On the way to work the other day, I heard a radio commercial advertising a local hospital network’s cardiac care services. In it, a patient’s daughter related her overwhelmingly positive experience with the hospital team that treated her 90-year-old father with a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), a minimally-invasive alternative to open heart surgery. It was a good commercial.
It had all the elements: “I was worried at first, the doctors earned my trust, the surgery went well, everyone was so nice, now Dad is back at home and doing all the things he used to do, thanks to hospital X.” The problem with commercials like these is that they’re misleading, and they don’t really tell you anything at all about the hospital or its services. From a consumer standpoint, it may be easier to relate to individual patient narratives, but the ones chosen for radio and TV ads are, of…
