The campaign offers numerous benefits to your practice through improving your online presence and driving traffic both to St Vincent’s Private Hospitals and to your specialist profile, from prospective patients actively searching for your practice and specialist orthopaedic care.

The enhanced visibility to a targeted audience builds awareness and recognition, as well as competitive advantage, meaning patients will be interacting with SVHA and your practice ahead of others.

The campaign is predominantly digital at this stage, with the SVHA contact centre triaging all enquiries received.

As at December 2023, digital advertising from the campaign has been viewed over 1.1m times – and has generated 78,000 clicks and over 300 hospital admissions nationally.

On average, the Orthopaedics Hub has over 4,500 visitors per month and over 1,800 prospective patients have submitted an enquiry.

A strong content marketing component underpins the Orthopaedics Hub, and this organic search-first strategy has delivered consistent growth in digital search market share for SVHA. Australian consumer research indicates 69% of patients say they do research online to understand their symptoms and treatments. Patients are taking their health in their own hands and SVHA is leveraging this emerging trend.

St Vincent’s remains the only national hospital – group and independent – to create a content-rich, digital experience of this calibre, that focusses on educating and empowering the prospective patient. St Vincent’s is now outperforming digital giants Mayo Clinic, Health Direct and The Rothman Orthopaedic Institute in 20+ key search terms in the hip and knee orthopaedic space.

The St Vincent’s Digital Assistant (Chatbot) is an AI-driven technology, designed to simulate conversation with the end-user.

The end-user initiates a conversation by entering in their name, contact details, and answering questions regarding their enquiry. Based on these responses, the Chatbot then directs them to a page within the website that is best placed to provide the information sought. The end-user is then given the option to indicate whether their enquiry has been resolved. If it has not, the enquiry is escalated to a “human” at our national contact centre, who respond to the end-user within one business day, and work with St Vincent’s Private Hospitals to provide a resolution.

Doctors are only required to provide their surgical fees for the specific service we are looking to market. These fees won’t be displayed publicly, and only provided to patients who enquire directly with the hospital via our marketing.

In most instances we create a fixed rate hospital packages, but this will only apply to patients who meet the criteria for a low complexity, standard surgery.

Our marketing channels are a way for patients to be provided with a fee estimate/guide for their surgery. Formal quotes will come via the existing financial processes following their VMO consultation and treatment plan finalisation.

Please communicate any opportunities or ideas you may have to your Business Development Manager.

Typically, we would look for procedures that meet the following criteria:

• They have significant public wait lists
• Existing self-funded activity within our hospitals
• Low complexity, somewhat easy to standardise
• Affordable / justifiable for self-funding patients
• Growth benefits for the hospital and specialists

While we service self-funded patients for most of the procedures done at St. Vincent’s hospitals, our marketing campaigns are limited to those that we identify as providing good opportunity for growth of our hospitals and specialists

Fees will only be accessible to patients by submitting enquiries via our marketing channels. Fees will not be shown publicly on the website. Once a patient has submitted an enquiry requesting a fee estimate, they will be provided this via direct email with clear information stating that this is just a guide and that fees will be finalised once the patient has been through the necessary steps with their surgeon.

If you would like to express interest in participating in one of these programs, please contact your Business Development Manager.

You'll have the opportunity to grow your business: With over 55% of online bookings made after hours, St Vincent’s Priority allows 24/7 access to specialists in real-time. Leverage the thousands of patients searching St Vincent’s Priority every month and put your practice in front of more potential patients.

You'll benefit from free marketing to you and your practice: We’re not only investing in the setup of the technology, but also in dedicated marketing programs to ensure you’re top of mind for GP’s when they make decisions and for patients when they are searching for specialist healthcare.

Your staff will have less administration: With a streamlined referral process and an ongoing stream of lead generation, St Vincent’s Priority allows you and your staff more time to focus on delivering patient care.

You can register your interest to participate here. Once you have done so, a MyHealth1st representative will be in touch to arrange a meeting with you to answer any questions you have regarding St Vincent’s Priority.

Your staff will have less administration: With a streamlined referral process and an ongoing stream of lead generation, St Vincent’s Priority allows you and your staff more time to focus on delivering patient care.

Most of us will use online booking services in our day to day lives without thinking about it – like Expedia to book our latest holiday or Ticketek to book concert or theatre tickets. It’s more the norm now to have online services so that consumers can choose to interact with organisations at a time that suits them. St Vincent’s Priority enables us to simply capitalise on natural consumer behaviour and give our patients and GP’s more choice about how they access our specialists. We’ve also seen this validated by uptake of the service – more than 90,000 visitors in the first year to the service and over 10000 bookings to date.

Online appointments are designed to work for you, from your PMS calendar. With a direct integration, there is no additional admin required - giving your staff more time to focus on face to face patient service and less time on booking administration.

Only available appointment slots in the PMS can be seen by MyHealth1st’s platform. This means that patient data, offline appointment details or scheduling commitments are completely out of view from MyHealth1st. As each specialist has their own set of discrete needs, the service can be customised to reflect:

• The length of appointments, e.g. 15 min, 30 min, 60 min, 90 min intervals.
• The practice policies, such as the type of patients you wish to see, or your costs per appointment and cancellation policies. These appear at the beginning of the booking form. Booking confirmation emails will also reiterate the practice policies.
• Practice and practitioner profile description.

There is a one-off integration setup cost that is dependent on the number of practice locations you have - which St Vincent's will pay (limited time offer). Thereafter, there is a monthly subscription fee of just $75 + GST to enable you to take online bookings on both St Vincent’s Priority and the MyHealth1st marketplaces, as well as enabling your own practice website to take bookings. You will be supported by dedicated customer service and IT teams throughout the onboarding process and throughout your subscription to the service.

• Melbourne: SVPHM.Marketing@svha.org.au
• Mater, North Sydney: james.sklarchik@svha.org.au
• Sydney: james.sklarchik@svha.org.au
• Griffith: svpchg.marketing@svha.org.au
• Northside: svphn.gpevents@svha.org.au
• Toowoomba: pandora.bevan@svha.org.au

Melbourne: SVPHM.Marketing@svha.org.au
Mater, North Sydney: louisa.cairns@svha.org.au 
Sydney: peta.owsnett@svha.org.au
Griffith: svpchg.marketing@svha.org.au
Northside: Suzanne.bartlett2@svha.org.au
Toowoomba: pandora.bevan@svha.org.au