The Makings of a Marketing Director

No one could ever complain that they don't know how I feel. Take this picture for example. I was probably around five years old, Down the shore in Wildwood. Grandmom had ticked me off for some reason. I feel good looking at this picture. Makes me feel like I was born this way.

Marketing directors use this look a lot. We often need to express our displeasure and having a look that will get one action is important. We are constantly evaluating, sizing things up. At the same time, we have people relentlessly coming at us--selling, complaining, wanting more, better, faster. No wonder we're all in a bad mood.

The challenge of being in my line of work at a place like Lourdes is that they expect associates (i.e., employees) to provide a level of courtesy that exceeds your average job. Some days it is really hard. This is actually the hardest part of my job. I used to have my own business and we would fire customers we didn't like. Can't do that here. And when you have vendors or salespeople who are eating up your time, its nearly impossible. People who work near me can attest to that.

So it is a bit of a tightrope--trying to be nice, or at least professional--when people are getting on your last nerve.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Just not the story you think.

Pictured here is WXPN Musician On Call Volunteer Guide Trainer Extraordinaire, Kimberly Massengill, and one-third of the South Jersey band Showin' Tell, Nicolino. While the picture shows Kim doing her best Gene Simmons imitation, in homage to Nicolino's KISS tattoo, there really is so much more here than meets the eye.

In April, WXPN Musicians On Call launched at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center -- the only hospital in all of New Jersey to participate in this program that brings live music to the patient's bedside. At the launch April 18, we were thrilled to have New York Artist Kenli Mattus and our very own "Born at Lourdes" Birdie Busch. Both serenaded staff and guests and then went out to visit patients on our Rehab floor. Honestly, I never saw people so happy in a hospital before.

That event was where I first met Kim and learned she has trained all of the Musicians On Call guides. Since then, and for the last several weeks, she has taken the Amtrak down from New York to help train Lourdes volunteers as well. These individuals take time out of their lives to spend a few hours in the hospital, helping the musicians navigate the delicate social (and sometimes emotional) interactions that occur when you walk into a perfect stranger's hospital room. You never know what you will get. People are stressed, hurting, anxious. The guides need to be resilient people. Kim clearly has seen it all and is a great teacher.

I hung around these past few weeks to be sure no one got lost, but mostly got to stand back in awe and watch Kim do her thing. Through her I got to observe what true Southern hospitality is. Our guides are fantastic as well. We are very lucky.

I can't tell you how much this program has meant to the hospital. People have been touched by the time the volunteer guides and musicians have taken to be somewhere they could clearly have choosen not to be. I've watched from the hall as volunteer musicians make people smile when just a few minutes before they looked pretty stressed. I've watched patients and families listen together from an adjoining room, tapping their feet in silence and nodding their heads. The night this photo was taken, Showin' Tell played on our maternity floor. This was pretty exciting stuff. No one in the history of the Musician On Call program had played for a maternity unit before and everyone was pretty happy. One family had just welcomed a new baby and, as die-hard XPN fans, they were thrilled to learn they were getting a Musicians On Call performance. It was a nice celebration for them.

All of this is just the kind of transforming, healing experience we try to be a Lourdes. And we are grateful.

Thinking Out of the Box

I've kind of boxed myself in with taking such a narrow angle on this blog--wanting to write exclusively about the blog and our "journey." It is kind of giving me writer's block--mainly because I've been neglecting the blog myself and haven't had time to rally the troops (the other bloggers) or go out and get additional ones. Dr. Miller suggested we get together again, especially since we had such a successful initial meeting, and also because it will help us to form a bit of a writer's group. But events (and in marketing it is literally events) have gotten in the way. We had a well attended heart month event with Dr. Mimi Guarneri from Scripps at the Enterprise Center on February 6 and just yesterday, our Health Careers Day at the Moorestown Mall. Among the activities we offered--besides an up close view of our Da Vinci robot--was a chance for kids to play dress up as doctors and nurses. Check out Josh's little girl, at right.

It also didn't help my schedule that I chose this time to enter Yoga Teacher Training at the Lourdes Institute of Wholistic Studies, but I credit my time taking those classes with keeping my cool. Plus, there is nothing like immersing yourself in another part of an organization to see things from a whole new perspective--and to learn things you didn't know. For instance, I found out we provide yoga therapy to cardiac patients. That is pretty cool.

