Changing the Face of Health Information Sharing

Oct 11

The Client

The Alberta Medical Association (AMA) supports more than 14,000 physicians and patients within the province by advancing patient-centred care and supporting physicians’ wellness. The Accelerating Change Transformation Team (ACTT) is a branch of the AMA that focuses on quality improvement and system transformation for Alberta medical practices.

The Opportunity

Started in 2016, the Community Information Integration & Central Patient Attachment Registry (CII/CPAR), is an initiative that connects community-based physicians with the rest of the healthcare system by allowing them to share and receive critical patient information. There is no cost to participate, but physicians must sign up. The initial goal was to have 80% of eligible medical providers participating by May 31, 2023, but as of 2020, the adoption rate was only 20%.

The initiative was unbranded, complicated to understand, and had too many resources (PDFs, PowerPoints, etc.) and no strategic marketing plan. Until July 2020, the project had only focused on family physician signup and promotion, leaving over 2700 eligible specialists in the dark without any plan to reach them. Formidable was contacted to provide strategic communication direction to the project, develop a plan to target the untapped audience, and create new communication strategies to reach family physicians.

Making it Formidable

Formidable used diffusion of innovation theory to understand the audiences and develop strategies to target each segment. For example, the uptake was 50% among family physicians, meaning late majority tactics were needed to build interest. In contrast, only 22% of specialists were participating, meaning early adopters and early majority tactics were still needed for that audience.

Awareness was deemed to be the key culprit in the lack of adoption. Formidable developed a widespread campaign that included rebranding the initiative to build recognition, involving stakeholder and government relations to build support, improving wayfinding and user experience on the website to disseminate resources better, clarifying key messages, and producing concise speaking points for leadership.

Services Provided
Strategic Communications Planning
Integrated Marketing
Brand development, visual identity, brand voice
Collateral materials
Social media content
Digital Communications
Video and newsletter production, collateral creation
Website wayfinding, knowledge-base solution research and recommendations
Public Relations
Stakeholder relations and speaking opportunities

“It was such a pleasure working with the Formidable team! We got to work together on a variety of projects over 3 years together. They excelled at helping us craft the key messages for our customers in a clear, effective, and creative format. I always appreciated how they were thinking ahead of how we would measure the impact of our communication strategies before we implemented to determine if they were effective. Having a strong communication team made the implementation of our project strategy so much easier. They really helped us create and portray a cohesive brand for our audiences. I would gladly work with Amaya, Savannah, and their team again on a future project.”

— Christal Lacombe, Project Lead

Formidable Results

Our powerhouse of a team has been instrumental in building, branding, and creating a stir around CII/CPAR, and reinvigorating a project that seemed stalled in uptake.