HLTH5673 Module 6 marketing plan with evaluation measures example

From 11.9 to 20 Percent in Two Years: The Finished Lung Screening Marketing Plan and the Measures That Would Prove It Worked

Student Name

American College of Education

HLTH5673: Marketing for Healthcare Professionals

Module 6 Assignment

Instructor Name

August 7, 2028

The Plan in Brief

The composite 180-bed community hospital's lung cancer screening program performed 610 screenings last year. The market analysis found about 11,300 residents in the primary service area who meet national screening criteria, of whom about 1,340, or 11.9 percent, were screened by any provider. Nationally, fewer than one in twenty eligible adults were screened in 2018 (Fedewa et al., 2021), so the area is ahead of the country but far from the recommendation's intent. The largest opportunity is the 88 percent screened by no one, not the residents screened by competitors.

The plan targets former smokers already seen in the hospital's own practices, plus people who only qualified once the 2021 rules widened, first, with current smokers, rural residents and uninsured residents as secondary targets addressed through tailored channels and partnerships. Its promise to patients is a short drive and a nurse who stays with any worrying result, a promise made true by hiring a navigator, offering same-day decision visits and scans and signing a referral agreement with the university medical center for surgery. Messages are written at a sixth-grade level, in English and Spanish, and make only claims the compliance office approved. Six channels survived privacy and referral review, with a first-year marketing budget of $148,100. A plan is finished when everyone who reads it knows what will be counted to decide whether it worked.

Objectives

The plan has four objectives. First, raise the share of eligible residents in the primary service area screened in a year from 11.9 percent to 20 percent by the end of the second year, about 2,260 residents, which requires roughly 990 additional screenings in the first year and a further 100 or so in the second as the eligible population grows. Second, return for annual screening: at least 65 percent of patients screened in year one should be screened again within 15 months. Third, follow-up: at least 90 percent of patients whose scan calls for additional testing should complete it within the recommended interval. Fourth, equity: screening rates among rural eastern residents and Spanish-speaking residents should rise at least as fast as the overall rate.

The return objective deserves attention because it is easy to neglect. Screening reduces deaths only if it is repeated. Pooling 15 U.S. studies, Lopez-Olivo et al. (2020) found a pooled adherence rate of 55 percent after a baseline screen, with current smokers less likely to return than former smokers and White patients more likely to return than patients of other races. A program that doubles first-time screenings but loses half of them the next year has achieved much less than its first-year numbers suggest.

The Measurement Ladder

Measures are arranged from activity to outcome, so that a shortfall at the top can be traced to where it began. Process measures show whether the plan is being carried out: letters and portal messages sent, calls received on each tracked number, eligibility checks completed, pack-year histories recorded in the practice registries and physician education sessions held. Output measures show whether activity produces screenings: shared decision-making visits completed, screenings performed by segment and by channel of first contact and the share of callers screened on the same day. Outcome measures show whether the plan changes the population: the screening rate among all eligible residents, the annual return rate, completion of recommended follow-up and, over several years, the share of lung cancers diagnosed in the service area at early stage.

The stage measure will take years to move and will be read with caution, since small numbers of cancers vary by chance. But it is the reason the program exists. A national policy statement on screening programs lists data collection and tracking of outcomes among the core elements of a comprehensive program (Wiener et al., 2015), and the program will submit its data to the national screening registry so that its performance can be compared with others.

Equity and Compliance Measures

Two further sets of measures protect the plan from succeeding in the wrong way. Equity measures report the screening rate, return rate and follow-up completion separately for rural eastern residents, Spanish-speaking residents, current smokers and Medicaid or uninsured residents. If overall screening rises while these groups stay flat, the plan has widened a gap, and the second-year budget will shift toward the channels that reach them. Compliance measures report any privacy incident involving the program's marketing, any complaint about a message and the results of a quarterly audit confirming that no tracking technology has been added to the program's web pages. The target for each is zero.

Telling the Plan's Effect From Everything Else

Screening rates are rising nationally, so an increase in the service area would not by itself prove that the plan worked. The program will use two comparisons. First, it will compare the change in the screening rate in its primary service area with the change in a neighboring county of similar size and smoking prevalence, using the same state claims data. Second, within the hospital's own practices, the eight practices will begin letter outreach in two waves three months apart, so that the first four can be compared with the second four during the gap. Call-tracking numbers and a question at scheduling about how the patient heard of the program will attribute screenings to channels, though imperfectly, since many patients hear from more than one.

Who Reports What, and When

Measures are useful only if someone looks at them on a schedule and has the authority to act. The program coordinator will produce a one-page monthly report of process and output measures for the program's medical director and the hospital's marketing director, who together own the plan. Each quarter, the full ladder, including equity and compliance measures, goes to the hospital's cancer committee, which already oversees screening quality and can require changes to clinical processes such as follow-up tracking. Once a year, the screening rate among eligible residents and the equity results will be reported to the board as part of the hospital's community benefit report, since expanding appropriate screening in its service area is a community health goal, not only a volume goal.

Each primary care practice will also receive its own quarterly figures: how many of its eligible patients have a recorded pack-year history, how many were invited and how many were screened. Practices that fall behind will be offered help from the program's staff rather than a ranking, since the aim is to make screening easy for busy clinicians, not to shame them into it.

What Happens If It Falls Short

The plan names its review points in advance. At six months, if eligibility checks are high but same-day screenings are low, the bottleneck is scheduling capacity, not marketing, and the imaging department will be asked to add slots. If letters are sent but calls are few, the message or the messenger is failing, and the program will test a physician phone call for a sample of patients. At twelve months, if first-time screenings reach target but return rates fall below 55 percent, the navigator's role will expand to annual recall. If the equity measures lag, community screening days will increase. Every change will be recorded, so that the second-year plan starts from what the first year actually taught rather than from what the team hoped.

References

Fedewa, S. A., Kazerooni, E. A., Studts, J. L., Smith, R. A., Bandi, P., Sauer, A. G., Cotter, M., Sineshaw, H. M., Jemal, A., & Silvestri, G. A. (2021). State variation in low-dose computed tomography scanning for lung cancer screening in the United States. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 113(8), 1044-1052. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djaa170

Lopez-Olivo, M. A., Maki, K. G., Choi, N. J., Hoffman, R. M., Shih, Y.-C. T., Lowenstein, L. M., Hicklen, R. S., & Volk, R. J. (2020). Patient adherence to screening for lung cancer in the US: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open, 3(11), Article e2025102. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.25102

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