With more changes coming to healthcare in 2013 and 2014, should practices be looking at traditional marketing, social media marketing, or do they even have to market at all? I asked healthcare marketer Greg Fawcett from Precision Marketing Partners to talk to me about the future of marketing for the medical practice.
Mary Pat: There is currently a physician shortage that is expected to become more severe in the coming years. If each physician is expected to have more patients than s/he can handle, why is marketing a medical practice important in the current/future environment?
Greg: Natural attrition contributes to the loss of clients in all types of businesses, and medical practices are no exception. No matter how many patients you have or how loyal they are, death, relocation or a switch to managed care programs that you don’t belong to are bound to reduce your client list over time. Unless you’re vigilant and market consistently to replace those patients you lose, you’ll wake up one day to the realization that business isn’t what it used to be!
Here are a few of the reasons why you need to do medical practice marketing:
Establish your practice’s reputation as specialists in a particular field of medicine
Attract new patients to build your practice
Increase awareness of your practice and create a dominant presence in your specific community
Improve your efficiencies and maximize the return on your financial investment
Sometimes a job just gets a little old, and even the best employees need a little something to get them re-engaged and excited again. Try one of the ideas below at your practice and let me know in the comments the ways you keep your staff energized and engaged!
1. Provide a career track and offer multiple levels of learning jobs. For instance, break the receptionist job into steps (see below) and set time lines for attaining those goals. You may want several steps to be accomplished at 90-days, more at 6-months, and more at 12-months. There may be monetary awards, honor awards, or qualifications for other acknowledgements.
Pre-registering patients by phone – demographics
Making appointments & mini-register for new patients
Registering patients face-to-face – demographics
Understanding insurance plans and registering their insurance
Taking photo ID or taking photos
Collecting co-pays
Answering basic patient questions
Answering advanced patient questions
Reviewing the financial policy with patients
Reviewing the Privacy Policy with patients.
2. Offer certifications and credentials – support staff emotionally, time-wise and financially so they can attend face-to-face or online courses.
As managers, providers and employees, we always have to be looking ahead at how the technology on our horizon will affect how our organizations administer health care. In the spirit of looking forward to the future, we present “2.0 Tuesday”, a feature on Manage My Practice about how technology is impacting our practices, and our patient and population outcomes.
We hope you enjoy looking ahead with us, and share your ideas, reactions and comments below!
Sometimes a job just gets a little old, and even the best employees need a little something to get them re-engaged and excited again. Try one of the ideas below at your practice and let me know in the comments the ways you keep your staff energized and engaged!
1. Provide a career track and offer multiple levels of learning jobs. For instance, break the receptionist job into steps (see below) and set time lines for attaining those goals. You may want several steps to be accomplished at 90-days, more at 6-months, and more at 12-months. There may be monetary awards, honor awards, or qualifications for other acknowledgements.
Pre-registering patients by phone – demographics
Making appointments & mini-register for new patients
Registering patients face-to-face – demographics
Understanding insurance plans and registering their insurance
Taking photo ID or taking photos and explaining the Red Flags Rule
Collecting co-pays
Answering basic patient questions
Answering advanced patient questions
Reviewing the financial policy with patients
Reviewing the Privacy Policy with patients.
2. Offer certifications and credentials – support staff emotionally, time-wise and financially so they can attend face-to-face or online courses.
3. Offer specific responsibilities and the title of lead person for that responsibility – don’t assume you know what staff are or are not capable of – they might surprise you!
4. Meet every 6 months or every quarter to set goals. A job can be a drag if there’s nothing new to learn or to accomplish.
5. Set up process improvement teams to work on problems that everyone complains about – give them the responsibility to come up with solutions and try them out.
6. Involve them in social media marketing of the practice. Make sure they understand your social media plan ( you do have a plan, don’t you?), give them guidelines to work within and let them work on your website, your blog, and your Facebook page.
7. Install a wiki (many are free) and have them work on loading all the practice knowledge into the wiki. Have different staff responsible for different parts of the wiki and set goals for adding all the information that runs your practice every day.
8. “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” – this is also great for getting the clinical and administrative staff to understand each other better. Have the staff shadow each other and take turns seeing parts of the practice they don’t know much about. I recently participated in this at my hospital and shadowed a nurse (and asked a million questions) for about an hour. It was wonderful! I felt better equipped to work with my hospitalist service after having been on a patient floor for just a short time.
9. If you are a practice that receives referrals from others, have staff responsible for regularly touching base with staff from referring practices and asking how service can be improved. Teach staff about relationship building and remember that it’s the staff that often choose where the patient is referred to instead of the provider.
10. Have staff take turns going with you to meetings, seminars and local events where you represent the practice and introduce them to everyone.
11. Forward listserv discussions to employees and have them monitor the discussions and bring things to you that they want to know more about.
12. Encourage employees to become the practice expert in a payer, an employer, a referrer, a process or a protocol and help them learn about their topic by sending them information from the web or your professional organizations.
13. Have the staff put together an internal or external newsletter and help them with concepts of internal and external marketing.