And the other thing that we all do, which takes time since I'm not stationed at the hosptial, is patient rounding. I can imagine this is not everyone's cup of tea, and some days I'm not up for it, but I am committed to it. Patient rounding is when associates go visit patients. (We have assigned rooms.) We do this as a check on our customer service and patient care, and to try to bridge some gaps that may occur. Even when I'm not feeling up for it, I always find it to be interesting, and often I meet great people. Usually people are quite happy with the service; sometimes they aren't, or just need some help but a particular issue or concern. Sometimes they just need to talk. I had a nice conversation with a man the other day about our mutual dislike for "Mcmansions" and the over-development of land. The other week I met with a man who did not speak English. The enviornmental services associate. Carmen, translated for me and we could tell something was up. He said the care was fine but that he was feeling a 'little down." I asked if he would want a visit from pastoral care and he said he would. Turned out they had visited him earlier but had not realized he had been transferred to a different floor.

So, always lots to do, but just like patient rounding, we are committed to the blog. For now, at least, it will just evolve a bit slower than we would like.

Grass Not Greener in NJ/Blog #4

Friday we had our quarterly leadership development institute. It is sort of a retreat day where we focus on a particular topic or issue. This one was a reflection of last year's accomplishments and next year's goals, but the day began with a presentation of a report, the result of a effort by the New Jersey Hospital Association to obtain an independent and objective analysis (a "warts and all" review) of the state of New Jersey's hospitals. They chose Accenture, which I think did a great job.


Before I worked at Lourdes, I worked for a hospital trade association and I've seen a lot of reports. Some can be self-serving, but this one is quite good because it demonstates that everyone needs to try harder in order to make real improvements in the in the delivery of care.

Up until now, I've spent my healthcare career in Pennsylvania. When I started at Lourdes last year, I could tell that the regulatory environment was much different, and in particular the organization of physicians and their relationships with hospitals. The Accenture presentation helped to clarify those differences and to point out how public policy, government programs and compensatory behavior conspire to create circumstances that impact hospitals, and more importantly, the patients they serve.

As just one example: New Jersey ranks 33rd in the use of hospice care among Medicare patients in the last stages of life. That means a lot of things. It means patients are probably being overtreated. It can mean that doctors and nurses are failing to have good, honest discussions with families. It means families and patients are not facing reality and demanding that "everything be done" when in fact the compassionate and decent thing would be to make sure the patient is provided as many dignified and pain-free last days as possible.

A summary of the report can be found at: http://www.njha.com/publications/HCNJ/HCNJV15No6.pdf

Back to Reality: Blog/Blog 3

Looks like the holidays took a bit of a toll on our blog. If everyone else has been like me, the new year started out busy and hasn't let up. And it doesn't look like it is easing up any time soon. Lots to do. The March issue of our Physician's Practice Magazine supplement had to get done and we were running late. We needed to get the ad out for our first heart month event, and two presentations, not the least of which the big "Our Blog Test Kitchen" talk at the "Using the New Web 2.0 for Corporate Communications" seminar at Philadelphia University.http://www.prwebfire.com/

Personally, I had a great time and learned a lot. It was also very inspiring. Great company all around. Met some nice people from our friends at Fox Chase and got to see our buddies from Main Line Health. Also present, Mr. Al Paul Lefton, President of one of Philadelphia's premier advertising agencies. I had to tell him how much I respected him as a result of a Philadelphia Business Journal profile a few years back. In it, he talked about how their agency does not participate in awards contests. I can't tell you what a refreshing move that is, especially these days. All of those agency awards are a big scam. It's like kindergarten where everybody winds up with a prize. You pay to enter and are pretty much guaranteed something when you leave at the end of the dinner. Plus, the award winners are not required to demonstrate any ROI for the client. Don't get me started.

Christopher Barger from IBM gave a terrific keynote, with lots of content and good examples, including a mention that some of IBM's 250 bloggers are focused exclusively on healthcare. I checked it out and will be linking some of them, and their links, very soon. IBM has quite a vision as to how blogging fits into the corporate structure, and it was good to hear him end his talk with some tips on when not to blog--which was kind of where I was headed with my presentation. One of his points was not to blog if you don't have a goal in mind.

In preparing my talk, I was thinking about the reasons we became involved in this project, and one of them was that it allowed us to provide a new media outlet to reflect the mission and values of this organization.

The conference offered lots of value-added information. I feel lucky to have been there and that we were given this opportunity. For those who missed what I had to say, here's the cribnote version what I said. I explained:

1. How we got involved


2. Why we got involved (one of them--it was a way for us to reflect our values and mission through new media)


3. The process we used to gain buy in and get it rolling


4. And yeah, we're glad we did it.

I finally figured out how to link files (hooray), and at the conference I got a good explanation of the whole RSS feed thing, so I promise next post I'll add some content.

Also learned one other thing. We need to keep this more regular, so I need to check in with our bloggers. And I think it is time to perhaps search for a few more to lighten the load.