This year, Modern Healthcare and Advertising Age partnered to create the Healthcare Marketing IMPACT Awards to recognize healthcare's best advertising, marketing, promotion and communication campaigns on and across all media platforms.
Quint Studer is a born storyteller, and he often uses his unorthodox entrée into healthcare to convince hospital leaders that focusing on their employees is the surest path to improving patient satisfaction and the hospital's image in the community.
In the 1980s, he was a special education teacher in Janesville, Wis., with a serious drinking problem. Admitting he needed help, he began attending meetings at a 35-bed drug-and-alcohol treatment center, where he discovered they needed someone in community outreach. He leaped at the chance.
By visiting community groups and large employers in the region, some of which were hospitals, he realized that instead of cajoling employees to get help, he needed to focus on their managers. “They had to get better at recognizing personnel with problems,” he recalled.
A few years later, he moved on to become chief operating officer of Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, where local physicians were balking at admitting their patients because they frequently complained about their experiences. Through better training of hospital department managers, he engineered a turnaround that gained national attention and a visit from troubled Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, Fla., which hired him as president.
“Holy Cross is where the light bulb clicked on,” he said. “The way you create great service is by creating a great place to work. The key is creating great supervisors.”
Over the next four years, he took Baptist, a hospital ranked in the ninth percentile in patient satisfaction with a 30% turnover rate, to one of the top-ranked hospitals in the nation. In 2000, he launched the Studer Group because his experiences there had taught him that “there were techniques that were transferrable.”
Today, the Studer Group has 227 employees and a roster of clients that include some of the largest for-profit and not-for-profit hospital chains in the country, including HCA Corp., Community Health Systems and Kaiser Permanente. He is the author of seven self-published books, including Hardwiring Excellence.
And he has a roster of satisfied clients who have bought into his mantra that successful community outreach and marketing begins with a relentless focus on training middle managers to capture the hearts and minds of the hospital workforce. “You have to understand going into it he's not going to transform you,” said Frank Sacco, CEO of the $1.6 billion Memorial Health System in Hollywood, Fla. “He's going to teach you how to transform yourself.”
It all starts with Studer's ability to translate his message into language that everyone in the hospital understands. “He sees the big picture and communicates that in ways that appeal to executives like me and caregivers and nurses and the like,” said David Dunlap, CEO of Roper St. Francis Healthcare in Charleston, S.C., who was first exposed to Studer's techniques while managing Tenet Healthcare Corp. facilities in Louisiana. “It sounds simple, but they really do drive up engagement and the morale of the workforce.”
For his pioneering work in recognizing how employee engagement and management training lead directly to improvements in patient satisfaction and community reputation, for creating proven methods for achieving those goals and for his exemplary skills at communicating his message, Modern Healthcare is proud to name Quint Studer winner of the inaugural Healthcare Marketing Visionary IMPACT Award.
Follow Merrill Goozner on Twitter: @MHgoozner
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