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Suzanne Hendery: Making A Difference

Suzanne Hendery, has accomplished so much in her four years at Renown Health in Reno, Nevada. She and her team have taken a relatively unknown provider in the middle of the desert and turned it into an internationally recognized healthcare leader. A key part of her strategy was using social media.

Healthcare Social Media

Every time I do a video interview, I am reminded of how much I miss being at conferences. I can’t wait for all the restrictions to be lifted and it’s safe to gather in large crowds again. I am especially looking forward to conducting interviews, in-person with friends like Hendery, Chief Marketing & Customer Officer at Renown.

When Hendery arrived at Renown Health in 2017, she had just spent 27 years at Baystate Health in Springfield, MA…about as far away from the desert environment of Reno, NV as you can get. It was soon clear that her can-do attitude and sunny disposition were a perfect match for Renown.

One of the projects she took on was to increase awareness of the Renown brand. Rather than just stick with traditional marketing channels like print, radio, TV and billboards, Hendery made social media a key pillar of her strategy.

“Dan Dunlop from Jennings gave us a lot of counsel and guidance,” she recalled. “He helped create a strategic approach [to social media] to meet our goals.”

If you look at the Twitter feeds of Tony Slonim, CEO of Renown Health @RenownCEOTonyMD and of the organization itself @RenownHealth you’ll see well crafted tweets with selfies, candid photos and replies (yes REPLIES!). It is more than your standard one-way corporate tweets.

I had to ask Hendery if Renown has seen a tangible return from their social media efforts. Her answer was an emphatic YES: “We have certainly seen anecdotal evidence. When Dr. Slonim goes to an event and speaks, complete strangers will come up at the end and ask if they can take a selfie with him. At a metrics level, through the tweets and posts, we were able to garner international recognition for some of the innovative things we were doing that no one paid attention to before.”

The Impact of COVID-19

“Like all other healthcare organization across the country, we were suddenly thrown out of our “marketing suits” and into scrubs as the public information officer for the organization,” said Hendery. ”In that role, we were the eyes, ears and the mouthpiece to our employees [how they could protect themselves], their families [how they could protect their loved ones] and to our community.”

I thought she summed it up best when she said: “We used to spend hours on crisis communications manuals, but no one wrote the manual for this [the pandemic].” To help her team weather the COVID-storm, she held daily Zoom calls where she and her colleagues shared ideas, successes, failures, and just vent. “We all did it together and we see some hope at the end of a very dark tunnel [now that the vaccines are here].”

Winning a HITMC Award

Hendery’s accomplishments in the past year did not go unnoticed. She won the 2020 Medigy HITMC Award for Marketer of the Year (Provider).

“Winning the Award was really different for me,” explained Hendery. “I’m used to winning team awards which is always exciting. But winning this individual award meant the world to my board members, my CEO, my supervisor and my team. To win an individual award based on marketing excellence and to get that external validation was so important to establishing my credibility. It has meant everything.”

As a Medigy HITMC Award winner, she had this advice to share with fellow healthcare marketers on how to succeed:

  • Work harder and better than anyone else.
  • Always say positive things about others (I love this one!)
  • Make your boss look good.

Watch my fun and far-ranging interview with Hendery to hear:

  • How Suzanne collaborated with her hospital’s CEO to become a social media influencer
  • What you need to be prepared for when getting your organization onto social media
  • Why teamwork is key to making it through a crisis
  • Her advice for people thinking about getting into healthcare marketing
  • Her suggestions for nominating someone for a HITMC Award

Interested in nominating someone for the 2021 Medigy HITMC Awards? Visit our awards page to see all of this year’s categories and how you can nominate an organization or individual who did outstanding work last year.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is an award-winning Marketing Executive with more than 15yrs of healthcare and HealthIT experience. He co-founded one of the most popular healthcare chats on Twitter, #hcldr and he has been recognized as one of the “Top 50 Healthcare IT Influencers”. Colin’s work has been published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, American Society for Healthcare Risk Managers, and Infection Control Today. He writes regularly for Healthcare Scene and here at HITMC.com. Colin is a member of #pinksock #TheWalkingGallery and is proudly HITMC. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

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