Creative Community Joins to Solve Health Care Crisis

Minneapolis, MN, March 26, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Amino Lounge, a creative health care community, launched online today as a collaborative solution to address the health care crisis through better marketing, advertising, and communication. Using a LinkedIn group as a forum, Amino Lounge brings creative and health care industry professionals together to form a new “standard” for health care communication. The community’s original ideas and analysis are published on Google’s Blogger at http://aminolounge.blogspot.com/.

Amino Lounge is envisioned as a focused and more participatory environment for groundbreaking new ideas --- ideas about elevating the quality of stories, media and creative used to communicate health care to the level of consumer advertising. Eric Hayward, Creative Accounts Director at 50-year-old branding and design firm Grossman Design Associates, has been using Grossman’s blog (“Our Haus” - http://gdahaus.blogspot.com/) as a platform for news and ideas about health care creative for the past year.

“If you want people to get more involved in purchasing health care, you have to make it compelling,” said Eric Hayward. “If I feel bad, Volkswagen and Lexus are doing a way better job telling me a new car is the solution to my malaise, or that I should be thinking about my next car, than hospital systems and insurance companies are to get me to think about my health,” says Hayward.

Other industries facing marketing and perception problems have traditionally banded together to influence market changes. Why not health care? is the driving attitude behind Amino Lounge.

Amino Lounge will discuss not just the tools and tactics of advertising, but more fundamental, previously unquestioned marketing assumptions made by providers and public health advocates alike. Its inaugural post discusses landmark research on the value of addressing the underlying social framework of health decisions vs. the individual accountability typically employed by organizations pushing consumerism.

“Advertisers are great at getting people to equate consumer products with personal values; even with social causes,” says Eric Hayward. “Health care is a more deserving beneficiary of this territory than, say, a soft drink manufacturer. Health care leaders can start challenging each other to be more creative, and that’s one function the new online community [Amino Lounge] can serve,” Hayward said.

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