandemic. For over a year, NW was the unwelcome messenger of bad news. All lockdown, vaccine mandate, and infection number news came from the agency. This has made NW the "bad guy" for a lot of its constituents. The Authority is now looking to soften their image. The mandate from the NW executives is that those served by NW are aware of what it does for their communities.

An initial assessment of the authority's constituents shows that there are three types of people who interact with NW: current patients, regular patients, and the general public. Current patients are classified as people who normally do not have long term stays at hospitals but are currently receiving such care. They could be people who have a bad infection, their first heart attack, or in an accident that requires medical attention. Regular patients are people who, because of their health issues, regularly visit the hospital. These people may have diabetes, cancer, or general poor health. They tend to be much older than the general population. The general public are people who may have some slight connection to the Health Authority, such as through regular checkups, but for the most part their interaction with NW comes from visiting patients in the hospital, hearing about the Authority on the news, and through health warnings and advisories. According to the survey, regular and current patients feel that NW services have declined during the pandemic, but that NW will naturally correct itself. The general public on the other hand feels that the NW experience is subpar and desperately needs to be improved with a complete overhaul of the system.

The new marketing approach is to focus on the general public. NW's vision is for people in their region to live healthy lives. Their general goal is to be the top provider of medical care in Ontario, and their objectives are to have the lowest wait times, highest vaccination rates, and highest satisfaction for long term care in the province. This will be a challenge since NW covers a large area of Ontario that includes a diverse group of people. This challenge was seen as an opportunity, and NW has worked hard over the last five years to be very community oriented.

To be more community oriented, the old communications department gathered information from patients. Methods included surveys of regular patients, exit surveys for current patients, monitoring social media, and email. Using email for communication was difficult since it tended to get lost or ignored. NW's website is notorious for being difficult. Visitors must go through multiple webpages before finding the right contact information. Therefore, most people usually send their complaints to the general email which means that these complaints can get easily lost.

The marketing department wants to use more modern methods. Justin Scott Jr., the current head of marketing, thinks that a community app may be one way to "market" to the community. The app could provide health tips, alerts, and new services. For instance, by connecting the app to medical records, patients could receive lab information, general interpretation of lab data, and the ability to make appointments using the app.

A new objective of the department is to highlight the ways hospitals and general services help the community. For instance, many people do not know that new medical machines have been recently purchased by NW. These

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machines provide services that used to only be available in Ottawa or Toronto. Residents should understand how NW makes their lives better.

Another area that needs changes is the SEO strategy for NW. Of course, NW does not use SEO to create general awareness since most people know about the Authority, but they do use SEO to highlight stories of NW's impact in the community. The communication department tried to achieve this goal by posting stories on their website and trying to boost the reach of those stories. Their idea was to use PPC ads to promote these stories when people searched for NW. However, the quality scores for these ads declined over time. Here is an example of an ad.

MRI in the North West

Ad· https/stories.nwh.ontario.ca

There's some interesting MRI news circulating throughout North West Ontario! Since the installation of the two new machines in Kenora and Dryden, and a new replacement unit in Thunder Bay, the north west

region has seen some pretty incredible results..

What MRI Scans Cover

Our scans cover the brain, liver, urinary, digestive systems & more

For Patients

Simple scan for 330 cancers and medical conditions

 

The campaign tied to these ads used a modified match keyphrase for their ads. For instance, one campaign used the keyphrase "exciting NW news", where it would replace any synonym for "exciting" in the search terms.

Another idea that Justin had was for the marketing department to implement a patient relationship management system. Similar to a CRM, this system would support the patient's journey through the healthcare authority. All individuals in NW would be able to have access to the patient data they need to provide services effectively and efficiently. The system would capture patient health data and synchronize that information throughout the system. Justin also wants to supplement this patient system with social media. The old communication department maintained a presence on many social media platforms, but they believed that it provided very little return. However, they wanted to be on all social media to ensure that they could communicate with everyone. Since this is an essential capability of all Health Authorities in Canada, Justin doesn't want to leave all social media. However, he believes that the department should think strategically about the use of social media and focus on using social media monitoring tools to determine patient sentiment.

Due to the public nature of the organization, there are many other places other than social media where people discuss NW. Healthcare discussions about NW occur on reddit forums as well as local community pages open to the public. A lot of the frustrations and anger towards NW are expressed on these public sites.

Justin has a big task to take on but he is ready to bring marketing to healthcare.

 

1. How would you suggest Justin conduct a targeting strategy for North West Health?

2. Based on their goals, what is the brand persona of North West Health? Justify your answer.

3. What metrics from google analytics can be used to help with the targeting strategy discussed in Question 1?

4. Based on your targeting strategy in Question 1 what specific sources of data would you need to access? Justify your answer.

5. Explain both the waterfall and agile development process for developing the community app. Which would you choose and why?

6. What tool would be best for paper prototyping the apps design, mockups or wireframes? Justify your answer.

7. How would both augmented and virtual reality help with the goals of the app? Which would be the most useful? Justify your answer.
8. Out of the nine mobile design principles, which one(s) is/are the most important for the app? Why?

9. Is off or on-page optimization more important for NW's SEO strategy? Explain your answer.
10. The company's previous ad campaign did not work. Based on the information in the case what do you think was the problem (ad relevance, landing page or CTR)? Explain your answer.

11. Did they choose the right keyword-matching technique? Why or why not?

12. Create "CRM" strategy for NW based on the information about the patient relationship management system? Explain your answers. 

13. Identify useful operational and analytical features of the patient relationship management system. Explain why they are useful.

14. How should NW use social media strategically to achieve their goals? Using the social media application matrix identify the social media app (describe what features the app should have) to achieve these goals. Explain your answers. 

15. How would you use a social media API to help achieve NW's goals? Justify your answer.
16. What content structure and substance would be best for the social media campaign discussed in Question 14. Justify your answer. 

17. How would NW be able to use the SEAMS framework to achieve their goals. Explain how the process would work and justify your answers.
18. Out of the nine characteristics of social media that are important for public relations and communications, which one(s) is/are the most important for NW? Justify your answer. 

19. Explain how NW could use ethical ORM to achieve their marketing goals. Justify your answer. 

20. What type of onboarding email would you use to welcome new users to the app? Explain your answer.