Humans tend to see their ailments as discrete events—that lower back pain, annoying dry skin, indigestion—decoupling the problems from each other and also from the overall self. A healthcare system can do the same thing on a grander scale, with patients chasing down specialists in a faceless corporation.
Washington Hospital Healthcare System has presented an alternative for over 60 years, and their recent rebranding as Washington Health renews their commitment to seeing and caring for the whole person.
Washington Health CEO Kimberly Hartz spoke on how the hospital’s roots reach back to before Fremont’s incorporation as a city.
“In 1948 community members came together because they wanted to have local healthcare,” says Hartz. “They were either traveling north to Oakland or south to San Jose, and so they decided they wanted to bring local health care to this community. It took them 10 years, and they raised the money and opened Washington Hospital as a 150-bed hospital serving a community of about 18,000.”
Now the hospital has 415 beds, clinics, a birthing center, surgery center, new Level II trauma center—and serves 400,000 in Fremont, Newark, Union City, Southern Hayward and Sunol. While that’s the core service area, some patients come from beyond the Bay Area and even out of state.
The rebranding reflects that while Washington Health (WH) began as a hospital, it’s now an integrated system of programs. Hartz says, “People come up and say, ‘I came over to this surgery center and it says Washington but is it part of you or not?’ So there’s been some confusion as to what constitutes Washington Hospital Healthcare System.”
Careful consideration and market analysis went into the rebranding, which started in July of 2022. The process included doing market research and talking with the community, patients and staff to get a sense of how they saw Washington as a healthcare system.
“It was a lot of thinking about who we were, who we are, and who we need to be as a community health system,” says Hartz. “Our community has always been here for us and we feel how important it is to be here for our community.”
The new logo combines three diverse elements to represent the diversity in the Bay Area, adding a calming blue but keeping the original Washington Hospital green.
Underpinning community focus is the fact that WH is an independent health system and will continue this way—in an increasingly rare model where doctors and staff live in the community. Hartz explains, “We don’t have a parent company, so all the money we make goes back into new programs and services to meet the needs of our community and not to some other place.”
WH partners with others such as local faith-based and nonprofit organizations. In particular, WH’s relationship with UCSF Health lets them bring academic level care in cardiology and oncology to the Tri-City community.
The switch from “Hospital” to “Heath” for the “H” highlights an expansion from fixing diagnoses to proactive care, including community education. Says Hartz, “Healthcare is much broader than just coming to a hospital, whether it’s going to your physician or needing to get services in rehab. There’s so many pieces that are part of health.”
The rebranding started with an internal rollout, where physicians, staff and volunteers got up to speed on the new logo, name and mission values so that they could in turn answer questions from the community. Now WH is beginning the external brand rollout, starting digitally with the website and social media, then proceeding to forms and the annual report, and finally physical signage on buildings.
Patients, however, can expect telephone contact numbers, communications and the online portal to stay nearly the same—just with more blue. Everything will have the label Washington Health, with the individual discipline listed below. In fact, Hartz hopes that a unified branding will reinforce teamwork across departments.
“Sometimes even things like having that same name as Washington Health makes everybody say, ‘Yes, I’m not in my silo,’” says Hartz. “‘We should all be working together.’”
Harz summarizes, “We’re here as a hospital if you need us, but we have so many other elements of the integrated system. Our goal is to have that integrated experience. If you walk into one of our medical group offices and they say ‘Hello,’ and then you end up in the surgery center, they say ‘Yes, we already have all of your information.’…So there’s more of a consistent experience for our patients no matter where they touch our system.”
Washington Health
washingtonhealth.com
