Posts Tagged social media

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Do Medical Practices Really Have to Market Anymore?

Marketing a Medical Practice

 

 

 

 

 

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

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Posted in: Innovation, Leadership, Practice Marketing, Social Media

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13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers

13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers
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.

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Posted in: Human Resources, Leadership

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2.0 Tuesday: HIPAA-Compliant Text Messaging, Investing in Price Transparency and PwC Has Advice for Hospitals

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!

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Steve Jobs, Social Media and iPad enabled voting: Welcome to 2.0 Tuesday! A look at what’s next in technology and healthcare.

At Manage My Practice, we have always been fascinated by the opportunities created when innovation and technical advancements are applied to the Healthcare system. The intersection of technology and medical practice has always been one of the most exciting spaces in research and development because the challenges of the Human Body are some of the most daunting and emotionally charged of our endeavors. Curing diseases, diagnosing symptoms and improving and saving lives are among our most noble callings, so naturally they inspire some of our brightest thinkers and industry leaders.

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 weekly feature on Manage My Practice about how technology is impacting our practices, and our patient and group outcomes.

We hope you enjoy looking ahead with us, and share your ideas, reactions and comments below!

  • Steve Jobs thought iCloud had the potential to store Medical Data

Apple’s recently announced iCloud service let’s you store pictures, movies, music, and documents in Apple’s “cloud”, or Internet storage system, and retrieve them with your iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Mac computers. Dr. Iltifat Husain, writing for the IMedicalApps blog notes that in the new biography of the Apple founder, Jobs mentioned that he thought even personal medical data would one day be stored in Apple’s iCloud. Cloud storage is all the rage right now in a lot of different areas of technology, but Jobs saying that medical data would be stored on the consumer end next to vacation photos and favorite songs represents a very bold vision of the future of patient data.

  • Researchers using Social Media to study attitudes about Public Health

A team led by Marcel Salathé, PhD at Pennsylvania State University published a study last month in PLoS Computational Biology that used “tweets” gathered from the social network Twitter to analyze how the public felt about the H1N1 influenza vaccine in 2009. Although Social Media research has limitations, Christine S. Moyer, writing for the American Medical Association’s Amednews.com notes that the results were similar to traditional phone surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, and provides some other examples of how Social Media has been used to understand public health trends.

  • Interesting EHR/EMR data from the Soliant Health Blog

Medical staffing specialist Soliant Health had very eye-opening list of statistics about EHR/EMR implementations on their blog last week. My personal favorite: Hospitals using EHR/EMR systems have a 3 to 4% lower mortality rate than those that don’t. Very interesting numbers.

  • HealthWorks Collective predicts changes in healthcare communications after ACA

Healthworks Collective‘s Susan Gosselin makes some predictions about how the communications between and among providers and patients are going to be changed by the Affordable Care Act (or Healthcare Reform)- and what both groups will demand from a changing system. Great stuff!

  • Oregon to help disabled voters cast ballots using iPads

In today’s local and congressional elections, five counties in the state of Oregon are going to be equipping local officials with iPads preloaded with special touch-interface software to accompany people with physical or visual impairments, or who would otherwise have a hard time making it to the polls. The 9 to 5 Mac blog is reporting that the pilot program features hardware donated by Apple, and could soon spread statewide by the next election.

Be sure to check back next week for another 2.0 Tuesday!

 

 

 

 

Posted in: 2.0 Tuesday, Electronic Medical Records, Innovation, Social Media

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Mayo’s Parody Video Invites You to Know Your Numbers: Blood Pressure, Lipids, and BMI (Sing to the tune of Jenny 867-5309)

The Third Annual Health Care Social Media Summit took place on the Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota last week, and to my chagrin, I was unable to attend. Lots of good information and resources were shared, including this video. It was posted on YouTube on October 14th and has already been viewed more than 10,000 times.

Mayo Clinic wouldn’t mind if the video went viral, but really wants the message to go viral. For information about installing the “Know Your Numbers” app on your hospital or practice Facebook page, contact Makala Johnson at Johnson.Makala@mayo.edu.

