Think of a marketing program as if it were a patient. With patients you take a history, gather information, ask question, run tests, consult with colleagues, make a diagnosis and then proceed to treatment and subsequent follow-ups to achieve healthy outcomes.
The same approach works when planning a marketing program for any practice of any size or specialty. For history look at current marketing initiatives from other practices and within the profession itself. Review what other physicians in your specialty are doing and the level of competition they pose for similar services. Ask yourself how you might best promote your practice and its services in today’s new competitive medical reality. Is your specialty effected by seasonal changes, like allergy and immunology, or does your service remain constant, like surgery. Are your services in or out of the insurance loop? Do they apply to a specific gender or age group, or not? Will you target patients locally or attract from a larger geographic region? Once these types of questions are answered you will have an accurate marketing diagnosis and be better equipped to move forward with treatment; the actual creation and placement of ad materials in the marketplace. Next comes the follow-up. Measure results and change what’s indicated to achieve the best outcomes possible.
Friday, January 4, 2008
How To Market A Practice: Test, consult, diagnose, treat, follow-up
Internal Marketing: The secrets of an office brochure
Creating a brochure for a medical practice is more difficult than creating one for a business. Yet each needs to do the same thing, namely promote products and services. Business brochures follow a time tested rule for success. They give the reader information, news, helpful hints, and a description of product benefits. They compare price and performance to show customers that their company’s goods and services are better than the competition. They target their audience as specifically as possible and often include testimonials and demonstrations in support of product claims. They do this to get a competitive edge. And it works.
Practice brochures can do the same. They can use the same techniques as business brochures to achieve a competitive edge. However, to do this, to be the same but different, they must be changed in content and context from their counterparts in business and, more importantly, also reflect medicine’s ethical standards. Creating them to achieve a competitive edge for your practice will be helped by:
- Substituting successful outcomes and cure rates for product reliability.
- Substituting experience and number of procedures performed for product acceptance.
- Substituting before and after facts for product demonstrations and testimonials.
- Substituting specific, new medical technologies for industry news and information.
- Substituting women, who are responsible for making upwards of 70% percent of all health care decisions as the right demographic for any industry or business specific demographic.
Brochures techniques such as these will keep your internal marketing lively, interesting, informative and well focused - and give you the edge you want.
Friday, December 14, 2007
HMO’s and Shrinking Fees: Can advertising make you a better doctor?
Yes it can. It's no secret that shrinking reimbursement schedules cause distress for just about every physician no matter the practice specialty, size, or reputation. Some, however, see the constraints as a signal to take action on the business side of their practice to grow and prosper. It's not uncommon today for doctors, medical administrators and hospitals to turn to marketing as a reliable way to offset the downward pressures on fees and medical delivery decisions. They understand the need to "go after patients" themselves and concentrate on marketing to promote procedures for better returns on services rendered.
Taking action to carefully target patients and better paying procedures does a lot more than offset fee constraints. Successful action often replaces pessimism and frustration with a new found sense of well being and the knowledge that one's future is back in one's own hands instead of in the hands of third party payors. Solvency also has a remarkable way of returning doctors to their original calling, the "challenges of their profession" and helps them be better doctors.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Healthcare Marketing
Good for patients. Good for doctors.
It’s safe to say that marketing plays an important role in any commerce, healthcare included. It helps business compete for market share by informing consumers of the value they get when they choose one company’s goods, products or services over those of another. It does the same for medicine. It helps compete for market share by informing patients of the value they get when they choose one practice over another - a real plus for any physician in any specialty in today’s competitive medical reality.
A good medical marketing campaign will have, at its heart, a valid promise about the outcome received from the service rendered. This can be anything from prompt relief of symptoms and suffering, better cure rates, improved procedures, faster recovery, less pain, faster return to normal activities, enhanced beauty, better mobility and so on. In addition a good marketing
campaign will be better received when it also reflects a sensitivity to the patient’s feelings about his condition in relation to those services and promised outcomes.
Outcomes promised and sensitivity to patient concerns can add immeasurably to marketing’s success for both the patient and the doctor.
Can A Doctor Afford To Be A Healer? The Loss of Leadership
There is an hidden loss resulting from third party cost cutting measures that is over-shadowed by the more visible reductions in physician fees and medical delivery choices - but equally as detrimental to quality care. What’s lost is the leadership and partnering doctors have with their patients when they are forced into standardized treatment plans to meet third party payer schedules.
Standardized treatment plans put the payer in the physician’s role of care giver. They view patients as statistics rather than people, erode the doctor patient relationship, separate each from the other, creating a gap between the doctor, the patient as an individual person, and, in the end, the healing process itself. Standardization forces doctors out of sync with their training and knowledge, limits the quality and quantity of care they can provide, and stunts the patient’s journey toward wellness.
One recommendation that can help offset reductions on caring and income is to acknowledge the fact that restrictive healthcare policy is the newparadigm in medicine. Once done it will be easier to accept and embrace a new set of business principals aimed at keeping your practice healthy. These include practice enhancement marketing strategies that illustrate exceptional evidence-based scores for specific procedures. This type of marketing strategy is already being used successfully by the largest, most prestigious institutions. It makes them stand out from the competition and get a bigger share of the patient market. It can do the same for any practice of any size or specialty - and it may even put healing back into the doctor patient relationship.
