The Landscape of Tampa Bay Healthcare
AMA Tampa Bay Healthcare Shared Interest Group
Event Preview
Consumerism has drastically changed the way most of the largest companies and sectors do business. It has forced companies to give fast, efficient answers to their customer’s problems, yet healthcare seems to be taking a back seat in access to information and care. Jim Jacobsohn, VP of Sg2, specializes in areas such as marketing, insurance payment model redesign, billing and coding, regulations and compliance and healthcare standards. When he speaks at the upcoming AMA Healthcare Breakfast on March 23, he will dive deeper into the hurdles the Tampa Bay healthcare sector is facing and how creative marketing and innovation can drive change.
Consumerism is driving change.
“Healthcare is behind everyone else when it comes to consumerism,” Jacobsohn declared. Startup tech firms are popping up with answers to provide quick healthcare information married with new technology to expedite care. This poses the questions to big behemoth organizations in Tampa Bay- Do I Compete? How Will I Compete? This conundrum of small tech vs. small to large healthcare groups may not shake up a rural market of the country, but when looking specifically in Tampa Bay with a concentration of many healthcare players, there is new competition to assess. Our diverse Tampa Bay marketplace is unique and national trends will affect each organization differently and each organization will react differently.
Technology is a major player in consumerism.
“Technology plays such a big role in all of this, whether it’s accessing physicians and clinicians, or the wearable devices such as Fitbit or Jawbone.” Jacobsohn acknowledged. From tracking steps, logging food in an app or a heartrate monitor that sends information to your cardiologist, technology is providing consumers the ability to take a more active seat in their personal health. Jim proposes in a matter of time, technology will drive a “Yelp-like” platform specifically for healthcare to assist consumers in choosing where to be treated. Suggestion sites have integrated themselves into almost every other business to help drive decisions we make- where to eat, where to get our dogs groomed, where to repair your car- that healthcare is just waiting to be tapped into. “It just doesn’t exist and some people are scared of the reviews or what’s out there but it’s going to happen.”
Access is key.
Jim suggests that an easy answer to this changing landscape is accessibility. Different organizations will take a different approach, but if you make your services user-friendly and easy, big healthcare systems can compete. “It’s all about access and this is big for marketers. Sometimes it’s technology enabled access, sometimes it’s facility access like urgent care or Walgreens or after hours,” Jim said. Whether it’s building access points outside of the hospital such as kiosks at pharmacies or simply extending patient hours three nights a week, making your healthcare services easy to access in ways it wasn’t before will be demanded. People ideally in the end want as much continuity as possible and providing an experience that is quality and accessible will be essential.
Join the AMA Tampa Bay Healthcare Shared Interested Group on March 23 for more!
Jim has much more to say about the ever-changing healthcare landscape in Tampa Bay when he speaks at AMA Tampa Bay’s Healthcare Breakfast of Champions on March 23. Don’t miss out on his presentation looking beyond the headlines to explore the short and long-term ramifications of important healthcare topics.
Article By Molly Vazquez
Molly Vazquez is currently the Marketing and Communications Director at the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation. She is serving as the promotions liaison for the AMA Tampa Bay Healthcare SIG and a graduate from the University of Florida.