For more than 60 years, in Southwest Florida the initials NCH have stood for Naples Community Hospital, one component of what has become the largest health care system in Collier County.

Now, as part of a rebranding campaign that started in fall 2023 and will continue into 2025, NCH stands for Naples Comprehensive Health, reflecting the system’s growth in size, clinical offerings and reputation instead of representing just one hospital.

As the agency of record for NCH, The Partnership Inc. is responsible for the rebrand strategy and creative implementation.

Amanda Lucey, chief marketing and communications officer for NCH, said the rebranding is meant to reflect the “significant transformation” NCH has been through over the last 60-plus years, including the planned addition of the $200 million R.M. Schulze Family Cardiovascular and Stroke Critical Care Institute that received approval from the Naples City Council this winter, and the recruitment of top medical talent from around the country.

“It’s not just Naples Community Hospital anymore,” Lucey said in a recent interview. “We have two hospitals [Patty and Jay Baker Hospital in downtown Naples and North Naples Hospital] and an expanding healthcare system with lots of outpatient providers, and we’re working with a lot of nationally and even globally recognized partners. So, it’s an exciting time to kind of reevaluate the organization and who we are and what we stand for—and there was a lot of discussion around the fact that there has been all of this clinical transformation.”

Lucey said a focus on quality will be a big part of the rebranding campaign, meant to convey that people don’t have to travel outside Southwest Florida to receive excellent medical care.

“We’re committed to remain an independent nonprofit healthcare organization which is locally governed by our board of directors,” Lucey said, “but it’s really important to start communicating that quality is the primary focus, that quality is what we’re focused on here, and having exceptional patient outcomes and partnering with the best; bringing the best talent here to make sure that happens.”

She pointed to NCH’s participation in clinical trials—rare for smaller community health care systems—and in a Graduate Medical Education program as examples, and also to a groundbreaking procedure for patients with valvular heart disease. In late March, a team led by Dr. Robert J. Cubeddu, president of the NCH Rooney Heart Institute who was recruited here in 2021, performed the first transcatheter tricuspid valve replacement in Florida and one of the first in the country following its recent approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

New name, logo and color palettes

With the name change comes a new logo that Lucey describes as “clean and bold,” in colors called “Visionary Violet” and “Surgical Steel.”

“We wanted it to be bold and we wanted it to be scalable, so whether it’s really shrunk down and small on a little pen, or it’s really big on a billboard, that it’s really bold and visionary,” Lucey said. “Even on the [employee] name badges, we’ve started hearing some of the teams say, ‘Wow, you can really see it much better.’” In addition to the main colors, Lucey said there are “secondary colors” for different clinical service lines. For example, cardiology is red (perhaps not surprisingly), while orthopedics is a bright yellow. “And that’s also very strategic, because we want people to get back moving, right? We’re in Southwest Florida, people are outside playing pickleball and they’re at the beach and they’re doing all these outdoor activities,” Lucey said.

“So, we picked colors to represent different service lines as we start doing more of those marketing efforts, but all of it is under the big, bold, Naples Comprehensive Health brand.”

Internal and external input

Lucey said that decisions about the branding were informed by feedback from both internal and community audiences, starting with system employees.

“The people closest to the [patient] care, the people who make this organization run, are the people who work here—and they are absolutely foundational and so important,” Lucey said. “We wanted them to be a big part of this brand journey and the rebrand, starting with getting their input, engaging them, listening to them and finding out what was important to them. There was a lot of work done internally and externally when we were going through the research phase on how we were going to rebrand ourselves, and we launched in the fall [of 2023] with an employee- appreciation day where we had a lunch and a dinner, and even the night crew, making sure we had everyone involved. It was a 24-hour launch internally where we showcased the new logo, the new look and feel.”

In addition to the internal surveys, Lucey said the market research included “a lot of work and emphasis on the community,” including focus groups.

“We also worked with our Patient- Family Advisory Committee, and with our Philanthropy Committee,” she said. “We had a lot of community input, and that was really foundational and incredibly helpful as we went through the market research and what we need to do from a rebrand perspective.”

Rollout and timeline

As for the full rollout and timeline for the new branding components, Lucey described it as a “phased approach” over the next 18 months with an eye toward using resources wisely given the volume of materials and signage that will need to change.

The change is already apparent on patient materials and lobby signage at the two main NCH campuses, in print and television advertising that launched this spring and in a new billboard on U.S. 41 near Wiggins Pass Road. A new imaging center on Vanderbilt Beach Road operated by ProScan in partnership with NCH features the new logo, and Lucey said other partnering organizations will start phasing it in, as well.

“It wasn’t like flipping a light switch,” Lucey said in explaining the launch of the new branding. “You don’t see all the signage changing at once and you don’t see everything happening all at once, because we want to be good stewards of the resources that we have and make sure that we’re really engaging all of the different audiences we need to in this process and this journey. This is a healthcare organization that’s very unique, with so many different stakeholders who care so much about this organization.”

This story was published in The Naples Press on April 19.