INTRODUCTION
According to a global risk and business consulting firm, a strong culture of responsible business behavior can contribute to lowering costs, increasing effectiveness and sustaining reputation during times of trouble. That means reputation management should not be limited to the communications department of your hospital.
Assuming you have CEO buy-in, here’s how to implement a reputation management campaign for your hospital, clinic or health system.
DEVELOP PLAN TO MANAGE REPUTATION RISKS
First, list your hospital’s business goals. Examples:
- Be listed as a “Best Place to Work”
- Improve 30-day readmission rates
- Achieve consistent outcomes regardless of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic class
Next, list your reputation goals. You would have developed them when you determined your hospital’s reputation baseline. For example, a reputation goal could be, “75% of patients view our staff as ‘courteous and respectful’.” Sort these reputation goals underneath the corresponding business goals.
Take the reputation risks you’ve previously identified and categorize them underneath the related reputation goals. In other words, which risks (e.g. cybersecurity breach) correspond to which reputation goals (e.g. “90% of patients trust us as competent in protecting their sensitive data”)? In addition, list how you will prevent and mitigate each of these risks.
It’s also important to determine what tools you will use to monitor your reputation on an ongoing basis. For example, you may be using patient satisfaction surveys offline and mention.com online.
Finally, present this plan to the board of directors so they can integrate it into their strategy setting and business planning to make better decisions.
USE CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS TO EXECUTE PLAN
You should assign members of your cross-functional team to execute the prevention and mitigation portions of the plan. For example, the IT department would be tasked with implementing new training programs to prevent employee-caused cyber breaches.
Each month, the team should reconvene to report on its efforts and to seek advice/feedback from other team members.
EVALUATE YOUR EFFORTS
Use the aforementioned tools to track your efforts while the plan is being executed. That way, if you aren’t seeing a trend toward positive results, you can tweak the strategies and tactics immediately.
As you complete portions of your reputation management plan, you’ll need to re-assess your reputation risks. Some will invariably require less attention thanks to your prevention and mitigation efforts. In addition, based on new business strategies created by the board, you may need to add new reputation risks to the plan, which, after all, is a living document.