How can you market to physicians to increase volume and revenue?

Any number of healthcare organizations are looking to increase admissions or sell to drive revenue and volume by associated physicians.

Sales staffs are popping up all over like weeds-in-a-field, complete with goals and objectives, territories and sales quotas for specific docs along profitable clinical-lines and disease-states. In most cases they are managed by people who have never sold anything in their life. Little understanding of the relationship sales cycle, what is important to the physicians, their needs and ultimately their patients. The first time the sale person comes back to the organization with "This needs to change" request, it all breaks down because nobody internally wants to really change anything. We just want volume and revenue.

What's wrong with this picture?

To sell too physicians successfully, you need more than office lunches and how are the kids kind of conversations. Its about their experience in admitting, treating and referring patients to your emergency room, hospital, pharmacy, surgical center or a home care agency to name a few of the providers docs deal with on a daily basis. Everyone is out there with the send to me, me, me, message.

Its more than your own perceived features and benefits.

This is a relationship sell and your sales team needs to be on track with a common sales methodology that they all use. Leaving it up to the nice person in the medical staff office to do this because she makes the docs laugh, or assigning a sales managerial function to someone who has never sold a day in their life, especially in healthcare, is a receipt for disaster.

One of the great weaknesses in healthcare senior management is that people who are very well educated, read an article, go to a seminar and then think they know everything they need to know too implement a strategy. Healthcare leadership has got to change in this new consumer driven environment and learn they don't know everything. The sooner you make that realization the more successful you will be.


Be ready to make changes in how you do things. When your sales person comes back, and says he or she is finding a trend in obstacles physicians are encountering in admitting or practicing medicine in your organization, be ready to make meaningful changes. If not, your just wasting your time and money sending out people to increase volume and revenue from a physician or multispecialty group. Nothing worse than over promising and under delivering.

10 Steps for success

1. Hire a sales manager that has healthcare sales experience. Make it a VP level position at the senior management table. They drive strategy to make sure it is in sync with the organizational business plan and financial objects, as well as act as an agent for internal change.

2. Hire trained healthcare physician sales individuals. Lots of people from pharma and medical device companies make great hospital and other healthcare provider sales representatives.

3. Make sure that everyone is using the same sales methodology, techniques and materials. All sales and marketing materials should be designed for use in for the specific point in the sales cycle.. One size does not fit all.

4. Use a sales database system like SalesForce.com for example for accountability, tracking, etc., and make sure your marketing department has full access to the information. Mine the data for strategy and new opportunities.

5. Integrate your marketing and sales efforts from day one. You have to avoid the internal conflicts which arise and those "Marketing is clueless about what we need" or "The feet on the street don't sell it like we want them too", kind of conversations. Integrate and create a joint sales marketing committee to solve a lot of that. Make sure your marketing team is trained in the sales methodology the sales force is using. Marketing should also be attending sales calls.

6. Establish joint goals, objectives and revenue targets for sales and marketing. Share in the pain, share in the gain.

7. Make meaningful changes to your products and services based on the needs and expectations of your customers. That does not mean one-offs, but changes across the enterprise that will benefit many.

8. Remember it's about the brand, your brand promise and how your brand delivers upon those expectations.

9. Make sure that the entire organization knows what you are doing. Nothing more embarrassing or damaging when someone at any level of the organization is clueless and can't be supportive of the sales and marketing efforts. Makes you look like you do not know what you are doing.

10. Evaluate, monitor performance, make changes as needed in the program or staff and start the cycle again.

To your success.

Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.

Should outcomes transparency drive outpatient healthcare marketing?

Is nearly everyone missing the most important piece of the marketing puzzle to generate demand, revenue and market share in outpatient healthcare? Especially with the market competition heating up between hospital owned physicians/ clinics and the private sole practitioners/multi-specialty or single specialty group practices and retail clinics.

One area that is greatly lacking in most outpatient healthcare marketing, is an intelligent dialogue on your outcomes with your audiences. Payors', pharma and medical device, have recognized this and are leading in the use of quality and outcomes data to drive decision-making. It is time for the rest of the healthcare industry to catch up. And in my experience, it works, driving demand, volume, revenue and market share.

Where is the outcomes and quality data?

