Des Moines Register

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is spending $3.7 million of its operational funds promoting its new Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

UIHC officials told the Cedar Rapids Gazette's Erin Jordan that the campaign is intended to raise awareness of the new facility not only in Iowa, but Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

But are these ads helping parents make informed choices about their children’s health care, or do they simply advance the interests of the state’s largest public hospital?

The UIHC multimedia campaign features the fictional, pint-sized "Aktion News Team," which includes an 11-year-old boy who “turned his skills of reading out loud and smiling into a blazingly successful career” in broadcast news. That’s according to the hospital-funded website that promises Aktion News will deliver “local news that’s not super boring.”

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There’s no question that Iowa benefits from a successful children’s hospital and some form of promotion and marketing is needed to ensure that success. But as with so much hospital advertising, it’s hard to see how the UIHC campaign promotes wellness or offers usable, consumer-oriented information. The goal of the campaign seems to be a larger slice of the health care market — and while that’s understandable, it also ignores the big picture.

According to Kantar Media, the health care industry spent $14 billion on advertising in 2014, and that represented 20 percent increase from 2011. Among hospitals, television advertising increased 55 percent during that period.

Not surprisingly, the boom in advertising and promotion has triggered protests from patient advocates — and some health care practitioners — who say the billions spent on advertising is not only wasteful, pitting hospitals against each other in a fight for market share, but also encourages patients to seek inappropriate treatment.

This year, HealthLeaders Media reported that with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, public “safety-net" hospitals that take in patients regardless of their ability to pay have been ramping up their advertising now that their patients have a choice in where to seek care. One such hospital successfully campaigned to increase its brand awareness, and was pleased to find that its perception as the hospital “of last resort” dropped by 14 percent, while “positive media coverage” of its operations increased by 65 percent.

Dr. Yael Schenker at the University of Pittsburgh has studied cancer-center advertising, which has tripled over the past 12 years, and concluded that very little usable information is being provided to prospective patients. The appeals, she said, are typically “emotional” and of little use to patients.

A 2014 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that advertisements by cancer centers frequently "evoke hope and fear, while rarely providing information about risks, benefits, costs or insurance availability."

Alan Sager, a Boston University professor of health law, told the American Hospital Association this year that image-building advertising is not helping patients.

“This is not part of the real world of providing information to patients so they can choose based on price and effectiveness of care,” he said. “Money spent on image building is money that’s not available to take care of Americans who are ill or injured.”

To make things worse, some hospitals play fast and loose with the “facts” in their advertising, disseminating information that actually misinforms consumers. In Florida, news investigations have found that hospitals have been advertising waiting times in the ER that are one-third or one-fourth the actual wait time. In New Jersey, the Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center created an “Amerimama” program that offered to coordinate medical services for Russian women to give birth there, enabling the newborns to qualify for citizenship. In the process, the hospital claimed its neonatal division was one of the best in the nation, although it actually scores well below established, national benchmarks.

Although the Food and Drug Administration regulates the advertising of pharmaceuticals, it doesn’t regulate hospital advertising. With health care costs spiraling out of control, and hospitals spending millions to simply lure patients away from each other, that may need to change.