Project Profile: Munroe Orthopedics

Outcome: Launched an orthopedics brand and increased the orthopedics surgical caseload by over 50% within the first year.

Client: Munroe Orthopedics / Munroe Regional Medical Center, Ocala, FL

The Story: Munroe Regional is a very successful community hospital. Best known for their heart program (Munroe Heart), Munroe Regional is one of the best community hospitals in the country (according to Thompson Reuters). At the same time, they have a rather unusual competitive situation. There are a total of 17 hospitals competing for business in their market, including one for-profit hospital located directly across the street.

Munroe asked us to help them develop, define and launch a formal orthopedics brand.We worked from the ground up, but importantly, Munroe Regional had already done the heavy-lifting of working with the owned and aligned (or somewhat aligned) physicians and practices and senior management to get support for the initiative.

We created an identity for Munroe Orthopedics as well as an aesthetic approach for our communications. That was the easy part. After interviewing all of the physician groups to learn not only the particulars of their capabilities, interests and wants and needs, but also their vision for what Munroe Orthopedics could/should be, we researched the patient and referring physician drivers for orthopedics in the market and developed the insight that would shape the messaging and the delivery strategies.

Because we were both defining and evidencing the new brand, we had a number of levels to our communications—both in terms of campaign components and in terms of intra-communication planks.We knew that there were different drivers and “need to hear’s” among patients and the referral chain with regard to the three principal segments of orthopedics (joints, backs and active/sports medicine) as well as with regard to our principal sub-sections of “hurt:” knees, hips, feet/ankles and shoulders.With that insight and preparation, we broke the first phase of our work early in 2010. From the beginning, the work was very integrated, with advertising, a new micro-site with its own URL, fulfillment literature, and most importantly, an aggressive “feet on the street” component.

We made sure that we involved the physicians on an on-going basis—certainly, by involving them in the feet on the street component; but also by updating the orthopedics clinical team monthly and by making sure that the entire team (physicians, nursing staff, tech staff, senior management, etc.) knew what we were doing and why.

The campaign is into its second year, and we are drilling-out and expanding into secondary media. In October 2010, we took a look at some broad indicators and found that Munroe’s orthopedics surgical caseload had increased by some 55% in the first eight months alone.

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