Question

As the administrative leader of a primary care medical practice who is a member of an Independent Physician Association, describe your plan for encouraging every active patient to make an appointment for a health maintenance visit once per year. Be sure to address the logistical, political and patient engagement challenges you would face in planning and executing this campaign.

Answer 1

When it comes to such a public campaign which encourages people to go for health maintenance checkups, usually the turn out is pretty low or inexistent and the main problems would be with respect to the levels of awareness among the people and at the same time flaws in marketing also contribute to such lower results.

So while we are going for such campaigns we need to address the following in the same order, that is, why are we doing it, how are we doing it. If we are able to answer the above questions for the target crowd then we would definitely have a successful campaign and at the same time the huge turnout that was expected will become a reality.

So first things first, why are we doing it is something where we need to make the target understand that it is really important to go for maintenance every year and also make sure it is appealing as well, that is showing how it makes a difference by yearly maintenance checkup. Next coming to the how we are doing it, we need to explain how such adverse effects of not going for checkups will be prevented through various measures by the medical field and it is the only necessity for the patient/person to turn up at the place. Well the what is clearly conveyed to the audience in terms of how we are offering checkups to cater to the needs of the customer and are essentially unidentified by himself.

When it comes to the mode of transmission, it would definitely be digital campaign and the social channels would be the primary propagation modes. And at the same time coordinating with companies for employees and associations for the others who are not working would be a great deal of game changer for the campaign.

As we are an independent physican association we need to take care of the political issues in terms of the approvals and the necessary measures to be taken before launching the campaign and at the same time, the support that is required for setting up the checkups. The problems here would be with respect to the quality issues that the medical board would be concerned about and also as the campaign would be digital the information and broadcasting department needs to be informed. And while conducting the checkups, it would be necessary for the support staff such as the police department and also the sanitation staff for smooth flow of operations.

Coming to the logistical challenges, it would only be with respect to the space required for the implementation, and nothing to do with the campaign we would like to run. For the implementation, the whole setup would be a logistical challenge, right from the place required to adequate staffing, crowd control upto the appropriate disposal of the medical waste.

Patient engagement is the whole core of the problem and needs to be carefully dealt with, say for example, throughout the campaign the patient needs to be engaged and at the same time encouraged to participate in the maintenance checkups and should be motivated post the campaign as well. The primary ways to keep a check on this would be to put up activities and check the participation levels in an interactive manner and at the same time, take care of the audience as the best customer giving them weekly or monthly updates regarding the same.