HLTH5673 Module 3 service line positioning paper example

Close to Home and Followed to the End: Positioning a Community Lung Screening Program Against the University Program 38 Miles Away

Student Name

American College of Education

HLTH5673: Marketing for Healthcare Professionals

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

July 17, 2028

Who Chooses and What the Alternative Stands For

For the target segments chosen in Module 2, former smokers connected to primary care and newly eligible adults, the choice of screening program is rarely made by the patient alone. The primary care clinician raises screening, completes or arranges the shared decision-making visit Medicare requires and places the order, usually with the program the clinician trusts. Positioning must therefore work for two audiences: clinicians, who decide where to refer, and patients, who decide whether to go at all.

The named alternative is the lung screening program at the university medical center 38 miles away, which performed 420 screenings on the hospital's service area residents last year, about a third of all screenings. In clinicians' minds, it stands for confidence: a nurse navigator follows every abnormal result, and pulmonology, thoracic surgery and oncology are in one building. Interviews with local physicians in Module 1 showed that this confidence, not reputation in general, is why they refer there. For patients who never go anywhere, the alternative is simpler: doing nothing and waiting for symptoms. A position is not what a program says about itself; it is the reason a busy physician picks it without having to think.

Points of Parity

Some attributes the program must match simply to be considered. Clinicians will not refer to a program that reports results inconsistently, has no plan for incidental findings or cannot show quality. A joint policy statement from two national pulmonary societies described the core elements of a comprehensive screening program, including shared decision-making, standardized reporting, management of findings, tobacco treatment and data collection, and outlined strategies for planning, implementing and maintaining them (Wiener et al., 2015). The hospital's program already uses structured reporting with standardized nodule categories and meets the radiology accreditation requirements for a screening center.

Two parity gaps remain. The program has no formal pathway for patients who need a biopsy or surgery, which the hospital does not offer, and no tobacco treatment built into the screening visit. Both must be closed before any marketing begins. The first will be closed through a written referral agreement with the university medical center's thoracic surgery service, which also turns the competitor into a partner for the one service the hospital cannot provide.

Points of Difference

The program can win on two attributes the university program cannot easily match. The first is proximity and ease. For most residents, the hospital is a 10 to 20 minute drive instead of an hour, with free parking and no wait of three weeks. More importantly, the program will offer a single call: an eligibility check and a shared decision-making visit with the program's nurse practitioner, followed by the scan on the same day, rather than requiring a separate primary care visit first. That removes the step physicians named as a reason for referring out.

The second is navigation close to home. The program will hire a nurse navigator who calls each person whose scan needs a next step, schedules the next test, tracks it to completion and keeps the referring physician informed. Navigation has evidence behind it. In a randomized trial among current smokers at five community health centers, Percac-Lima et al. (2018) found that patients assigned to a navigator were far more likely to receive lung screening CT than those receiving usual care, 23.5 percent against 8.6 percent. Combined with proximity, navigation lets the program claim the university program's strength, follow-up, while adding its own, closeness.

The Positioning Statement

For adults in the two-county area who qualify for lung cancer screening, and for the physicians who care for them, the hospital's lung screening program is the local program that takes a patient from eligibility check to scan in one visit and follows every result to its conclusion with a dedicated navigator, because it combines same-day decision support, a nurse navigator and a formal pathway to specialist care, all within 20 minutes of home.

It has four parts: who the service is for, what it should be compared with, how it differs and why anyone should believe that it does. For patients who are choosing between screening and doing nothing, the same position translates into a simpler promise: it is close, it takes one visit and someone will stay with you if the scan finds anything. That promise addresses the fear and uncertainty that keep many eligible adults from screening, especially current smokers.

Claims the Program Must Not Make

The position depends on honesty, and some claims would undermine it. The program must not say or imply that it offers comprehensive lung cancer care, since patients who need surgery will go to the university medical center. It must not describe screening as preventing cancer, since screening finds cancer earlier; it does not stop it from developing. It must not state or imply that a negative scan means a patient is free of lung cancer, or promise outcomes. And it must not use fear or blame about smoking. The stigma research reviewed in Module 2 links feeling judged about lung cancer with putting off care (Carter-Harris, 2015), so any line that shames smokers would push away exactly the residents the program most needs.

What the Position Costs to Deliver

A position is a commitment, and this one has a price. The nurse navigator is a full-time position, with a loaded cost of about $95,000 a year. Shared decision-making visits by the program's nurse practitioner will take about half of one practitioner's time at the expected volume, roughly $80,000 a year, partly offset because Medicare pays for the counseling visit separately from the scan. Same-day scheduling requires holding four CT slots each weekday for screening patients, which the imaging department can do without new equipment by moving some routine outpatient studies to an evening block. The referral agreement with the university medical center costs nothing to sign but requires the program to share results promptly and to track each referred patient.

If the target segments produce the additional screenings estimated in Module 2, the program's volume would roughly double, and each additional screening also brings a share of follow-up imaging and visits within the hospital. The budget and channels module will set these costs against expected revenue in detail, but the principle is settled here: the program will not claim navigation or same-day service in any message until the navigator is hired and the slots are held.

Testing the Position

Before any launch, the position will be tested in three ways. First, the program will present it to physicians at the eight affiliated practices and ask whether it changes where they would refer. Second, the statement will be tested with two small groups of eligible residents, one of former smokers and one of current smokers, to check whether the promise is understood and believed. Third, the program will measure its own performance on the promise for three months, including the share of patients screened on the day of their first call and the time from an abnormal result to the next test, before advertising it. A position the program cannot yet deliver will be held back until it can.

References

Carter-Harris, L. (2015). Lung cancer stigma as a barrier to medical help-seeking behavior: Practice implications. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, 27(5), 240-245. https://doi.org/10.1002/2327-6924.12227

Percac-Lima, S., Ashburner, J. M., Rigotti, N. A., Park, E. R., Chang, Y., Kuchukhidze, S., & Atlas, S. J. (2018). Patient navigation for lung cancer screening among current smokers in community health centers: A randomized controlled trial. Cancer Medicine, 7(3), 894-902. https://doi.org/10.1002/cam4.1297

Wiener, R. S., Gould, M. K., Arenberg, D. A., Au, D. H., Fennig, K., Lamb, C. R., Mazzone, P. J., Midthun, D. E., Napoli, M., Ost, D. E., Powell, C. A., Rivera, M. P., Slatore, C. G., Tanner, N. T., Vachani, A., Wisnivesky, J. P., & Yoon, S. H. (2015). An official American Thoracic Society/American College of Chest Physicians policy statement: Implementation of low-dose computed tomography lung cancer screening programs in clinical practice. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 192(7), 881-891. https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.201508-1671ST