The Medicare Equation In 2007
More is less– it's the law.
The current regulations governing Medicare and Medicaid payments play out like this. When services go up reimbursements go down. As physicians provide more services per patient the spending by Medicare increases faster that the overall economy, and when cumulative spending targets established by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid exceed economic growth, reimbursements to doctors are cut. A 5% percent drop is predicted. Doctors in turn predict that any reduction in services to keep spending down will only result in diminished patient care.
The federal government is probably left with two choices. One, increase reimbursement rates to cover the difference between current service levels and economic growth or, two, adjust reimbursement rates to pay doctors on a Pay for Performance basis. Increased reimbursements per sea promise financial stability for doctors while Pay for Performance rates promise appropriate pay for proven outcomes.
The question remains. What drives medicine? Is it money for any and all services regardless of outcomes or money for proven performance? The doctor's voice is needed to help the government reach a workable solution.
Patient Safety
Is Quality Care A Dinosaur?
Yes. No. Maybe? Not Yet. Who knows? One thing that holds some degree of certainty is this - preventing quality care's possible extinction may well depend on physicians being willing to openly demonstrate to patients and other healthcare professionals their ability to provide superior outcomes.
Validating results with measurable data is emerging as a valid answer to the constraints imposed by third parties on quality care issues and physician incomes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the initiatives taken by major healthcare institutions and individual practices to promote their capabilities directly to patients via positive and competitive marketing campaigns. Marketing - once the outcast step child may, if invited to the party, save the day for healthcare.
The competitive stand taken by these prestigious institutions and private practitioners using results oriented, patient education marketing, is paving the way for an eventual mandate requiring all doctors to take CME credits in "patient safety" - another step that will go a long way to promote quality care, highlight its important place in the future of medicine, and prevent it from going the way of the dinosaur.
The Bi-Lingual Patient Challenge
The Hispanic population in this country is growing at a tremendous rate. Currently, there are over 40 million Hispanics in the U.S. with a projection of over 100 million by the year 2050, representing 25% of the the total U.S. population. New growth adds new challenges to providing quality care to patients who speak Spanish as their primary language. Overcoming communication barriers in pursuit of quality care for this new demographic is best accomplished with bi-lingual staff member(s) who can render spoken-word interpretations to patients both in the office and over the phone. Making a patient language initiative available is a plus for any practice and should be considered in a practice's marketing effort. Reaching this rapidly growing, yet underserved patient population, in their own language, can dramatically increase a practice's ability to provide improved, quality care – to everyone in its market area. Quality care starts with a language friendly marketing initiative that specifically targets foreign language patient and ends with a significantly improved clinical experience for them and the medical facility too.
Partial Source: Healthcare Executive – Nov./Dec. 2006
US HEALTH CARE SYSTEM GRADED "D"
The U.S. health-care system is doing poorly by virtually every measure. That's the conclusion of a national report card on the U.S. health-care system, released Sept. 20. Although there are pockets of excellence, the report, commissioned by the non-profit and non-partisan Commonwealth Fund, gave the U.S. system low grades on outcomes, quality of care, access to
care, and efficiency, compared to other industrialized nations or generally accepted standards of care. Bottom line: U.S. health care barely passes with an overall grade of 66 out of 100.
The survey was carried out by 18 academic and private-sector health-care leaders, who rate the system on 37 different measures. The poor grade is particularly discomfiting, the researchers note, because the U.S. spends more on medicine, by far, than any other country. Approximately 16% of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is devoted to health care, compared with 10% or less in other industrialized nations.
Health care is also responsible for most new job creation, according to BusinessWeek's Sept. 25 cover story (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/25/06, "What's Really Propping Up The Economy"). Yet the U.S. ranks 15th out of 19 countries in terms of the number of deaths that could have been prevented.The study estimates that each year 115 out of 100,000 U.S. deaths could have
been avoided with timely and appropriate medical attention. Only Ireland, Britain, and Portugal scored worse in this category, while France scored the best, with 75 preventable deaths per 100,000.
Below Potential. The U.S. ranks at the bottom among industrialized countries for life expectancy both at birth and at age 60. It is also last on infant mortality, with 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 2.7 in the top three countries. There are dramatic gaps within the U.S. as well, according to the study. The average disability rate for all Americans is 25% worse than the rate for the best five states alone, as is the rate of children missing 11
or more days of school.
The report found that quality of care and access to care varied widely across the country, and it noted substantial gaps between national averages and pockets of excellence. The authors concluded that, if the U.S. improved and standardized health-care performance and access, approximately 100,000 to 150,000 lives could be saved annually, along with $50 billion to $100 billion a year.
The Commonwealth Fund, which studies health-care issues, commissioned the report last year as part of an effort to come up with solutions to the nation's troubled health-care system. The report "tells us that overall we are performing far below our national potential," says Dr. James J. Mongan, chairman of the team that pulled together the study and chief executive
officer of Partners Healthcare in Boston. "We can do much better and we need to do much better," he says.
