Do Hospitals Know How to Market to Pregnant Women?

As many of you know, I do consulting with a company called "Business of Birth". I try to help birth care providers and facilities get their marketing message heard by the 20 to 40 year old females that are; The pregnancy target market. Hospitals are places for old sick people, and they do a great job marketing to these , old sick people. Pregnant women are not old, and they are rarely sick. So, it would make sense that the same message that would be targeted to older people would fall on deaf ears in the pregnancy population. Yet, when I talked to hospitals, or even hospital birth centers about simple marketing techniques such as: "A separate website for the maternity unit,." they are reluctant to tery something new. Ohio Valley General Hospital, just announced that they are closing L.&D. by the end of the year. Ohio Valley is in the Pittsburgh, PA region. In 2006 Ohio Valley spent millions of dollars opening new maternity unit trying to grow to 800 births a year from 300 births a year. They were unable to accomplish this, and have raised the white flag of surrender. Click Here to Read Article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette I have no personal knowledge of the steps that Ohio Valley took to try to grow the maternity unit. I am willing to guess that they did not reach out to the birth advocates, the birth bloggers, the birth movie people (Business of Being Born, Orgasmic Birth, etc.) to try to do anything really different. This is another example of one of my pet peeves. Hospital executives pay scant attention to what happens in the maternity unit. Then, when it is time to close the maternity unit, the hospital CEO gets up and explains why the maternity unit had to close. My question is? "Why do CEOs wait until they announce the closure of the maternity unit before they get involved in operation of the maternity unit?" Alan