Communications at a City Hospital with Media Relations Director Dan Collins

This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Effective communication is essential in healthcare, and understanding strategic media relations helps physicians amplify their expertise, build trust, and shape institutional reputation. Media strategy impacts patient engagement, physician recruitment, and workforce retention, making it a valuable tool for advancing both individual practice and organizational goals.

Mike Sacopulos: You’ve spent nearly three decades at Mercy Medical Center—longer than most journalists spend at any single outlet. Before we get into your work there, can you draw a distinction between media relations and public relations for our audience?

Dan Collins: Public relations is the tree, and media relations is the branch—probably the biggest branch on that tree. But public relations encompasses much more: publications, video production, internal communications, and the management of issues across the entire organization. There are also distinct varieties of public relations (PR)—government, corporate, nonprofit—each oriented toward helping an organization achieve its particular goals.

Media relations fits within that larger framework as the discipline focused specifically on leveraging media coverage to advance organizational objectives. And here’s where I always push back a little on tactical thinking: I’ve encountered executives who see a competitor featured in a prominent publication and immediately say, “Why aren’t we there?” The better question is always, “What are we trying to achieve?” Is the goal patient volume? Investor interest? Market expansion? Once you’re clear on the goal, media becomes a powerful tool to pursue it—rather than an end in itself.

That’s actually why I think about Arthur Page, who served as vice president of PR for AT&T in the 1920s through the 1940s and is widely regarded as the father of corporate public relations. He made the case that the PR professional needs to be at the executive table from the beginning—not brought in at the end to put a shine on decisions that have already been made. There are still CEOs today who think PR means press releases. That’s a bit like saying the construction industry equals a single nail. The discipline is far broader and far more consequential than that.

Sacopulos: Tell us about Mercy Medical Center. It’s an institution with a remarkable story.

Collins: It truly is, and I feel that more strongly than ever as we mark Mercy’s 150th year. The hospital was founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1874, and the sisters continue to shape our mission and values today. Sister Helen Amos, who was president and CEO when I joined, now serves as executive board chair.

What distinguishes Mercy, in my view, is the strategic clarity it found about 30 to 33 years ago around women’s health. Our marketing leadership commissioned a Gallup survey to determine where Mercy should focus its energy. The findings pointed to women’s health—and for good reason. Women remain the primary healthcare decision-makers in most families, and they face a distinct set of medical needs, from gynecological and fertility issues to obstetrics and beyond.

Rather than simply rebranding existing programs, Mercy went out and studied hospitals across the country with proven track records in women’s health, then invested in recruiting physicians with exceptional credentials in that area. One early example was Dr. Neil Rosenshine, who had been head of GYN Oncology at Johns Hopkins. Attracting someone of that stature created what we came to call a “magnet doc” effect: a physician with a strong reputation draws patients, and also signals to other excellent physicians that this is a serious institution worth joining.

Over roughly 30 years, Mercy climbed from seventh in the Baltimore market for women’s health to first. We’ve since expanded into other areas of distinction—robotic surgery, surgical oncology—but the women’s health brand remains central to who we are.

The other thing I’d emphasize is leadership. Great strategy fails without great people at the top. We’ve been fortunate: Sister Helen Amos, Tom Mullen—our first lay president and CEO—and now Dr. David Nain, our first physician CEO, who stepped into the role right in the middle of COVID. That continuity of strong, mission-driven leadership is not something you can manufacture, but it makes all the difference

Sacopulos: How has the day-to-day work of media relations changed over your career?

Collins: Dramatically. When I arrived at Mercy in the mid-1990s, there was no hospital website, and social media hadn’t been invented yet. In Baltimore, the goal was straightforward: get into the Baltimore Sun, above the fold if possible, followed by television and radio. That was essentially the landscape.

Then, gradually and then all at once, everything shifted. Print media began launching online platforms, which ultimately undermined their print circulation. Newspapers that had operated for 150 years started closing. The Baltimore Examiner, where I did some freelance work, lasted only about three years before shutting down in 2009. And into the middle of this disruption came social media—Facebook, Twitter, and everything that followed—which the old guard initially dismissed as a place where people posted photos of their lunch.

What that period required—and what is still required—is adaptability and honest counsel to leadership. Executives are running complex organizations; they don’t have time to monitor every shift in the media landscape. That’s part of what a media relations professional does: track what’s working, understand which platforms reach which audiences, and translate that into strategy.

Today, the calculus has become even more nuanced. Is it more valuable to be profiled in The Wall Street Journal or to appear on a podcast with 20 million listeners? That’s a genuine question, and the answer depends entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish and who you need to reach. Our job is to know those answers.

Sacopulos: Does your content strategy vary by platform?

Collins: It does, although the mechanics vary depending on how platforms are structured. Facebook and Instagram, for instance, are integrated—content can carry across both. But character limits on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Bluesky obviously demand a different approach than a long-form LinkedIn post or a feature article.

