Brandview World
Aug
Nursing Homes Close as Need for Care Grows
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World
Nursing Home Challenges
According to a report by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL) in April 2022, more than 1,000 nursing homes have closed since 2015. This breaks down to 776 closures before the COVID-19 pandemic and 327 closures during the pandemic.
The same report also projected 400 nursing homes to close in 2022 based on financials at the time. While the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported 135 nursing homes closing in 2022, it is believed the number could be higher. This is due to possible discrepancies between the time a closure plan is submitted by a facility and its full execution to be listed in the federal database.
Staffing shortages and low reimbursement have long been recognized as factors for nursing home closures even before the pandemic. Rising wages and increased operation and maintenance costs in recent years exacerbated the situation, especially in rural areas.
The Impact of Nursing Home Closings
These closures resulted in former residents transferring to another facility, which in most cases, was farther from home. Some even must move twice after the first nursing home they transferred to subsequently closed. The process could also take weeks as social workers look for placements so a patient might find themself staying in a hospital in the meantime. Conversely, some nursing care facilities are keeping beds vacant because they don’t have enough workers.
Amidst these challenges, the need for long-term care grows with baby boomers joining this group.
Nursing Home Alternatives
While the pandemic put a spotlight on the difficulties faced by the nursing care industry, it also opens opportunities for reforming and improving nursing homes. It also paves the way for exploring nursing home alternatives, such as in-home care for seniors. However, home care may prove to be the more expensive option and while it offers more personal and tailored assistance, you might have a senior who prefers or thrives more in a group setting like the one offered by assisted living communities.
Then there are group homes and family-style nursing homes, which are both small-scale options for assisted living. While a typical nursing home holds over 100 resident beds on average, a group home can house between five to 10 people (or 20, depending on the state) while family-style homes host 10 to beds. These setups allow for more personalized care and a higher staff-to-client ratio in a sociable, homelike setting with home-cooked meals.
Due to being smaller in scale and not as advertised as regular nursing facilities, most group homes might slip past the radar of older adults or their loved ones seeking assisted living. With well-developed branding, however, smaller-scale assisted living communities can stand out even from the shadows of larger facilities and get their message across better to the seniors most suited for the living arrangements they offer.
MDSA can help you develop your branding, thanks to an array of services such as Brand Development Research and Segmentation Studies backed by over three decades of experience. Whether you are a smaller residential care home trying to get the word out or a larger assisted living community looking to reach the ideal senior or even the skilled nurses you need, we can help you find the right market research solution for your branding needs.
Aug
How Great Research Helps Financial Services Companies
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
From maintaining loyalty and fostering customer relationships to focusing marketing messages on the most profit-optimal consumer, great research is helping Financial Services companies identify not only their best customers and prospects but also their needs and why they prefer their brand over others. This is done through a high-quality segmentation study and persona development, which break a company’s market into different groups so that different strategies for marketing to these groups can be leveraged. The main reason a company wants to complete market segmentation research is so they can gain actionable insights, like how to sell more of their product or services.
Take for example, Banner Bank for whom Cascade Strategies developed a brand model which identified “Strivers” as the primary segment they should focus on. The bank initiated special promotions and appeals featuring the products of greatest interest to Strivers. A Striver-specific ROI program was developed to measure the degree of program success. Modeled indices were used to set Striver product targets by branch. After 2 years of activity, Banner Bank exceeded all key Striver product targets system-wide.
Read about our approach to high-quality brand development research here.
Another example is the case of Capital One where they needed help trying to identify the “persona” or psychographic type most interested in adopting a certain mobile app for personal investing. We conducted in-person depth interviews with “mobile-minded consumers.” We also conducted an unpacking session with Capital One staff where individual staff members were given assignments to review videos and be prepared to discuss key traits and behaviors of respondents, such as outlooks, investing styles, goals, worries, needs, plans, and so forth.
We identified that the “Empath” is the most interested in adopting a certain mobile app for personal investing. The “Empath” persona is fairly immersed in pragmatic thinking and probably best understands the possibilities for “thinking” or guidance apps, allowing Capital One to focus their brand campaign effort on the needs of this psychographic type. The net result was a highly successful new product introduction.
Read about our approach to segmentation studies and the development of brand personas here.
“But wait, can’t AI do this?” you may ask. While there is a faddish and hype-driven tendency to turn quickly to AI for short-cuts in market research, AI cannot yet fully replicate the deep interpretive and intuitive skills of the human brain, especially the right brain (the nonrational side). Moreover, effective AI deployment requires human supervision and involvement as final arbiter of how the outcomes will be leveraged.
As you can see, market research results as good as the examples above come from human-centered thinking, the kind that allows brands to break past ordinary bounds and achieve true excellence. It’s this kind of extraordinary thinking that Cascade Strategies has consistently provided a long list of US and international clients for 33 years.
Feel free to reach out to us to discuss your needs at https://mktgdatascience.org/
Apr
How healthcare people can help underserved populations
jerry9789 0 comments Brand Surveys and Testing, Brandview World, Burning Questions
There’s no shortage of knowledge about the healthcare needs of underserved communities in the US such as the Hispanic, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander subpopulations. What may be lacking are workable and effective efforts to address these needs.
There are two main parts of this problem:
- Communication issues
- Lack of practical programs.
