Healthcare leaders tend to be very internally focused and for all the right reasons. But even when we’re doing very well performance-wise—with all the right metrics moving in the right direction—we can forget to leverage these results externally to build a strong brand.

While it’s great to celebrate your successes internally, take a moment to put your periscope up and look around outside your organization. What you’ll see is sobering. As healthcare becomes increasingly consumer-driven, the competition gets increasingly fierce. Before you know it, urgent cares, freestanding emergency departments, and surgery centers have sprung up on every corner.

You do great work, and people in your community should be aware of it—but that doesn’t happen automatically. It requires that you get good at telling your own story so that consumers want to choose you over the competition.

Healthcare Plus Solutions Group^® (HPSG) partner TriHealth in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a great example of an organization that understands this. They were recently named the #5 most human healthcare brand in the nation and #1 in their region in the 2025 Monigle Humanizing Brand Experience (HBE) report. The report also noted TriHealth as being the #4 strongest healthcare employer.

This is no small honor. Based on feedback from over 27,000 healthcare consumers across 71 U.S. markets, Monigle evaluates brands not just on awareness or advertising, but on how well they connect emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally with the people they serve.

This recognition is backed up by strong performance internally. We all know that employee engagement is directly and positively linked to patient care. TriHealth’s emphasis on people and culture as a competitive advantage has been profound, with particularly significant breakthrough results in the last 18 months:

• Employee engagement has moved from 85 percentile in 2023 (top quartile) and finally to >97 percentile (top decile) as of July 2025.

• Likelihood to recommend TriHealth as an employer is >90 percent, and “sense of belonging” is >85 percent.

• Additionally, the cohort leaders who participated in Precision Leader Development^TM sessions focused on leader communication came in at >95 percent likelihood to recommend.

In early 2024, TriHealth implemented the market’s first Career Success Center with hands-on coaching, which has reduced turnover for active frontline clinical roles by >34 percent. They implemented targeted initiatives around priority recruitment, launched the system’s first employer brand using internal and external stakeholder input, moved to an “Always On” workforce listening model, and added new hire turnover as an organization-wide leader goal.

What happened as a result? Open positions dropped by 47 percent with a 51 percent reduction in acute care RN vacancies, and total turnover decreased by 46 percent. In just 18 months, these outcomes resulted in a >$11.6 million savings in direct cost of turnover, and the urgency around staffing has dropped dramatically.

How does TriHealth convert their internal success to external recognition as evidenced by its recent Monigle win?

They’re super intentional about communicating their brand to the community. They do it through words and disciplined actions:

• A powerful focus on the patient-centered experience, guided by the brand promise “Be Seen. Be Heard. Be Healed.”

• Disciplined leadership accountability, clear expectations, and rigorous communication.

• Community involvement and outreach. TriHealth supports organizations addressing social, education, and community-related issues.

• Strategic partnerships with organizations focused on specific community needs. For instance, TriHealth works with Cradle Cincinnati to reduce infant mortality and improve maternal and infant health outcomes.

Here are a few takeaways from TriHealth’s playbook to help your organization build its brand:

• Regularly raise the periscope. Keep tabs on where you land in the marketplace. How are you performing relative to others? To the industry?

• Get comfortable with beating your own drum. Healthcare people tend to be humble by nature. But narrating all that you do in the community is now a must-have. It helps you gain citizen support for funding, attract and retain great employees, improve access, strengthen local partnerships, and build the sense of trust and connection that encourages people to choose you for care.

If an organization feels they have impact in the community, these messages allow them to expand that impact…all without feeling like an eternal infomercial.

• Master the who, where, and what of messaging. Make sure to know and convey the answers to these questions.

Who should narrate your story? Everyone from the C-suite to board members to leaders and employees at all levels should play a role.
Where should you tell the story? Learn to leverage local media, social media and digital platforms, community events, internal channels, and more.
What should you talk about? Consider sharing the good news from different areas: patient success stories, community partnerships, lifesaving innovations, the hospital’s impact on the local economy, etc.

It probably goes without saying that messaging alone isn’t enough. You need the results to back it up and the culture to keep those results coming. As we will discuss in the next column, organizations can never stop building and strengthening the leadership muscle it takes to make this happen. Doing the hard work that makes brand recognition possible is a never-ending effort…but the blood, sweat, and tears are worth it in the long run.

# # #

Dan Collard is the cofounder (with Quint Studer) of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group^® (HPSG). He is the coauthor (with Quint Studer) of Rewiring Excellence: Hardwired to Rewired and Rewiring Leadership in Post-Acute Healthcare: Equipping Leaders to Succeed.He is currently coauthoring with Dr. Katherine A. Meese the book Genfluence: Igniting Intergenerational Impact (ACHE Learn, Winter 2025). For more information, please visit www.healthcareplussg.com.

The post Translating Performance Excellence Improves Brand Recognition appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.