AMI Tarzana Uses Magazine in Effort to Court Patients : Health Care: The hospital hopes its new quarterly will boost business, countering reductions in Medicare revenue.
The fall issue of Vim & Vigor, the Valley’s Family Health Magazine features Mary Tyler Moore on the cover and a “Kidney Stone Update” inside. Moore’s face gives the magazine some mass appeal. By contrast, “Kidney Stone Update” includes the unappealing revelation that kidney stones can be as large as golf balls.
That may not sound like the kind of information designed to romance consumers. There’s no glamour, no humor. But according to Vim & Vigor editor Patricia Klein, “Kidney Stone Update”--like Moore’s face-- makes for good marketing.
Klein is the public relations manager for AMI Tarzana Regional Medical Center, which recently sent out its first issue of Vim & Vigor to about 20,000 former patients and San Fernando Valley residents.
Joining a trend toward more aggressive advertising by hospitals, AMI Tarzana is hoping that the magazine will showcase its services and bolster its image as a community hospital. That could help the hospital win new patients and cement the loyalty of old ones at a time when government cost controls are eating away at hospital profit margins.
AMI Tarzana, a 212-bed hospital operated by American Medical International in Beverly Hills and owned by American Health Properties of Los Angeles, sends the magazine out for free. The hospital pays Phoenix-based Vim & Vigor Inc. about $170,000 a year to publish customized issues of the quarterly magazine--a service the company provides to about 14 hospitals nationwide.
Vim & Vigor, owned by Preston V. McMurry Jr., provides the bulk of the magazine’s feature stories and prints the magazine. Tarzana’s Klein puts together the rest of the magazine--several pages of stories focusing on AMI Tarzana.
AMI Tarzana is hardly alone among hospitals in launching highly visible marketing ploys. Hospitals nationwide have been trying to boost admissions by advertising. The pressure to act comes from cost-cutting by Medicare, the federal health care for the elderly program, which accounts for as much as 50% of some hospitals’ business, according to Rae Alperstein, an industry analyst for the investment firm Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards in Los Angeles.
The Tarzana hospital’s operator, American Medical International, has been under pressure to improve companywide results since it lost $97 million in its fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, 1986, which forced AMI to sell 37 of its hospitals. Last month, a group backed by the Pritzker family of Chicago completed a $1.7-billion buyout of the health-care giant, amid complaints that the company had not recovered quickly enough from those losses.
Medicare once paid hospitals a fee based on each service given to a Medicare patient. But to encourage hospitals and doctors to economize, in 1983 the government introduced a system under which the program pays a flat fee based only on the ailment.
The new system of so-called DRGs--diagnosis related groups--means hospitals must perform fewer tests and discharge patients sooner to make money. And with patients staying for shorter visits, hospitals need more patients to keep their beds occupied.
A hospital that wants to stay afloat “is going to have to market like crazy,” Alperstein said. “So most have started major marketing programs.”
But can hospitals really drum up business by marketing to consumers?
No way, said Todd B. Richter, an industry analyst for Dean Witter Reynolds in New York. “Most of the marketing done by hospitals is completely inefficient,” Richter said. The problem: “Hospitals like to think people decide what hospital they go to, but they don’t. That decision is typically made by doctors and health maintenance organizations.”
But Lois Green, AMI Tarzana’s assistant administrator for marketing and planning, countered that, “Consumers still have a large say in what hospital they go to.” She said most of the doctors associated with AMI Tarzana are affiliated with more than one hospital and let their patients decide which one to visit.
And as long as that’s true, said Green, it’s smart for AMI Tarzana to try to reach potential patients.
McMurry said straight talk on kidney stones isn’t the magazine’s only attraction. Each issue of Vim & Vigor features a celebrity medical patient on its cover--this issue’s is Moore, who discovered 20 years ago she has diabetes.
“We try as far as reasonable to choose a happy, healthy, wholesome American who has had some health-care experience to share,” said McMurry. Other examples: Paul Newman and a former Miss America. McMurry said “it’s a trade secret” how he persuades the stars to appear on the magazine’s cover.
As for the magazine’s attention to medicine’s less glitzy subjects, McMurry said it’s an approach that draws readers in instead of turning them off.
McMurry said he was once on a plane and watched the woman next to him pick up his copy of Vim & Vigor and read it virtually cover to cover, taking notes. When he asked her about it, McMurry recalled the woman explaining: “Every article in this magazine has to do with a member of my family.”
