Branding in Unlikely Places: Using Patient Friendly Billing Statement in Hospital and Medical Marketing

In hospital and medical marketing, your brand is part of everything you do. It’s not only your brochures and business cards...it's everything. From the individual or group provider to the multi-location health system, your brand is the recognition connecting point for patients and the public. It communicates your professional reputation. And done right, your branding message will shine through at every opportunity.

The objective is consistency, even in not so obvious, but highly significant, places such as the billing statement. Yes, the billing statement.

A patient-friendly statement is more than putting your logo in the top margin of a machine-generated string of impersonal numbers. The professional image you’re consistently building through all your other communications channels is no less important at the moment someone sees the statement. (A potentially emotional moment.)

The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) defines a “patient friendly” statement as clear, correct and concise. And being patient friendly includes being sensitive to the needs of the patient and family members, with a design that achieves the administrative function and communicates a positive image.

The use of color is a major design tool that can be used to highlight important parts of the patient statement for clarity, ease of understanding, and bring attention to your name and logo.

According to Kennon Askew of LetterLogic, which produces statements for healthcare entities, “The Patient Statement is the number one way that hospitals interact with customers. A patient friendly statement improves satisfaction, operational efficiencies and revenue cycles. The necessary evil of a bill is also a marketing vehicle.”