Our Takeaways from HMPS24 in Las Vegas

In April 2024, the Cast & Hue team flew to Las Vegas to attend HMPS24, the 29th annual Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit. We heard a lot of mentions of patient-centricity and human-centered thinking. Here we share our highlights:

Reinventing Primary Care

This session, with Suzanne Hendery, Rob Klein, and Linda MacCracken, was of huge interest to us, as we are very passionate about reimagining the primary care experience and the opportunities that exist to do just that. Something that stood out to us was part of the Renown Health vision statement for their program centered around primary care access:  “...a personalized Renown experience that is digital when you want, human when you prefer…” Those words resonated because they remind us how important it is to understand patients' needs and expectations so that experiences can be designed for the patients - not for what is convenient for the organization. 
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Patient Experience & Your Brand Promise

Denise Wiseman did a wonderful job moderating this session with Dean Browell, Joel English, and Ahava Leibtag opened up with empathy and storytelling where we heard three experts in healthcare share their own experiences navigating patient experiences. They reminded us to take a human-centric perspective when approaching how brands interact with patients, because, as Joel said, “Brands don’t make promises, people make promises with other people.”
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The Changing Role of Digital in Health Systems

We also really like hearing Chris Boyer lead the discussion on the role of digital in health systems. Now that digital has become something that’s a given, the next iteration is understanding what the consumer needs. Pam Landis had an interesting point about moving beyond “owning” initiatives, to expanding tables of stakeholders and everyone “contributing” to projects and workflows instead.  Reed Smith shared how he leads experience with individual teams working on consumers, patients, and employees collaborating together. 
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Elevate Nursing Communications to a Strategic Initiative

We closed the conference with this session by Wendi Chason and Thomas Fowlkes of Mount Sinai Health System. The presentation detailed the development of a personalized nurse communication strategy and was packed with insights and examples that all of us can learn from. But the element that stood out to us the most was Wendi sharing an article that Mt. Sinai Health’s new CEO wrote as soon as he came on board earlier this year, focusing on the value that nurses bring to the system, calling them the “backbone of patient care.” It highlighted something that we’ve seen in our work on multiple occasions - nurses (and care teams in general) want to be acknowledged and included, and it doesn’t happen as much as it should. In this case, we think the combination of the new CEO’s attention and a focused, personalized communication strategy will go a long way.
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Overall it was a great conference and we enjoyed getting the opportunity to hear from thought leaders in the healthcare space as well as reconnecting with friends of Cast & Hue.