That's right: next spring, Living Stone will pack its bags and head to the vibrant city of Ghent. But we’re not moving to just any location—we’re setting up at  WATT The Health, a brand-new, health-focused business center and event space. Designed to be a hub for innovation and collaboration in the healthcare sector, WATT The Health is where health, sports, and tech businesses come together to connect, inspire, and grow.

Start telling your story early, and share lots of information as construction proceeds Launching a new initiative such as a new hospital facility or clinic requires a proactive communications approach in order to make the initiative a success from day one. Here are some suggestions for how to communicate to all your audiences over the lifetime of the project, from the initial planning stages through to your opening events.

If you want your stakeholders to listen, you have to prove that your messages have value The perception that key stakeholders like referring physicians and patients have about your hospital is crucial. If it’s good, your stakeholders want to serve or be served by your hospital. On the other hand, if people hold a negative perception about your hospital, it can have an impact on everything from staff retention to patient volumes. A differentiated positioning sharpens the perception of the value of a hospital, increasing its attractiveness in the eyes of all audiences. So how can you boost the perception of your hospital? To answer this question, there are two key areas to explore: How can you develop a relationship with your target groups that is based on trust? And how can you become a reliable partner that people listen to?

When you make your service orientation clear, everyone knows what to expect from your organization In the competitive hospital world, it’s important that all of your stakeholders – employees, patients, referring physicians, suppliers and others – know what your hospital stands for. Whether your service concept is ‘patient intimacy,’ ‘operational excellence’ or to be a ‘competence center of excellence,’ for example, all of your communications and activities must reinforce and support it.

Launching a new medical device is a complicated process. First, of course, you have to come up with a concept. What do you want your technology to do, and how will it do it? There’s that initial period of blue-sky thinking and prototype development, where you refine your technology and determine whether it’s viable. Then, once you decide to move ahead with commercialization, and you’ve achieved your safety and efficacy goals, the pace picks up, and suddenly you’re on a fast track to your launch target date.

Remember “audioblogging”? The first audioblogs, or podcasts, were introduced more than 20 years ago. In the decades since, podcasting has evolved from these clunky first recordings into a billion-dollar industry. In the past five years, it’s ramped up even faster, with podcast listenership doubling worldwide since 2016.

The concept of branding started with our ancestors "branding" cattle so they could easily pick their own animals from a larger herd. Today, a "brand" stands for much more than the mere identification of a product. With a good brand, you can create an emotional bond between your product and your customer.

Hospitals are scaling up to more COVID-19 capacity at the expense of non-COVID-linked activities. Many clinicians will be forced to reschedule their activities from home in anticipation of the decline in Corona numbers. As a healthcare vendor, how do you learn to surf the waves of these (and coming) pandemics?

Healthcare changes faster and is more complex than almost any other industry, meaning that healthcare marketers face a unique set of challenges. But change management hasn’t typically been part of the healthcare marketer’s skillset. It’s the same for big data analytics expertise. Increasingly, however, these are emerging as two of the most important skills that a healthcare marketer can have.i