Our Future As A Unified Brand
Last October, my Corporate Column led off with a significant milestone – we were officially the largest orthopaedic group in the country. While the accomplishment was a testament to the strong momentum we had built since our founding, it seemed to lack a certain gravitas. On paper we were the biggest in the country, on par with some of the most storied brands in orthopaedics, but in reality our potential was limited by a lack of a singular identity.
Legendary brands are bigger than any one individual. For example, outside of our market the Rothman Institute has built itself into a brand synonymous with best-in-class orthopaedic care. My neighbor at the Jersey Shore recently had his knee replaced, and when I asked him who did the procedure, the answer was simply “Rothman.” It didn’t matter to him the individual physician, in his eyes, just walking through the doors of a Rothman facility guaranteed he was in good hands.
That’s why I’m even more excited about the milestone we’ll be hitting at the end of September, the adoption and implementation of a powerful and unifying brand in all that we do.
Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand, and that’s what our Board of Managers did last year when we collectively marked September 30th, 2017 as the deadline for company-wide brand conversion. To some it seemed ambitious, to many it seemed long overdue, but that moment helped crystalize the vision and mission statements we drafted together in 2013.
- Vision: To be a community of highly engaged physicians and employees positively influencing healthcare delivery and improving patient outcomes.
- Mission: The national leader in delivering the highest quality and most compassionate orthopaedic care through the private practice model.
Often making a resolution or setting a deadline is the easy part, the trick is fully committing to it. Honoring the rich history of our individual brands, while embracing our collective future in The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics, certainly wasn’t easy and required an investment of both time and capital to make it happen. At Corporate, with the help of our productive Marketing Committee, we identified a strategy focused on making brand conversion as manageable as possible.
We handcrafted a website template with robust capabilities that could be inexpensively rebuilt again and again for each care center. We forged ahead with initiatives such as the Brand Book, the gospel for all things CAO, and developed CAO Central, our custom intranet, to increase internal communication, while continuing to add new marketing collateral to help tell our patient-focused message to the communities we serve.
We also had the foresight to realize a brand is far more than a beautiful design or compelling brochure, it’s the holistic sum of all its parts. The time we all invest – physicians, administrators and staff – into Patient Experience Training, collecting real-time insights via the Binary Fountain surveys and so much more, has already paid huge dividends in making sure how we market ourselves is in lockstep with how we actually care for our patients.
After all of the hard work and sacrifice by so many, we’re finally ready to go to market as The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics, the largest and most convenient provider of orthopaedic care in the country. We now have the clout to back it up.
Gone are the days of private practitioners forced to manage a declining way of life, now is the time to thrive and empower our model that puts the patient at the center of everything we do. It’s an incredibly exciting time that represents endless possibilities for business growth and new ventures. With a unified brand, we can positively influence national healthcare conversations, leading the charge for how care should be delivered. At the same time, new opportunities for prosperous ventures can become realities, from consolidating our PT practices into the leading brand in the region, to pioneering value-based payment models and launching new healthcare technologies.
On behalf of the team at Corporate, it has been rewarding to see how each of our care centers has steadfastly remained focused on brand conversion, and it has helped build a wonderful spirt of camaraderie and shared purpose amongst us all. We want to express our sincere gratitude for your efforts.
As a result, moving through the dog days of summer, our path ahead has never been brighter.