I maintain that even in this economy, there are healthcare dollars out there. Healthcare consumers willing to spend those dollars, if only that had a compelling reason to do so. With all other marketing avenues exhausted, healthcare executives weary from being in "survival mode" and facing new revenue pressures, one would think healthcare marketing would be able to answer some of these challenges.

Maybe it's time to give the healthcare consumer be it physicians, payers, government, employer, individual or family, or any other stakeholder you can identify, quality and outcomes data to make decisions?

That's really the only avenue left for healthcare providers, to start talking about quality and outcomes. Engaging in a meaningful dialogue, that goes beyond accreditation logos and quality awards from third parties, to an actual honest-to-goodness quality and outcomes disclosure and discussion.

A few healthcare providers are willing. Most are afraid of this direction. But, it's a strategy and tactic that can break the current cycle of avoidance and loss. Recognizing that your customers are best served by the healthcare organization that places them first in a meaningful way.

You have some choices here. Stay the course and do what you have been doing. Get lost in an endless paralysis by analysis loop. Mimic your competitors. Talk about quality and outcomes in vague terms. Or, be the first in your market, to establish a clear strategic marketing plan focused on your healthcare consumers about your brand, quality and outcomes.

If you are not willing to change, then don't expect a different outcome from doing the same old healthcare marketing that you have been.

Sooner or later, you are going to have to do this. Oh, and don't forget about price.


Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.

So, how do you market the employed physician?

With a dynamically changing healthcare industry, employment of physicians is making a big comeback to the hospital industry. Born of necessity, hospitals and physicians are being driven by reimbursement declines, effectiveness and efficiency pressures, retail clinic competition and new opportunities. The drive to create ACOs in a value-based payment environment demands a different type of physician relationship. 

With this new opportunity to reinvent, revitalize and recapture what previously before had been an adventure on the part of hospitals with mixed results, it's time to discuss how one goes about marketing the employed physician.

First break from the past......

It's easy to look at this and say we'll just do what we did in the past in promoting employed physicians and be done with it. That is a dangerous mistake. Healthcare consumers/patients are making physician choices based price, location and convenience due to increasing co-pays and rising deductibles. If you're just going to throw some ads out there with a picture of a nice smiling doc with copy written in the third person about how wonderful and compassionate he or she is, you can expect dismal marketing failure.

What is needed is a new look at what you are doing and changing to meet the needs of your healthcare consumer, not you.

With great change comes great opportunity. That is if one is willing to embrace that change and find new ways of moving forward and creating value.

Your Brand. Your Value. The Patient Experience.

You need to communicate very strongly your brand and brand promise you are associating with the employed physician. Bring your brand to the forefront and brand the doc to you.  They represent your brand at an individual level. Capitalize on that opportunity and leverage.

Communicate the value that this physician brings to your community and the healthcare consumer. Communicate the value that the doctor brings to your brand. Stop talking at people, talk to them. Talk to them with compelling value driven reasoning why they should select that doctor, or even why they should even considering switching physicians.

Pay attention to the patient experience. How long is the patient waiting? is your web site easy to use. Can they schedule appointments online? How are they greeted? View the patient experience from beginning to end at ever touch-point along the continuum. Remember, a consumer is only a patient one-third of the time they interact with your physicians. Before care and after care, they are consumers, evaluating their experience with you at very touch-point that they come in contact. And just because you have high patient satisfaction results, that doesn't equate to a grand overall experience.

Stop wasting your money putting ads in papers that expect people to take action simply because the doctor is on your medical staff or in one of your buildings. That treats the healthcare consumer like they are idiots. They're not. They are demanding value and acknowledgement that they have a say in what's going on. If you won't meet their needs they will go somewhere else.

If you're not communicating value and what's in it for them for selecting your physicians, then you can put it in the bank that the healthcare consumer will pass on by and go where they perceive the value to be greatest for them in line with the price they are paying.

In the end, it's all about knowing what consumer/ patient needs are and delivering that in a convenient location at a price point that is affordable. If you think this is crazy, then why are the retail clinics taking you to lunch?

Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.

Are you using social media, online marketing for an exceptional healthcare experience?

In the new world of healthcare where price, quality and a consumer paying more out-of-pocket costs for healthcare, social media and online marketing represents an opportunity that can be used advantageously to meet healthcare consumers demands for a better experience.

