If you were a cancer center trying to get patients to come to receive care at your facility, what message would you send them? In other words, what would you as a cancer center director think people would value in choosing a place to receive cancer care?
One way to answer this would be to survey cancer center directors. You could conduct face-to-face interviews or written surveys. You could hold focus groups, if you could get all the directors in a room together.
But Laura Vater and colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh had a much cleverer and simpler way to answer this question, published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
They analyzed cancer center advertisements. They collected national advertisements from U.S. consumer magazines and television networks, dutifully analyzed the topics covered in each ad, and tabulated the results. What they found is telling, if not totally surprising. (To read the rest of this article, please visit Forbes.)