More importantly, platform choice should be driven by audience. At Mercy, we don’t use TikTok—partly because of the ongoing regulatory questions around the platform, but more fundamentally because our target audience skews older. We’re trying to reach women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and they’re far more present on Facebook and LinkedIn than on TikTok, which tilts heavily toward the 18- to 24-year-old demographic.

The same tailoring applies beyond social media. When a Mercy physician is preparing for a live television interview that will become a 90-second segment, I help them prepare very differently than I would for an in-depth conversation with a medical trade journalist writing a 2000-word feature. Knowing the format—and preparing your people accordingly—is a core part of media relations work.

Sacopulos: How do you handle misinformation posted publicly on your channels—anti-vaccine claims, for example?

Collins: It’s a nuanced situation that requires judgment rather than a reflexive response. On Facebook, where we have our strongest presence, there’s a helpful feature that allows us to hide comments rather than delete them outright. The person who posted can still see their comment, but it’s not visible to the broader audience. That’s an important distinction—we’re not silencing people, but we’re not amplifying demonstrably false information either.

When a comment goes beyond general misinformation into something potentially libelous, or when it involves a specific patient grievance, that becomes an opportunity to engage directly. I always encourage our team to resist the instinct to treat a negative comment as simply a threat. Often, there’s something real behind it—a patient experience that went wrong, a communication failure, a concern that wasn’t addressed. So rather than becoming defensive, we try to connect that person with our patient advocacy team and find out what happened and how we can make it right.

The goal is transformation: turning someone who came to your page to express frustration into someone who leaves feeling heard and respected—and who may ultimately become an advocate. It happens more often than you’d expect. Someone who was publicly critical will sometimes follow up with an equally public note saying that Mercy reached out and resolved their concern. That kind of authentic, positive word-of-mouth is worth more than almost any paid campaign.

Sacopulos: How should a chief medical officer think about working with media relations?

Collins: The relationship I have with our CMO, Dr. Wilmo Rowe, is a good model. The most important foundation is mutual understanding—making sure the CMO knows what media relations can do and sees the team as a resource, not a bureaucratic checkpoint. That relationship-building starts on day one and never really stops.

The operational piece is equally important. During COVID, we established a structured cadence: regular meetings with the major executives across the hospital, where I was included alongside clinical and operational leadership. That kept me informed in real time about policy decisions, staffing changes, and clinical protocols—so I could anticipate media implications before they became problems, and so I could flag issues to the CMO that she might not have seen coming from a communications standpoint.

The underlying principle is: don’t make media relations the caboose on the train. If PR is only notified after decisions have been made, the function is essentially decorative. The value comes from integration—from having the communications perspective in the room when strategy is being shaped.

And when you’re building those relationships with physicians and clinical executives, the most effective approach is to lead with service rather than ask. If a doctor’s primary experience of the media relations team is of being peppered with requests for interviews or quotes, that’s going to create friction. If, instead, you come in asking, “What’s making your job harder, and how can I help?”—you build trust quickly, and everything else flows from that.

Sacopulos: Where does media relations sit in the organizational structure, and why does that matter?

Collins: At Mercy, our department has a direct line to the president and CEO, and I think that’s essential. I’ve worked at institutions where the media relations function was buried lower in the hierarchy, and— candidly—that’s one of the reasons I’m no longer at those institutions.

Access matters because media relations, marketing, and public relations function as three points of a single triangle, all aimed at the same organizational objectives: growing patient volume, retaining existing patients, and attracting and keeping top clinical talent. If communications leadership isn’t part of the strategic conversation, you lose the ability to deploy those three functions in a coherent, mutually reinforcing way.

The placement of the function in the org chart sends a signal about how seriously leadership takes communications—and that signal is picked up internally by staff and externally by the media professionals you’re trying to build relationships with.

Sacopulos: Can media relations play a meaningful role in staffing and workforce retention?

Collins: Absolutely, and it’s an area where I think healthcare organizations leave significant value on the table. We recently did a series of profiles on four of our top nurses for a new nursing publication. The response from those nurses was genuinely enthusiastic—and then I asked them to share the stories with colleagues and their professional networks. That’s earned media working as a recruitment and retention tool simultaneously.

We also partnered with our local ABC affiliate, WJZ, for Nurses Week—bringing a well-known anchor to a hospital-wide celebration and putting our nursing staff front and center on television. For a nurse who’s weighing where to work, seeing that kind of visible recognition matters. It communicates something important: this organization values its people enough to celebrate them publicly.

We’ve also begun working with a video production company called Zinnia Films to create content specifically focused on what it’s like to work at Mercy. Those videos are designed for both recruitment and retention — distributed through our own channels and through external platforms where prospective employees are likely to see them.

The through line in all of it is the same: people want to know that what they do matters, and that their organization sees them. Media, used thoughtfully, is one of the most effective ways to show them that it does.

Listen to this episode of SoundPractice .