Social and online represents a great opportunity for patient/consumer/business directed healthcare organizations to break from the pack, by creating a social/online healthcare experience that is memorable, exceeding an individual, business or families experience and expectations.

Most healthcare organizations are still stumbling with using social media and the online experience to drive differentiation, meaningful information and experience.

In any case, when you look at your social media strategy and online presence, does it:

• Delight your customer?
• Create sustainable differentiation?
• Is adaptable to new opportunities?
• Leverages your investment?
• Deliver in every situation?

Or, is it just pushing out information that is that you have deemed valuable to you, but carries no meaning for the information seeking consumer, or business? Does it meet the needs of those looking for solutions to challenges? Do you focus on features and benefits, not solutions or value?

This is the lens that you need to look through to objectively evaluate your efforts. If it's not doing these things, then chances are you are not delivering an exceptional social or online experience. But for that matter, neither are your competitors.

In the world of healthcare which is too much "me too", the social and online healthcare experience is pretty boring.

Make your social and online presence not just "good enough" but exceptional.

  

Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.

Is the market changing to where a hospital admission is a defect in the quality of care?

Fee-for-service payments vs. care value payments. On one side you are rewarded for the production of care by filing beds. On the other side you're paid for providing the right care, at the right time, in the right location that in reality, keeps the patient out of a hospital or hospital-based service.

Healthcare marketers are caught in the middle of this brave new world trying to drive demand to put "heads in the beds" to generate revenue though the production of care, while trying to manage demand in new payment models that push patients to more appropriate care which may not be the hospital.

Somewhere, a group of entrepreneurs is looking at the process of care and have come to the conclusion that a hospital admission is a defect in the quality of care.

Are you just trying to survive?

An attitude, much often too common in hospital executive leadership that we are just trying to survive. This is sad really, when innovation, growth opportunities and new business development initiatives are being left on the table because hospital executives can't get out of the "we're just trying to survive" mentality.

If you're just trying to survive today without looking for market opportunity and finding ways to be more consumer- focused, innovative and non-traditional in the providing care, then you are not going to survive.

Are you being left behind?

Infusion centers, retail clinics, pharmaceutical advances, free-standing surgery centers and diagnostic clinics, remote monitoring, home health care, sub-acute services, patient management to prevent readmissions, medical device technological advances and many other services when taken together, have the potential to significantly change the way that healthcare is delivered. It will make the hospital admission of today, a defect in the process of care tomorrow.

Does that mean hospitals will go away? No, there are limits to this concept of the hospital admission as a defect in the quality of care. Many medically complex surgical procedures can only be performed in a hospital. ERs will always be needed. But the rest of it, maybe not.

Unless hospital executives and their marketing and planning departments start seeing the forest from the trees, just trying to survive is leading them away from innovation, opportunity and growth, at a time when others with non-traditional entrepreneurial backgrounds, may very well relegate the hospital to a place in the care continuum where an admission is a defect in the process of care.

So, are you still just trying to survive, or are you changing to what the market is demanding to remain relevant and needed?

Innovate, adapt and meet market needs, or become just another "big box" healthcare provider that goes by the wayside.

Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.

Have you put the value of you in your healthcare marketing?

With healthcare changing so rapidly, is it time to move healthcare marketing beyond "all about us" to the value and benefit we bring to the healthcare consumer? Unless you are a brand new provider in the market, you have been telling your audiences all about your features and benefits for years now. They get it.

In today's world, it's about value and benefit to the healthcare consumer.

In today's world, it's about the answering the healthcare consumers question of what is my ROI for using you?

In today's world, you need to have a compelling value proposition with messaging that provides clear and understandable benefits to the healthcare consumer.

Value Marketing

Value marketing really, is making the case to your healthcare consumer how you are solving a problem, offering a solution, giving results and even making them happy.

Value marketing is a creative exchange between people and organizations in the marketplace. It is a dynamic transaction that constantly changes based on the needs of the individual vies a vie what the healthcare organization has to offer.

So instead of talking about what you do every day, talk about what the value and benefit is of what you do.

Instead of talking about programs and serves that everybody else has, talk about the value and benefits those same programs and services and what they bring to the healthcare consumer.

