MMHA 6800 Week 1 Audience Brief Example

After the Pediatrician's Office Closes: An Audience Brief for a New Pediatric Urgent Care Site

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6800: Marketing Management and Business Communication for Healthcare Administrators

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

After the Pediatrician's Office Closes: An Audience Brief for a New Pediatric Urgent Care Site

Purpose

Brightwater Health, a fictional regional health system used for this course, will open a pediatric urgent care site at Maple Crossing, a growing suburb about fourteen miles from its children's emergency department. The site will be open weekday evenings from 16:00 to 22:00 and on weekends from 09:00 to 21:00, staffed by clinicians trained in pediatrics, with on-site X-ray and rapid tests. Before any message is written, the marketing team needs to decide whom the launch is for. This brief chooses one primary audience, explains why, and sets aside three others for later work.

Choosing one audience is a discipline, not a limitation. A launch that tries to speak to parents, physicians, schools and employers at once usually says too little to each. The audience chosen here is the group whose decision the site exists to change.

The Primary Audience

The primary audience is parents and guardians of children under twelve who live within about fifteen minutes' drive of Maple Crossing and who face a decision about where a sick or injured child should go when the family's pediatric office is closed. The decision usually happens on a weekday evening or a weekend, often with a child who has a fever, an ear infection, a minor injury or a cough that has worsened through the day.

Table 1

Primary Audience Profile (Illustrative)

The profile centers on a decision under time pressure, which is the moment every later message has to reach.

Why This Audience

Three reasons support the choice. First, the evidence suggests many emergency department visits by children could be safely handled in lower-acuity settings. Weinick et al. (2010), working from national visit records, judged that a sizable fraction of emergency department care involved problems a walk-in clinic could handle, and studies of pediatric Medicaid visits have found urgent care used for conditions similar to those seen in emergency departments at much lower cost (Montalbano et al., 2016). Parents choosing between a distant emergency department and nothing are the people a nearby pediatric site can help most.

Second, the system's own data show it. Over the past year, about a fifth of children from Maple Crossing ZIP codes seen in the children's emergency department were treated and released with low-acuity diagnoses, an illustrative figure for this brief. Those families drove fourteen miles in the evening for care the new site could provide.

Third, the audience can be reached at the moment of decision. Parents search on their phones and listen to their pediatrician's after-hours message, two channels the system can influence. That makes the audience practical as well as important.

What This Audience Needs to Hear

Parents need answers to four questions before they choose a new site in the evening: is it for children like mine, is it safe for this problem, how long will it take and what will it cost. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that urgent care for children be coordinated with the child's medical home, with records shared back to the pediatrician (Conners et al., 2017). That gives the campaign a fifth, reassuring message: the visit will be reported to your child's own doctor. The brief does not write the messages; it identifies these five as the content the campaign must carry.

Audiences Deferred

Deferring an audience is not ignoring it. Pediatricians, in particular, will shape whether parents trust the site, and their after-hours phone message is one of the channels for reaching parents. They need a different message, written in a different register, which is why they get their own piece of work later in the term.

Table 2

Three Audiences Set Aside and Why

Each deferred audience matters, but none makes the evening decision the site exists to change.

Risks of the Choice

Two risks follow from this choice. A campaign aimed at parents of young children may miss teenagers, whose parents face different decisions about sports injuries and mental health concerns. And a focus on parents nearby may underserve families farther out who have no closer option. The brief proposes reviewing visit data at three months to see who actually uses the site and adjusting if either gap appears.

A third risk is that the campaign succeeds too well with families whose children need emergency care, steering them to a site that cannot provide it. Messages about what the site does not treat will matter as much as messages about what it does.

Conclusion

The launch of Brightwater Kids Urgent Care at Maple Crossing should be built for one audience: parents deciding, on a weekday evening or a weekend, where a sick child should go when the pediatrician's office is closed. That audience is large, underserved by current options, reachable at the moment of decision and the group whose choice the site is meant to change. Physicians, schools and employers matter and will be reached later through work designed for them.

References

Conners, G. P., Kressly, S. J., Perrin, J. M., Richerson, J. E., & Sankrithi, U. M. (2017). Nonemergency acute care: When it's not the medical home. Pediatrics, 139(5), e20170629. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2017-0629

Montalbano, A., Rodean, J., Kangas, J., Lee, B., & Hall, M. (2016). Urgent care and emergency department visits in the pediatric Medicaid population. Pediatrics, 137(4), e20153100. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2015-3100

Weinick, R. M., Burns, R. M., & Mehrotra, A. (2010). Many emergency department visits could be managed at urgent care centers and retail clinics. Health Affairs, 29(9), 1630-1636. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2009.0748