Don't Brand Your Patients

By Forte Research, Customer Experience Services

Any marketing professional worth their salt will tell you that maintaining a positive Brand is an important component of any business’ efforts to pursue growth. Let’s not get into Brand theory too much here other than to remember that the term “Brand” is commonly defined as a company’s personality and the concept is often extended to encompass how customers feel about a company.

In practice, many efforts at Branding start with slathering the company logo on any object or surface that can be screen-printed or have a sticker adhered to it. The healthcare industry is no exception. As a general rule, getting your logo on stuff and putting it in front of your customers, community, and business partners is the right thing to do. And, when this is accompanied by consistently positive behaviors that reinforce a good feeling about your site, then you have the makings of some very good Branding.

In fact, as a site trying to recruit patient volunteers, Brand development can be crucial to your site’s future viability. However, is there ever a time when NOT putting your logo in the forefront is actually the best thing you can do for your site’s Brand? In fact, there are some important exceptions to this practice and one of them is in the case of patient reimbursement.

Patients who volunteer to participate on clinical trials donate their time and effort for the advancement of medical knowledge. While the financial remuneration that is sometimes extended to research subjects to compensate them for their contribution can seem relatively small, the investment that you make in resources to issue and track these payments does add up. In an effort to streamline this process, many sites are turning to systems that utilize prepaid debit cards, which can be issued through electronic means rather than the largely manual process of issuing checks.