By Anthony Cirillo

When Lowe's Home Improvement recently announced that all employees who needed cardiac surgery would go to Cleveland Clinic, it made me pause. Living just miles from Lowe's headquarters (near Charlotte, N.C.) and surrounded by very good major medical centers, I would have liked to be a fly on the wall when local hospital officials heard the news. The announcement must have sent shock waves through them.

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Lowe's realizes that while the initial cost may be higher (or not), they are paying for the Clinic's quality and betting that overall costs (fueled typically by possible readmissions, etc.) will be lower because their employees will be taken care of right the first time.

I have been working in medical tourism since my first trip to Dubai in 2004. I have continually tried to bring the message back home to U.S. hospitals that medical tourism does not just mean going overseas or for that matter going to the Cleveland Clinic. Yet my warnings always fall on deaf ears.

Niche Thyself

Hospitals continually want to be all things to all people. They can't. People will start self-selecting based on their "shopping" experiences. Yes, there are varied opinions about how much consumers pay attention and research the ratings that are out there. And more are coming. Take Nevada, whose draft bill would require hospitals to report preventable injuries. And there are increasing calls to document patient experience well beyond the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS).

Here's the thing. Boomers WILL travel for their health care using planes, trains, and automobiles. So if my new knee can be done more cheaply with better quality and a great experience (think joint camp) then I am driving three counties or states over to get it. You can bet those employers will be looking at this well before the consumer!

Market Differently

Which brings us to the next point. Healthcare marketing must change. Your audience is not just the primary, secondary, and tertiary coverage areas. Your audience also consists of caregivers 3,000 miles away looking out for mom and dad, corporations, and educated consumers. So please ditch the mass media. The way to reach this audience will be by leveraging social media, SEO, and through influential blogging that conveys a point of view about what healthcare should really look like.

Experiences Matter

Which leads to my third point that probably should be my second point. The total experience matters, as Fred Lee showed us in his book, If Disney Ran Your Hospital. So please marketing, leverage great experiences and stories. But do not try to take the lead on managing experiences. Rather, manage expectations, then make sure you exceed them when people come. And do not promise what you cannot deliver.

I think there will be a backlash from consumers who may opt out of traditional insurance, pay the penalties, carry catastrophic coverage and then shop for everything else. Critical access hospitals may find that those who had no insurance in the past, now with a newly minted insurance card, may decide to go not to the only place that would take them in the past, but to the place that will provide the best care.

So take local medical tourism to heart and think differently about pretty much every strategy you have employed to this point.

So how does all this "move" you? Send me an email at Cirillo@4wardfast.com and let's continue this discussion.

Anthony Cirillo, FACHE, ABC, is president of Fast Forward Consulting, which specializes in experience management and strategic marketing for healthcare facilities.