DDHA 8801 Week 5 Positioning Statement Example

A Positioning Statement Someone Could Dispute: Bayshore Joint Care for Working Adults With Arthritis, Its Four Supports, Its Falsification Test and Two Versions That Were Cut

Student Name

Walden University

DDHA 8801: Building Healthcare Brand and Alliances

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Positioning Statement Someone Could Dispute: Bayshore Joint Care for Working Adults With Arthritis, Its Four Supports, Its Falsification Test and Two Versions That Were Cut

The Statement

For Brown County adults aged 50 to 64 who are still working and whose hip or knee arthritis has started to cost them time on the job, Bayshore Joint Care is the orthopedic program that sees new patients within five business days, offers appointments before and after the working day, and sends every patient home from the first visit with a written plan for staying at work, because a surgeon and a physical therapist see each new patient together, unlike programs in the region that are organized around the operation.

Support 1: The Segment

The segment comes from the audience profile prepared for this course: county residents in their fifties and early sixties with arthritis of a hip or knee, employer coverage and a job, estimated at roughly 9,000 to 10,000 people. The statement addresses them by the problem they feel, lost time at work, rather than by diagnosis. It deliberately does not address residents over 65 or younger adults with sports injuries, who choose on different grounds and are better reached by different messages.

Support 2: The Frame of Reference

The statement places Bayshore among orthopedic programs, not among health systems in general. That frame matters because, as Keller et al. (2002) argue, a positioning must establish what category a brand competes in before it can claim a difference within it. Within this frame, the alternative it displaces is the surgery-centered program, which the competitor review found in all three rivals: each speaks mainly to patients approaching an operation, and none promises anything about the months before surgery or the patient's work. Bayshore's claim is a point of difference within the category, not a claim to be a different kind of organization. Keller et al. (2002) also stress points of parity, the things a brand must match to be considered at all. For joint care, those include surgeons with comparable training, hospital complication rates no worse than the national figure reported on Medicare's Care Compare and in-network status with the county's main employer plans. Bayshore meets the first two and is out of network with one large employer plan, which it must fix, because a working adult whose plan excludes Bayshore will never test its point of difference, however good that difference is, and closing the gap is a contracting task for the coming year.

Support 3: The Evidence

Every element of the claim is either already in place or can be counted. Speed to a first visit is measurable from Bayshore's scheduling system. In the most recent quarter, the median time from request to first orthopedic visit for new patients in this age group was eleven business days, so the program does not meet the five-day promise yet. A pilot that added early-morning and evening sessions at one clinic brought that clinic's median to six business days. The statement therefore describes a commitment Bayshore must reach before publishing, not a current fact, and Week 6 of this course addresses what must be measured before any version goes public.

The joint first visit with a surgeon and a physical therapist has a clinical rationale beyond convenience. Deyle et al. (2020), in a randomized trial among patients with knee osteoarthritis, found that physical therapy produced less pain and better function at one year than glucocorticoid injection. Starting the therapy conversation at the first visit makes nonsurgical treatment a real option rather than a fallback, which also addresses the fear, reported in the audience profile, that seeing a surgeon means agreeing to surgery.

The written work plan is the newest element and the hardest to prove. It is a process measure, the share of first visits that end with a documented plan, and it can be audited from the record.

The case for speed is not only about preference. Prentice and Pizer (2007), studying veterans' access to care, found that longer waits for outpatient appointments were associated with higher mortality among older patients. Joint pain is not life-threatening, but the finding supports treating delay as a harm rather than an inconvenience.

Support 4: The Test That Would Show the Claim False

The positioning is false if any of three things is true after it is published. If the median time to first visit for the segment exceeds five business days in any quarter, the speed claim is false. If fewer than nine in ten first visits end with a documented work plan, the plan claim is false. And if, after a year, the share of segment members who name Bayshore for a joint problem in the community survey has not risen from below one in five, the positioning has not taken hold, whatever its operational truth. Keller (1993) located brand equity in what customers know and think, so the third test matters as much as the first two.

Earlier Versions and Why They Were Cut

Table 1

Two Earlier Versions of the Statement

Both cuts follow the same rule: a statement must be specific to a segment and must rest on something Bayshore can measure and publish.

What Must Happen Before Publication

The statement is a target as much as a description. Bayshore must reach the five-day median across its orthopedic clinics, staff the joint first visits and build the work plan into the visit template before any version appears in public material. Until then, it guides internal decisions about schedules and staffing rather than advertising.

References

Deyle, G. D., Allen, C. S., Allison, S. C., Gill, N. W., Hando, B. R., Petersen, E. J., Dusenberry, D. I., & Rhon, D. I. (2020). Physical therapy versus glucocorticoid injection for osteoarthritis of the knee. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(15), 1420-1429. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1905877

Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101

Keller, K. L., Sternthal, B., & Tybout, A. (2002). Three questions you need to ask about your brand. Harvard Business Review, 80(9), 80-86.

Prentice, J. C., & Pizer, S. D. (2007). Delayed access to health care and mortality. Health Services Research, 42(2), 644-662. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6773.2006.00626.x