Communication issues
The recently-released National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report points out that certain racial and ethnic groups that coincide with the underserved subpopulations are the most severely uninsured. See Figure 1. (Please note that the term American Indian/Alaska Native is shortened to AI/AN, and the term Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander is shortened to NHPI.)
These disparities should not exist by definition, largely because of the availability of Medicare, Medicaid, and low-cost or no-cost insurance from state insurance exchanges. As the report points out, they exist largely due to communication and access issues. Many members of the underserved communities either have coverage but avoid seeking care or don’t know they’re eligible for coverage in the first place.
Avoiding treatment
Having coverage and avoiding care is a solvable problem, if healthcare organizations and the society in general have the will to do so. People in the underserved communities often miss planned appointments for certain medical purposes such as wellness exams, follow-up appointments, and scheduled appointments for priority services such as prenatal care and maternal wellness, causing them in the latter case to pay a high price in terms of maternal morbidity and neonatal health. (See “Lack of Practical Programs” below.) Some of this is due to language barriers, transportation issues, or unease in the interaction with healthcare personnel; but a great deal is due to a misunderstanding of the extent of their coverage, especially what remains due from the patient in the form of copayments, deductibles, etc.
Healthcare organizations can ease these problems by providing more and better-trained navigators as well as interpreters and translation services. They can build more outreach programs to the underserved to make them aware that in many cases they have little or nothing to pay for wellness services and planned care for medical purposes such as behavioral conditions, substance use treatment, chronic conditions, routine wellness care, and priority areas such as the above-mentioned prenatal care.
Not knowing about eligibility
The same potential remedy applies to lack of awareness of eligibility. Members of the underserved communities often don’t know that they’re eligible for coverage in the first place, and this leads to avoidance of treatment as well. More and better-trained health navigators supported by outreach programs can also go a long way toward alleviating this part of the problem.
Lack of practical programs
If communication with the underserved can be improved, it stands to reason that well-structured programs must be established to accommodate them. In other words, they have to have a place to go. Not enough imaginative or careful thought has been put into the development of these programs for underserved communities. Programs, personnel, and training are lacking in the areas of behavioral health, substance use treatment, dental care, prenatal/postpartum care, and more.
While the AHRQ report clearly identifies significant disparities in each of these areas for underserved communities, nowhere is the disparity more painful than in the area of prenatal care. See Figure 2.
The AHRQ data show that the level of care is well below acceptable levels for each of the four main underserved communities. This has unfortunately led to higher rates of maternal morbidity among these members of the underserved communities due to such conditions as eclampsia/preeclampsia, severe postpartum hemorrhage, venous thromboembolism, and other complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
While this is just one significant area of disparity in quality of care for the underserved, it appropriately points out the need for practical programs. Health care organizations can respond with energy and creativity by developing doula/monitrice services, transportation services, language/interpretive services, and structured prenatal and postpartum care services in tandem with the improved communication and health-navigator programs mentioned above. There’s also evidence that the provision of team-based, interprofessional, central location care centers can often lead to improved medical outcomes for underserved populations.
Information-gathering is an important first step
Clearly, different approaches will be required based on geographic, cultural, linguistic, and sociodemographic issues that pertain to your organization, but the journey always begins by gathering information. Cascade Strategies has a great deal of expertise and experience in helping healthcare companies assemble this knowledge, and we stand ready to assist you. Please tell us about your information needs at contact Cascade Strategies, and we’ll be pleased to serve your needs.
Apr
If your company or firm provides services or products, either to the public or other businesses, you need an in-depth understanding of how the market works. Market research provides you with relevant data to give your establishment a competitive edge over others. One reliable research method to gain insight into the market, brand perception, and customer behavior is a brand survey.
A brand tracking survey measures the performance, health, and success of your brand. A survey is a document that contains a series of purposefully constructed questions to extract data from a particular group of people. This group of people could be your customers, employees, and other people outside your target audience. Firms have multiple ways to conduct brand surveys and tests in the US. Individuals can take surveys online, and have them mailed to them, or they can use traditional methods, such as paper documents.
In this blog, we will look at some of the importance or benefits of brand surveys.
Importance of brand surveys.
1. Measure campaign effectiveness.
Brand surveys can show you how effective your marketing campaigns are- Without data from surveys and other means, it would be nearly impossible to determine if your campaigns are successful or whether your company is wasting resources. The survey will indicate if your advertisements are reaching the right audience and
2. Customer insight.
Brands that stay relevant value their customers. You need to listen to your customers, know what they want, and understand and anticipate their behavior. With Brand surveys and testing in Washington, companies, businesses, and other organizations stay connected with their customers and never go out of touch.
3. Brand perception.
How the customers, and the public at large view your brand is critical to its success. Your brand stirs up emotions in your customers and people outside your target audience when they see, hear, or think about it- and it had better be good emotions. Top companies all over the world ceaselessly work hard to ensure that they maintain their brand image. Surveys give you valuable insight into how people perceive your brand. These results from the brand survey tests and analysis tell you if your brand is portrayed in a good light and shows you areas to improve upon.
4. Competitive analysis.
Understanding and beating your competitors will give you an edge in the market. If your competitor outranks you in brand awareness, recall, and association, your marketing or branding department or company as a whole knows areas that need improvement.
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