By John Lavey | Hammock President/COO

I had dinner with an old friend last night. As we caught up, we swapped stories about lots of things, including the health of our parents. We both have parents with heart issues who were treated in the same hospital—Inova Fairfax Hospital—near where we grew up.

This morning, my friend sent me an article about Inova Fairfax. It’s a beautiful story about two teenagers who received heart transplants in the same hospital on the same day, then years later, fell in love.

That story and our conversation drove home the power of storytelling around healthcare. As marketers, we can never lose our connection to healthcare’s biggest story: the miracles that can happen.

On the B2B side of healthcare, we can get caught up with the industry’s clinical and financial issues. We may put patients at the center of things in how we talk about healthcare, but far too often, we lose the forest for the trees.

The stories we tell about the solutions we champion should focus on how we help people live healthier lives, or how we help people battle illness and thrive. This isn’t about being patient-centric, and it’s not about appealing to clinical decision makers. It’s about helping customers understand where we sit in the big picture: improving healthcare and improving the lives of others.

Takeaway: We should never lose sight of the role our solutions play in the most important part of healthcare: improving the lives of others. If you tell your story but your audience has to do a lot of work to understand how you fit into that story, you missed the mark.

Photo: Getty Images

About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here . To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.