Telum Talks To... Elayne Soh, Chief Executive Officer, Beyond Medical Group and Aaron Poh, Alpine Surgical Practice (ASP)
Interview

Telum Talks To... Elayne Soh, Chief Executive Officer, Beyond Medical Group and Aaron Poh, Alpine Surgical Practice (ASP)


The World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Singapore as the best in Asia and the Bloomberg Global Health Index ranked Singapore as number four in the world. Singapore is widely considered one of the best destinations for medical tourism in Southeast Asia, credited to its rapidly growing Medical Infrastructure, the growing Hospi-tel concept in Singapore, as well as its rapid medical advances.

This week, we caught up with Elayne Soh and Dr Aaron Poh to learn insights into communications in the medical industry, as well as how personal branding works for individual medical professionals.


Personal branding in the medical industry
As a medical professional, personal branding is no less important compared to other industries. Many doctors often ask Elayne, “What is personal branding?”, to which she says it’s “the story people tell about you when you're not in the room”

Managing one’s personal brand as a medical professional can prove to be a challenge in Singapore and Elayne believes that there are several criteria that medical professionals need to take note of when it comes to building up a personal brand.

Personal Branding: Being Genuine and consistent
Customers these days are getting more intelligent and easily see-through disingenuous acts. Because of this, Elayne notes that simply being genuine and focusing on patients instead of commercial needs works wonders for personal branding. 

Dr Aaron Poh puts this into practice by focusing a lot of patients’ education, overall experience and evidence-based clinical treatment. He adds to this saying that patients will naturally form a rapport with their doctor, and this is often based on how well their doctor listens to them.

On top of all that, she proclaims that in order to achieve effective personal branding, one also needs to demonstrate consistency across the brand communication, gravitas, and appearance as well as service delivery.

Personal Branding: Back to the basics
Elayne also reminds medical professionals that they also need to be in total compliance with PHMC (Publicity) guidelines, which claims that in any publicity outreach, the content must not be offensive, ostentatious or in bad taste such as to undermine the honour and dignity of the medical profession.

In addition, Elayne also feels that the best form of PR is to very simply “let others tell your story and spread your brand.” She believes that word of mouth remains to be one of the best forms of personal branding for medical professionals. 

Aaron also chimes in on her thoughts regarding this and adds that word of mouth is an important referral source as a medical professional, considering potential patients feel more assured if someone they knew had underwent similar procedures and have recovered well.

 
Educating the public: Simple and Sweet
Medical jargons can often make it hard for the public to understand what medical professionals are trying to convey to them.

Elayne mentions that when educating the public on healthcare, the goal is to provide information for them to take better care of their health. She believes that it is important to keep it factual, evidence-based and actionable health information.  

She also notes that when planning for media pitches and in-house marketing materials for ASP, they ensure a strong emphasis on easy-to-understand messages to allow better understanding of the condition or treatment. 

“We invest more resources in creating educational videos to benefit our patients as generally they are generally the older aged group and may not fully understand the medical terms.” Elayne adds.

Aaron adds to this saying that simple messages with easy-to-understand analogies are key. Simplifying medical jargons and terms into everyday examples often make situations that are difficult to digest much easier to understand. 

Social media – the way forward
Elayne personally thinks that social media is an essential tool for any businesses to communicate their products and/or services, seeing that people globally often use social media a source for information. 

She delves deeper saying that “for health and science-related issues, digital presence on social media is paramount. For example, straight forward statistical information on certain conditions, eyeball attraction on Instagram is good. For a deeper insight onto the condition, from an education angle, YouTube video supports it. Ultimately, health education is to educate the general public.”

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