Hospitals Learn the Hard Sell

The U.S. medical establishment may still draw its primary inspiration from the Hippocratic oath, but many hospitals are taking a few lessons from Madison Avenue. Items:

-- Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach is selling its own brand of chicken soup, complete with the hospital name on the label. Reason: to promote its reputation as a warm and soothing place.

-- SwedishAmerican Hospital in Rockford, Ill., is offering a clever gimmick to lure obstetrics customers: Dial-A-Dad, a service in which beepers are given to expectant fathers so they can be paged within a 30-mile radius when mothers go into labor.

-- "Kidney Stones? Who Ya Gotta Call . . . Stonebusters!" With that jarring punch line, Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., is touting its newly acquired lithotripter, a device that disintegrates kidney stones with shock waves.

What is all this hype about healing? Dr. Ben Casey, the stuffy TV neurosurgeon of yesteryear, would surely be stunned. While many doctors still keep a low advertising profile, the rest of the health-care industry has suddenly gone for the hard sell. To fill a growing number of empty beds and to stand out amid increased competition, hospitals and clinics have started embracing modern marketing techniques. Result: a wave of come-ons for everything from cancer treatment to fat removal.

The promos blare from radio, TV, newspapers, billboards and even subway placards. Ad spending by hospitals alone has surged from less than $50 million in 1983 to an estimated $500 million in 1986. The new imperative to attract customers may be unsettling, but it is making the health-care industry far more creative in letting consumers know what modern medicine can do for them. "Hospitals are struggling to learn all the competitive skills that businesses have known and applied for a long time," says Linda Bogue, an administrator at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center.

Hospitals hope their new marketing savvy will help cure the growing epidemic of empty beds. The national occupancy rate was only 63.7% during the first nine months of 1986, down from a traditional level of about 80%. One reason is the advance of medical technology, which has increased the number of procedures that can be performed on an outpatient basis. Another spur to health-care competition has been the dramatic efforts by insurance companies, employers and Government health-care programs, notably Medicare, to rein in runaway medical costs by encouraging shorter hospital stays. The Government, for example, now generally reimburses hospitals based on a flat rate for a given illness, rather than allowing the hospital to set the price.

To keep their buildings full, hospitals aim to shed their images as sprawling, complicated, emergency-oriented places. One method is slicker packaging. Hospitals have reorganized their services into neatly thematic departments devoted to problems ranging from impotence to sports injuries. In Philadelphia, where medical competition has grown intense, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital advertises special clinics to handle childbirth, eating disorders, sleeping problems, Alzheimer's disease and hearing loss. A print ad for Jefferson's bulimia program shows an attractive female model who says, "Eating ruled my life. I called Jefferson." The ad even provides a catchy toll-free number: 1-800-JEFF-NOW.