Sports Pediatric Medicine, Overwhelmingly Interdisciplinary

So my main project this semester as indicated before was to work on marketing the sports medicine program at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I got some questions about the last blog on “What is a Sport Pediatric Medicine Doctor?” Basically it the same as sports medicine in a regular hospital, i.e. treating sports related injuries, with one huge difference that we specialize in treating “growing” athletes. What many doctors do when the see that a patient has a condition that they are unable to treat properly or afraid to treat it due to their lack of understanding of the growing adolescent is say, “Don’t play this sport anymore.” At Phoenix Children’s Hospital we are focusing our efforts in specialized care so that we don’t have to say “don’t play the sport anymore.” This is amazingly interdisciplinary process marketing for this type of service. What I have done thus far is do a lot of research on what other hospitals are doing with their pediatric sports medicine program, and then applying some but not others ideas to our strategy. I am blessed that we are the only hospital in Arizona with a pediatric sports medicine specialist in staff, because it allows us to say we are the best because we are the only ones in Arizona. I am also blessed by PCH’s overall reputation, because when I talk to several different companies about the program, they hear that it is PCH and they want to get involved, to the point where I have to choose what events are most beneficial for us to either sponsor or provide health coverage.

            This week I did a lot of mix between communication, marketing and business to business sales. Although the sales were not costing anything, I classify relationship building between different businesses sales because a service is exchanged for marketing. I am getting ahead of myself… To back track, this week my supervisor and I decided that we should go and contact different youth related small business in the Phoenix and Mesa areas providing them with information about the program and invite them to contact us for health coverage possibilities and so on and so forth. This was a process which I am learning that everything is a process in this industry. I noticed at first when I started I was ready to go out and just do everything, however, the processes are so time consuming it is unbelievable, and these processes always deal with different disciplines making the overall process very interdisciplinary. On top of these bigger projects again I am utilizing my skills in Creative Writing to write more news releases and paragraphs for internal publications. Nothing about the marketing process that I have experienced can be classified as interdisciplinary.