Instead of saying we have the latest high-tech gizmo, talk about the value and benefit of what that latest, greatest high-tech gizmo brings to the healthcare consumer.

Instead of just talking about Healthgrades or Thompson Reuters Top 100 awards for care, talk to your healthcare consumer about the value and benefit of that award.

Instead of talking at your audiences, talk to them. Talk to them about your value and how you can solve their health problem by offering a value based solution to their healthcare concerns.

It's time for healthcare CEOs, Boards and healthcare marketers to stop doing over and over again those things that are out-of-touch with the new reality that is healthcare. The healthcare consumer is awakening and demanding more. More proof. More value. More benefit for them, not for you.

Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.

What is your healthcare marketing ROI?

Healthcare marketing needs to keep up with the times and change as much as overall healthcare. It's time for healthcare marketing departments to step out of the show and tell marketing communications approach to tracking campaigns, making assumptions of its effects on revenue and produce real Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) measures.

Work with your finance department.  With a high degree of collaboration and understanding between finance and marketing, you can lead and make a difference. By answering questions, concerns and opinions with solid data, you can move the discussion form marketing does “stuff’ to marketing is a financial contributor to the organization.

Below is an example of an actual ROMI computation that I completed for a multi-hospital organization. After this all was presented, all marketing campaigns going forward were tracked though the Physician Referral Call Center.

The method can be adapted to any campaign and provides you with the data fields and logical analysis you need. This has been edited to hide the organization.

An analysis was undertaken to look at the ROMI of the Physician Referral Call Center. The analysis matched a database of call center name records for the period to financial records which had already been downloaded. The analysis produced the following results:

• 9,102 call records were matched with utilization and financial data.
• 9,102 calls resulted in a total of 9,121 encounters in the ER, Inpatient and Outpatient categories of service.
• 751 encounters were ER
• 177 returning encounters
• 573 first time encounters
• 1,105 encounters were Inpatient
• 530 returning encounters
• 699 first time encounters
• 7,267 were Outpatient
• 2,014 returning encounters
• 5,253 first time encounters
• Total charges for all encounters equaled $22,522,649
• Charges for new encounters all services totaled $16,085,198 or 71 percent of the total charges
• Average charge per ER encounter $1,304
• Average charge per Inpatient encounter $13,581
• Average charge per Outpatient encounter $903
• Gallup measures loyalty at 68 percent (would return for service) which means that for every 100 patients 32 would not return for care- therefore:
• ED- 57 returning encounters captured that would not have returned
• Inpatient – 170 returning encounters captured that would not have returned
• Outpatient- 645 returning encounters captured that would not have returned
• Incremental charges counted returning encounters not loyal
•  ER - $74,337
• Inpatient- $2,308,851
• Outpatient- $582,505
• Subtotal charges counted: $2,965,693
• Overall market share in primary and secondary service area is 14.53 percent. The number of first time encounters have utilized us above market presence is therefore:
• ER 573 first time encounters, 83 not counted, 490 counted
• Inpatient – 699 first time encounters, 101 not counted, 598 counted
• Outpatient – 5,253 first time encounters, 763 encounters not counted, 4,490 counted
• Based on an overall market share of 14.5 percent the incremental charges counted for new encounters not because of market presence:
• ER - $638,960
• Inpatient – $8,121,438
• Outpatient – $4,054,470
• Total Charges counted: $12,814,868
• Discount from gross charges for Medicare, Medicaid, Managed Care, Bad Debt and Charity Care @ 65% is $8,326,644
• Net Revenue: $4,488,224
• PRCC program costs: $233,410
• Net contribution: $4,254,814
• ROI 18.22:1

So, do you still think you can't prove Return on Marketing Investment?

Marketing is a revenue department and will be more than ever as healthcare change continues unabated. Time for a lot of healthcare marketing departments and organizations to grow up and start proving their value.

Michael Krivich is an internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger with over 4,000 monthly pages views in over 52 countries worldwide. He is founder of the michael J group, a healthcare marketing consultancy dedicated to creating value through strategic marketing for hospitals and health system regardless of payment mechanism, either fee-for-service or value-based to increase market-share, revenue , brand and demonstrate actual return on marketing investment. Michael is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association.