Today’s health care consumers (and their physicians) want to do business with imaging centers offering the best possible service. How effectively a center can communicate to prospective customers its ability to satisfy their expectations of superior image quality, speed, comfort, and convenience often spells the difference between success and failure. Imaging centers can enhance their marketing efforts using 10 core strategies.

1. Emphasize your strengths . In all of your marketing materials, list, as bulleted points, the reasons that physicians should send their patients to you. If you can provide same-day studies, say so. Stress your ability to offer the shortest time on the imaging table or the easiest, most comfortable accommodation of special-needs patients. List rapid delivery of images and reports as well as the credentials and subspecialty training of the radiologists and support staff.

Jim Stuppino, president and CEO of Vision Imaging, Leesport, Pa, has built an entire marketing strategy around the technological prowess of his 6,000-sq-ft center. In 2004, his was the first US outpatient imaging center to begin offering whole-body angiography, breast imaging, and whole-spine screening using the new MAGNETOM Avanto 1.5 T MRI with Total imaging matrix