Before we started Groundswell Health, hospitals leaders around the country would ask us what marketing company would be a good fit if they started developing an approach for marketing and advertising with a strategic plan to shift marketshare. It’s not an easy answer. We had always noted agencies that touted themselves as organization specializing in health care, but the truth is that few possessed the requisite ability to assess and analyze service line market share, mobilize messaging to disrupt it, and build compelling creative content to appeal to audiences.

So when we launched Groundswell Health, one of the first hospitals we began working with started with one of those hospitals leaders who had approached us for advice on an appropriate agency to help expand its marketing and messaging operations. That came in 2019 when Jeff Barnhart, CEO at Hereford Regional Medical Center, realized he wanted to convey the advances and improvements his team had mobilized over the previous five years. Jeff had a quickly turnaround on his hands, and he knew the branding and messaging in the community needed to convey that.

In 2019, Barnhart set out to advance his organization’s reputation even more after several years of turnaround success. From there, Groundswell Health helped his team focus not only on that reputation management but also strategic service line patient volume to grow the business amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The timing could not have been better as our team helped build a positive rapport with the community through crisis communications management and an expansion of its digital footprint in the region. And in 2021, we focused even more on their web presence by installing a web overhaul, focusing ways to ensure a simple backend content management system. The result is a clean and consistent style that helps solidify its relationship with the community and avoiding the costly overhauls that unnecessarily plague hospitals and clinics.