STRATEGY

Investing in Thought Leadership Can Amplify Rural Health Care Systems

Designing and using a structured, repeatable “thought leadership engine” can elevate the voices of leaders in rural health systems, strengthening the organization’s relationships and brand regionally and nationally.

During a presentation held at the SHSMD Connections Conference in October 2024, experts weighed in on the importance of thought leadership and how investing in it can aid health systems—particularly those in rural areas.

The session focused on the experiences of the team at ECU Health, a health system serving a vast, rural, and medically complex service area.

ECU Health is a large academic health system serving 29 counties in eastern North Carolina, with nine hospitals, most of them small community facilities. It operates under a “hub-and-spoke” model with a Level I trauma academic medical center in Greenville, N.C.

The challenges associated with this reality are significant and include issues related to access to care for patients who may need to travel long distances, a high disease burden often seen in rural communities, and a payor mix that is highly reliant on Medicare and Medicaid.

“These realities mean our leaders have no choice but to be advocates for rural health care,” notes Jason Lowry, executive director of government and public affairs at ECU Health. “When you think about policies and funding, they have to be active and engaged in those conversations.”

Thus, for ECU Health, thought leadership is a strategic necessity, not a marketing tactic.

“Our goal is that when there are conversations about rural health care, our leaders are the trusted voice people go to,” Lowry explains.

A necessary first step, according to Laura Sanders, an associate vice president at health care communications consulting firm Jarrard Inc., is agreeing upon the definition of thought leadership. This, she says, is essential for ensuring there is understanding and buy-in from senior leadership.

“It wasn’t immediately obvious to all of our senior leaders what thought leadership was, what it looked like in action, or what we were asking them to do,” she adds. “A thought leader is an individual or organization that is an authority or exceptionally experienced in a particular area. And they demonstrate their authority by regularly commenting and sharing their opinions authentically in the [health care] space.”

In order to build momentum, the team identified and secured an “executive sponsor”—an individual in the organization who was already modeling thought leadership behaviors. At ECU Health, that was Julie Oehlert, DNP, RN, the organization’s chief experience officer.

“It’s really important to have somebody who understands the importance of thought leadership and can be that voice with other senior members of the leadership team,” Lowry notes. “Julie is very active—she's at conferences, on LinkedIn, writing books—and she helps other leaders see themselves as thought leaders.”

The active commitment provided by experts such as Dr. Oehlert was reinforced through the development of customized, leader-specific training and resource development. This included conducting discovery calls in order to identify each leader’s priorities and message themes, interactive training focused on skill building, and the production of reference guides intended to aid in quick recall prior to conferences or interviews.

“Custom and tailored is key here,” Lowry says. “A CFO [chief financial officer] will have a different voice than our chief nursing executive, but we need them all aligned to the same vision—to create the national model for academic rural health care.”

The team also developed resources such as LinkedIn user guides, conference support one-pagers, and pretraining worksheets highlighting messaging themes. Behind the scenes, they relied on trackers for conferences, awards, and recognition lists organized by deadline and integrated into regular meeting agendas to avoid missed opportunities.

One of the most powerful tools the ECU Health team developed was a suite of digital pitch packets—simple, functional website landing pages where key information was detailed for each thought leader.

This included multiple information sources, such as:

“It’s not about bells and whistles. It’s about functionality,” Lowry says. “Media, conference organizers, or anyone interested can quickly get everything they need.”

Maintenance of these pages is built into daily processes, ensuring that messaging and links are up-to-date and positioned to best meet the needs of audiences visiting the page.

Tracking the success of these efforts doesn’t require the use of specialized tools. At ECU Health, much of the tracking is conducted via a clear, clean, and constantly updated Excel spreadsheet where the team tracks opportunities and records wins, misses, and follow-ups.

A key here, Sanders says, is to see every “miss” as a seed planted. Recently, a passed-upon abstract submission led to multiple future opportunities for a growing thought leader.

“If you miss an opportunity, there’s always a chance to learn and often another opportunity that comes from getting your leader’s name out there,” Sanders adds.

Specific to rural health care systems, Lowry stressed the importance of remembering that local engagement can often be more beneficial than national publicity for both the thought leader and the organization.

“Connecting locally with the community is just as important, if not more important, than national recognition that we get through our thought leadership work,” he notes.

The ultimate goal of producing such a thought leadership engine is that it forms a self-sustaining cycle: Thought leaders generate opportunities, the system creates more opportunities for them, and new leaders join in the mix.

“Really what we’re trying to achieve is a machine that feeds itself—opportunity all around,” Lowry explains.

Doing so, Sanders notes, involves learning from experiences such as those detailed by the ECU Health team, and then adjusting in order to customize around the needs of your individual, constantly evolving organization.

“Your mechanics should be unique to your organization,” she says. “Our hope is you can apply some of these fundamentals to build something that works for you.”