Since the beginning of January, students in Health Care Strategies for the 21st Century have worked with local health care professionals to develop strategic market strategies for their organizations.
Elon students this week presented detailed plans to a range of local health care providers as the culmination of weeks of work exploring how strategic marketing can help address challenges within a changing health care industry.
Sitting down with their clients on Tuesday, teams of students walked through each organization’s marketing strengths and challenges, and offered detailed advice on how to identify customer needs, deliver a higher level of value and how to gauge the effectiveness of the efforts.
These presentations marked the culmination of work within the Health Care Strategies for the 21st Century, a Elon Core Curriculum capstone course taught during the Winter Term by Bob Stevens, adjunct instructor in management. Now in its eighth offering, the course each year works with different health care organizations within the local community as students learn the ins and outs of strategic marketing, and how to apply it to an organization’s goals.
“The idea here is to show students a practical, pragmatic approach to using marketing to improve the health of a local area,” Stevens said. “We partner with different groups every year, and this year has been superb.”
During this year’s course, students have been working with Piedmont Health SeniorCare, Burlington Pediatrics and the Burlington Vocational Rehabilitation Services office within the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. Coursework includes gaining a better understanding of what marketing means, as well as studying the local health care environment to understand what’s going on from a demographic standpoint, as well as aspects such as public policy and how providers are compensated for providing care.
Outside the classroom, students have met with leaders in the local health care community such as Preston Hammock, president of Alamance Regional Medical Center and a senior vice president at Greensboro-based Cone Health.
Sitting down with Marianne Ratcliffe, executive director of Piedmont Health SeniorCare, Waverley Lyons ’18 explained that PHSC should focus its marketing efforts on more than just raising awareness of the group’s name.
“We want to make sure the quality you deliver is linked to the knowledge people have about PHSC,” Lyons told Ratcliffe.
The idea is for the organizations that the students work with to walk away from the collaboration with concrete ideas that they can act on, Stevens said. At the same time, students get to have hands-on experience working with professionals to determine their marketing needs, and crafting potential solutions. “All three of these groups have been really looking to get some help, and these students get to provide some guidance,” Stevens said.
Dario Morando ’17 is majoring in entrepreneurship, and said the experience of working with an active health care organization is invaluable in terms of gaining the business skills he’ll need going forward. His team helped craft solutions for the Vocational Rehabilitation Services office, and he said it was fascinating to zero in on the challenges they face in marketing. “We realized they are not able to market the way they want to, but we were able to provide them with a good number of ideas,” he said.
Lyons also praised the ability to work interactively with professionals in the health care field to better understand the obstacles they face in reaching a broader audience. An international studies major, Lyons is minoring in marketing. “This gave me a chance to apply my knowledge in a real-life context,” Lyons said.