Note to the Privately Insured: St. Luke's Wants You!

By Lauren Smiley

Billboards have popped up around the city this month in a new ad campaign from California Pacific Medical Center reading, "Rediscover St. Luke's....the SoMa gateway to California Pacific Medical Center. We're here to stay!"

It sounds a tad bit defiant, but marketers figure that such chutzpah was in order for a money-bleeding Mission hospital that has battled rumors and the reality of closing before and after being merged by health-care giant Sutter Health at the first of 2007 as a campus of CPMC. After much in-fighting about whether the hospital would be closed, downgraded to provide only out-patient care, or remain an acute care facility (the latter option finally won), the St. Luke's marketers are trying to re-introduce the hospital with a we're-not-going-anywhere message.

The billboard takes a very literal view of the geography of "SoMA," touting St. Luke's as the hospital other than San Francisco General that sits south of Market Street. But the ad campaign is also targeting some pretty tony zip codes in the mix with its 50 some billboards and direct mailings -- including Castro and Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, the inner Richmond, Diamond Heights, and St. Francis Wood.

In short: if you have private insurance, St. Luke's wants you.

"It's certainly an attempt to get more people with insurance to come, to get more viable," says Kevin McCormack, the CPMC spokesman. "St Luke's will never make money. But if you can attract people that have to travel to other hospitals to think about St. Luke's as their community hospital, the financial burden, the financial pressures on it aren't so great."

St. Luke's loses an amount to the tune of $32 million a year, according to savestlukes.org. Now merged with CPMC, which has other campuses in the Castro and Pac Heights, St. Luke's is easily the facility with the least percentage of privately-insured patients.

"St. Luke's is known for its charity care and not turning anyone away, so certainly that's part of our mission," says Rob Seide, St. Luke's marketing director who created the campaign. "But St. Luke's does have an issue with getting a better mix of more insured patients in there."

"We're sort of like the phoenix rising from the ashes with the merger with CPMC, and we're looking to be rediscovered."