Commentary

How A Children's Hospital Uses Images As Communications Tool

Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, had quite a holiday party recently, with patients getting to meet live reindeer, neighbor Target’s Bullseye dog mascot, and a few Minnesota Twins baseball players.

That yielded plenty of “really great visual stuff” in the form of videos and still images, the hospital’s public affairs and media relations manager Nick Hanson tells Pharma & Health Insider, which Gillette was able to quickly use as shared content like a Facebook Reel, as well as providing all the imagery to Target, the Twins, volunteers and patient families.

The content will also be repurposed as this year’s holiday message being sent out Christmas Eve “instead of just some placeholder image, graphic or stock thing just randomly saying happy holidays to you,” Hanson says. “People can actually look at it and they might see a kid that they know.”

“For a children’s hospital, it’s really important to have strong images,” he explains, since they resonate both with current patients and their families as well as prospective new ones. Gillette uses images in “every form of communication,” he says, from email newsletters and print materials to its daily social media posts and banner images on every website page.

This year’s flurry of Christmas activity would have been impossible before Gillette – a nonprofit that serves children with chronic conditions – instituted a digital media management system in late 2020, Hanson says. That system helps the healthcare system access over 36,500 original visual assets in its library, with some 100 to 200 additional images being added weekly.

The system also helps Gillette share its imagery with corporate partners who, in addition to Target, include Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) fundraisers Dairy Queen, Walmart and Ace Hardware.

Hanson says that the Dairy Queen fundraising, which takes place in the summer, might mean that, “if you buy a Blizzard, a dollar or more goes to your local Children’s Miracle Network hospital. In Minnesota and west Wisconsin, that’s Gillette Children’s.”

Gillette can now combine pictures taken around the state at different Dairy Queens with images taken when the chain gives out Blizzards at the hospital, so that all stakeholders – including CMN and Dairy Queen – can use them.

Gillette’s image searches, which take place almost every day, can find content not only via existing tags, but now, thanks to machine learning and AI, through descriptions alone, notes Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter, which runs the cloud-based management system.

Fingerman provides an example of its AI visual search capability to Pharma & Health Insider: “Let’s say the Dairy Queen logo was on cup being handed to a patient. We’re able to recognize it and tag it.”

Hanson says that earlier this month, he needed to find an image of surgery in a Gillette operating room, and although such photos are often not tagged that way, the AI tool enabled him to retrieve 100 such images

Besides imperfect tagging, Hanson says Gillette’s content library used to suffer from a “chaotic filing system” where images were as likely to be found on someone’s desktop as on the hospital’s servers.  

“Having one centralized platform where we can upload and everybody has access to it has been a godsend.”

One unexpected benefit of the PhotoShelter system has been with the media, Hanson reveals.

“They use B-roll that we shoot all the time,” he says, whereby a couple of decades ago, “media would never use it. “The big affiliates here sometimes can’t come to events and they will use photos or b-roll that we take and run stories on the news that night.”

Beyond that, he says, if the media needs images “about a specific procedure, patient of provider,” he can now send them several possibilities.

Such requests for content are increasing, adds Fingerman, citing a recent PhotoShelter survey of over 600 marketing and creative professionals across categories which found 85% of them reporting “increasing pressures to produce content more rapidly.”

“The demand for creating and deploying content is larger than it’s ever been before,” he says, noting the importance of “being able to share authentic content and knowing that it’s going to resonate with the audience that they care most about having an impact with.”

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