It's ironic. Healthcare organizations are always telling their patients to see a specialist. But when they need professional marketing counsel for themselves, most wind up in the hands of a generalist — a firm that markets healthcare alongside their fast food, banking, and retail apparel clients.

There's far more to be gained, however, from working with experts in your field — people who already know more-than-a-little about ACOs, building volume via the referral chain, the sensitivities of staying HIPAA-compliant, or how to use seminars to build immediate consults.

But forget all that specific, technical stuff for a minute. The truly hard part of marketing healthcare services is grasping the subtleties of how people choose their doctors, how little the healthy care about hospitals, and the sometimes-contentious dynamic between physicians and administrators. These things that probably took you a long time to grasp can be even more elusive to a marketing agency that doesn't specialize in the field. 

At Worker Bees, we've been helping healthcare clients build their businesses for more than 25 years. So this is our simple piece of advice: Work with a firm who learned the healthcare ropes as long ago as you did. 

Worker Bees Healthcare Experience
King County Medical BlueShield
Network Health Plan/PacificCare
Pierce County Medical BlueShield
Providence Health & Services
Providence Medical Group Southwest
Providence Regional Medical Center Everett
Providence Medical Center Seattle Heart Institute
Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Washington & Oregon
Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research
Skagit Regional Health
Swedish Medical Center
Swedish Medical Center Foundation
UWMedicine
Washington State Department of Social & Health Services