Dartmouth Health and reaching rural patients

Salt Lake City - Dartmouth Health is a renowned academic health system, but it differs from many other academic systems in a significant way.

Most of Dartmouth Health’s patients live in rural communities. Dartmouth is based in New Hampshire and is the state’s largest health provider, and it’s also the second largest in neighboring Vermont. The system covers a large area of smaller communities.

Jennifer Gilkie, the chief communications and marketing officer for Dartmouth Health, says, “We're the most rural academic health system in the country.”

Dartmouth is working to improve access and make it easier for patients in those rural communities to get the care that they need. Gilkie talked with Chief Healthcare Executive® in a conversation at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit earlier this month.

“We are often dealing with patients who have trouble getting to their appointments, so we do provide transportation to our various facilities,” Gilkie says.

Dartmouth has also developed a capacity center at the enterprise level to work with the system’s nine hospitals. Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, New Hampshire’s only academic medical center, in Lebanon, is in a more rural area, and the system is also looking to utilize available beds in hospitals that may be closer to their communities.

“We want to put patients where they can get the care that's closest to their home and also the most appropriate location for them, so that's been something that we're proud that we've developed,” Gilkie says.

Dartmouth is working to expand in southern New Hampshire, the most populous area of the state along the border of Massachusetts.

“We're really focused on growing our presence in southern New Hampshire and building our Dartmouth Health brand awareness there. So that's a big initiative for us,” Gilkie says.

Dartmouth Health also recently announced plans to acquire Littleton Regional Healthcare, a 25-bed critical access hospital in western New Hampshire.

The health system is also using digital tools to help patients connect with physicians. The system added a new feature to its website (“Find Care”) to allow patients to easily find clinicians, including physicians closer to their own communities.

“We're pretty excited about that, because it streamlines the search experience for patients,” Gilkie says.

The health system also rebranded its visiting nurse and home services under the banner of Dartmouth Health Home Care.

The system, which had been known as Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health for years, was rebranded as Dartmouth Health in 2022. Gilkie says the rebranding was an important in operating more as a system.

“We're a relatively new system, and so that was an opportunity to begin really working across all of our members and creating aligned messaging,” she says. “And so as we developed the Dartmouth Health brand and with the brand architecture, we also developed what we call the messaging toolkit.”

She says the system gave members a common language for a brand with the room to also highlight their “unique nuances.”

“We developed specific toolkits for every member that aligned and supported the brand pillars, but also would support their unique characteristics,” Gilkie says.

She says she works with the executive team to develop strategies and priorities. And the system is looking to do more long-term planning

“We've just recently developed a dashboard and an executive scorecard, so that we can really communicate to the whole team how we're doing with our priorities,” she says.

Gilkie sees a more significant role in marketing in the coming years.

“We are really getting closer and closer with finance, with technology, really thinking, how do we all work together to improve access? How do we pull in our patient experience, our call center, our access center, and really come together and look at it across a kind of an operational structure? So that is going to be a really big shift for marketing. It used to be quite siloed, and you'll see a really big change there,” she says.