| A television documentary series entitled Stories of The Sharp Experience (SSE) provides viewing audiences with opportunities to better understand how providers committed to high-quality care build trusting relationships with patients. Created and distributed by San Diego's Sharp HealthCare, a non-profit regional system comprised of seven hospitals, attention is drawn to how patients' personal lives are positively impacted when partnering with skilled medical teams capable of addressing a host of medical challenges. By tracing how patients' problems are transformed into healing outcomes over time, filmmakers rely on up-close insights about real clinical encounters to reveal the fundamental importance of how personalized communication can become integrated throughout the care continuum. This study closely examines 16 30-minute archived SSE's to identify specific communication practices and patterns comprising 'personalized' care. Conversation analysis (CA) is employed to locate and analyze specific social actions. Findings reveal how strategic SSE marketing, anchored in authentic and naturally occurring (though edited) documentaries of clinical encounters, can be successfully employed as (a) a novel approach to Entertainment-Education (E-E), (b) a tool for communicating organizational identity to internal and external audiences, and (c) an innovative approach to 'branding' an organizational culture of technologically sophisticated yet caring health experts. Implications are raised for future collaborations between the Sharp HealthCare system and health communication researchers who are able to provide valuable insights into how to document and improve human interactions and social relationships. |
