Hospital, market thyself

Children's Hospital in Boston, which treats one in every three hospitalized Massachusetts children, is looking to go national.

For the first time, Children's is marketing itself with magazine ads in Time and Newsweek and television spots in two test cities, Rochester and Buffalo, N.Y., as well as a national contract with Yahoo.com.

The magazine campaign, titled ''Where to Turn When a Childhood Is Interrupted," features photographs of a child in a hospital gown or a hospital bed among children doing everyday things, like swimming, camping, and holding hands in class. Underneath, the text describes the care available at Children's and its milestones, including surgeons successfully repairing a heart defect in a baby still inside its mother.

The hospital, which began the advertising in May, will run the spots through September, and then survey upstate New York residents to see whether their awareness of Children's has grown and decide whether to expand the marketing.

On the Yahoo site, Children's agreed to provide new health information every month on topics ranging from childhood depression to heart defects, in return for a direct link to the hospital's website. The hospital is also revamping its website, partly so search engines like Yahoo will find it more easily.

''The pediatric population is flat or declining locally, and kids are going to community hospitals for primary and secondary care," said Sandra Fenwick, chief operating officer at Children's. ''We've maxed out locally. If you're not growing, you're not thriving."

Hospitals rarely advertise nationally because consumers usually choose nearby hospitals. But Larry Margolis, of Storandt Pann Margolis, a Chicago-area healthcare marketing firm, said academic medical centers ''need to reach out further and further to capture more market share" and that a growing number are ''reaching out to smaller communities, where there may be just a small community hospital." Partners HealthCare, the parent organization of Brigham & Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, began advertising its cardiac services on New England Cable News last month.

Health insurance companies have loosened their restrictions on consumers, making it easier for them to go wherever they want for care. At the same time, medical care has become highly specialized. An oncologist at a particular hospital may be an expert in treating a rare childhood cancer that affects only a handful of children in his own city.

Dr. Steven Fishman, for example, is a pediatric surgeon at Children's who specializes in vascular birth defects, particularly one called blue rubber bleb nevus syndrome, in which poorly formed veins bleed into a person's stomach, causing chronic anemia and fatigue. Fishman has become expert in an operation to remove the defective sections of veins, but few physicians and patients know about the treatment. The condition is so rare that Fishman knows of just one adult patient in the Boston area.

''We're trying to spread the word so people will know about this," he said.

Most hospitals don't advertise nationally for several reasons. Executives are reluctant to offend colleagues in other markets, whom they regularly see at meetings. Children's said it picked Rochester and Buffalo because those cities don't have large pediatric hospitals and are a seven- or eight-hour drive from Boston.

Specialists there are not thrilled with the ad campaign, which included sending out 200-page directories of Children's specialists to the two cities' primary care doctors.

''We now have a full compliment of pediatric sub-specialists, so it's very rare we would send someone out of this area," said Dr. Thomas McInerny, a pediatrician at the children's hospital that is part of University of Rochester Medical Center. ''Doctors have filed away the specialist guide. I doubt they'll use it very much."

Also, most nonprofit hospitals have tiny marketing budgets. Children's found a way around this limitation. Last year, Gail McGovern, a hospital board member and Harvard Business School marketing professor, approached Francis Kelly, president of Arnold Worldwide, the Boston ad firm best known for creating the ''Drivers' Wanted" Volkswagen campaign. McGovern asked him to take on Children's as a pro bono client. Kelly surveyed the ad firm's employees and found 75 interested in working on the account.

He picked a 15-member team, including Bob Fitzgerald, a creative director who wanted to work on the account because the hospital had helped his son. Based on interviews with patients from the United States, Norway, Saudi Arabia, and Greece, the team developed ads based on three key elements of Children's: devotion, innovation, and optimism. The TV ads show sick children returning to normal, including rolling their eyes at parents' comments.

The group has donated more than 1,000 hours creating a branding and marketing campaign for the hospital, while Children's paid for the cost of placing the ads. Children's executives declined to disclose the hospital's marketing budget but said Arnold's work increased it by about one-third.

''We've been struggling to express what is special about Children's, but we haven't had the resources," Fenwick said.

The ad campaign comes at a crucial point for Children's. The hospital is building an 11-story, $135 million clinical center scheduled to open next summer and house some of its most sophisticated services. By the end of 2005, the hospital plans to increase its number of beds by 15 percent, to 370.

The marketing push also comes on the heels of a difficult year for the hospital. Public health officials last year found that poor communication and lack of accountability among doctors contributed to the deaths of three patients. And for the first time last year, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia passed Children's Hospital of Boston in the US News & World Report ranking as the country's top pediatric hospital.

Even so, Children's still enjoys an outstanding national reputation -- it's still number two in the ranking and many University of Rochester pediatricians trained there -- and a dominant statewide market share. Children's treated 34.7 percent of Massachusetts children who were hospitalized in 2002 and 14 percent of New England children, according to the most recent data available.

''The hospital is booming. It's full," said Dr. Alan Retik, a pediatric urological surgeon at Children's. ''We're doing a lot of things other places just aren't doing. We want to let people know about them."

Liz Kowalczyk can be reached at kowalczyk@globe.com.