Among the reports' findings:
--Only 49% of U.S. adults receive the recommended preventive and screening tests for their age and sex.
--Only half of patients with congestive heart failure receive written discharge instructions regarding care following hospitalization.
--Nationwide, preventable hospital admissions for patients with chronic health conditions such as diabetes and asthma were twice as high as the level achieved by the best performing states.
--Hospital 30-day re-admission rates for Medicare patients ranged from 14% to 22% across regions.
--One-third of all adults under 65 have problems paying their medical bills or have medical debt they are paying over time.
--Only 17% of U.S. doctors use electronic medical records, compared with 80% in the top three countries.
--On multiple measures across quality of care and access to care, there is a wide gap between low income and the uninsured, and those with higher incomes and insurance. On average, measures for low income and uninsured people in these areas would have to improve by one-third to close the gap.
--As a share of total health expenditures, insurance administrative costs in the U.S. were more than three times the rate in countries with integrated payment systems.
The Business of Medical Marketing
Marketing is an information resource. It is not art nor entertainment. Its function is to educate consumers and get them to buy goods, products and services whose ads promise them value.
The same is true for medical marketing. Patients "buy" medical services from ads that promise to relieve or cure their problems. This can be anything from relief of symptoms or suffering to the promise of enhanced beauty, better cure rates, improved procedures, faster recovery, less pain, speedier return to every day normal activities, and so on.
Every great marketing campaign, be it medical or other has, at its heart, a real and true promise which attracts customers (patients). Their feeling about the service, technique, procedure and/or physician in the marketing materials directs their response and decision making in favor of one practitioner over another. In addition good medical marketing pays attention to two basic elements. One, the "essence" medical needs of the patient and two, the "essence" of the business needs of the practice itself. The patient's needs are improved health - but the business needs are improved practice health with more money, more prestige, more validation, a better life for the doctor.
Live Web Audio Interview With Rudy Svezia, Topic: The Insights of Medical Marketing
Some of the questions asked by Philippa Kennealy MD MPH CPCC of The Entrepreneurial MD were:
- 1. What do you mean by the term “marketing”?
- 2. Why should physicians be paying attention to marketing?
- 3. Given that many physician practice incomes are shrinking due to declining reimbursement, what are some of the less expensive or even free ways that physicians could make people aware of their services?
- 4. What are the key moves physicians should be making to market themselves better?
- 5. What changes have you observed in the past few years about how physicians are successfully marketing their services?
- 6. What do you see as up and coming trends in 2007 for physician practice marketing?
Listen here to the whole interview.
Anti Medical Legislation
Medicine and the legislator-constituent relationship.
A legislator's survival is dependent on his/her ability to listen to his/her constituents and then act accordingly. They say that constituents do not voice concerns about current constraints on medical care so they act accordingly by turning a deaf ear to the concerns voiced by the medical profession. Doctor's abilities to control disruptive changes to their profession, no matter how well intended or forcefully presented to legislators, will go unheard without public support. As a group doctors do not control votes and therefore do not control legislative decision making. Survival for the profession in this situation may depend on its ability to change the minds and actions of constituents (patients) who will, in turn, change the minds and actions of legislators. Constituents hold the key to both physician survival and quality medical care in today's new pay for performance medical reality.
It's not unreasonable to believe that a fully coordinated campaign to inform and educate the public on the hardships resulting from legislated changes favoring Medicare cuts, HIPAA compliance regulations, shrinking reimbursement schedules, and more, instead of favoring quality care would not significantly help medicine's cause. By passing legislators and going directly to the public may be the best way to off set threats to physician livelihoods and to patient care.
To make this happen. To reverse the downward slide in incomes and quality care the profession would do well to consider accepting leadership and guidance from professionals who know how to impact the public directly on their behalf and then to work with that leadership to create a strong voice organized around a proven and time tested information resource, namely marketing, to achieve their goals. Marketing, like it or not, gets the job done. It has played, and will continue to play, a key role to influence and educated in every human endeavor, politics included. It offers the hope of favorable outcomes for medicine.
Health Care Costs In 10 years
Within a decade, an aging America will spend one of every five dollars on health care, according to government analysts who see no end to increases in the cost of going to the doctor and taking medicine.
As Americans make more money, they spend more to get healthy. People making $90,000 are more likely to visit a doctor than those who make $50,000.
The country's aging population is expected to drive increases in two key areas of health care spending: nursing homes and home health.
Spending on nursing homes will grow from $121.7 billion in 2005 to $216.8 billion in 2015. Home health will grow from about $49 billion last year to $103.7 billion in 2015. It represents the nation's fastest-growing sector in health care.
Medicare spending will more than double, from $309 billion in 2004 to $792 billion, in 2015. Medicaid spending will grow from $293 billion to $670 billion during the same time span.
Investment in research, equipment and people also drives the growth in health care spending.
Projections, published in the journal Health Affairs indicate that the nation's total health care bill by 2015: more than $4 trillion. Consumers will foot about half the bill, the government the rest.
These changes will impact payers and providers to re-examine fundamental questions regarding the delivery and financing of health care services.
Source: Associated Press