Posted in: Practice Marketing, Social Media

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What I Told Transworld About Using Social Media to Market to Managers

Last week I gave a talk to a group of Transworld salespeople from across the United States. Transworld is the top name in collections across a variety of industries and they asked me to give a presentation on “How to Use Social Media to Reach Your Target Audience,” with the target audience being…people like you and me: managers, administrators, healthcare executives, and pretty much anyone in healthcare dealing with patient accounts receivables.

I described how much harder it is for today’s manager to make time to meet with salespeople. More than ever administrators are pulled in a million different directions, and it is not unusual for a manager’s priorities to shift from day to day and hour to hour. This must be incredibly frustrating for the salesperson who is trying to keep things flowing, but it’s a fact of life in healthcare.

 

Chris Brogan

In my talk I featured the work of two gentleman who really get how social media can positively impact sales. Chris Brogan is a prolific author and consultant who always has an interesting perspective on social media. I discussed his ideas around the sales circle as opposed to the sales cycle. You can read about it here.

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Posted in: Collections, Billing & Coding, Social Media

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Guest Author Jennifer Searfoss, Esq.: What Can an Attorney Do For a Medical Practice?

There are moments when the physician-centric world needs to engage an attorney. Please don’t hesitate to pick up the phone when the FBI shows up with a search warrant!

There are other moments when you and the physicians you work with do not need an attorney for boiler-plate contracts. How do you tell the difference?

What an attorney can do for you

Areas that an attorney can help your office include (but by no means are limited to):

  • Audit requests from RACs and insurers
  • Contractual and corporate organization documents
  • Human resource issues
  • Credentialing and privileging disputes
  • Ethical and disciplinary reviews
  • Quality, peer-review and risk management

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Posted in: Day-to-Day Operations

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9 Ways Managers Can Change Healthcare in 2011

Kindly turn off cell phones & pagers

Healthcare is changing.  It is changing to eliminate waste of money, time and resources.  It is changing to make more care available with less providers.  It is changing to empower patients to participate in their own care.  How are you changing with the times in 2011?  Here are 9 ideas.

  1. Make your website interactive, clean-looking, interactive, friendly and interactive.  Think of your website as your digital receptionist to your practice.  If all your patients can do on your website is look up your phone number, you’re wasting everyone’s time.  Patients want to register, make appointments, pay their bill, get their test results, chat online with a staff member, access their personal health record (PHR), watch videos and listen to podcasts you make or recommend.  They do not want to wander around your phone tree or wait on hold.
  2. Give your patients information, information, information. According to a MedTera study conducted in September 2010, 95% surveyed indicated that they are looking for more comprehensive information about disease management, and 77% said they hadn’t received any written information about their illness or medications directly from the physician.  See more details about what patients want here.
  3. Understand that people have different types of learning styles and offer your practice and medical information in different ways. Offer information via written and digital documents, videos, and podcasts.  Offer support groups and group education for the newly diagnosed. Help patients build communities around your practice.
  4. Take down all those signs asking people to turn off their cell phones.  Cell phones are going to revolutionize healthcare so go ahead and bite the bullet and embrace them.  For all you know the person on the cellphone when you walk in the exam room is texting “gr8 visit til now, wil i <3 doc?” (Great visit until now, will I love the doctor?)
  5. Eliminate the Wait. Patients have much better things to do than wait in your practice.  It doesn’t matter why the provider’s late – you’re cutting into the patient’s ability to make money and get things done.  Text them to let them know the provider is running late.  Text them to let them know an earlier appointment is available. Give patients an appointment range (between 10am and 12N), then text them when their appointment is 20 minutes away.
  6. Use a patient portal to take credit cards, keeping them securely on file and stop sending patients statements. Use the portal to deliver results and chat and email patients.
  7. Stop fighting the tide and let your staff use social media at work – for work.  Involve everyone in Facebook, Twitter and your website and blog. Using social media for communication and marketing is not a one-person job.
  8. Form a patient advisory board and listen to what specifics your patients want from you.  If people don’t have time to attend a face-to-face meeting, Skype them in.
  9. Think about alternate service delivery models, both in-person (group visits, home visits) and digitally (email, texting, Skyping, avatar coaches, home monitoring systems.)  Emotional technology studies show that people can improve their health by accepting and utilizing technology in healthcare.

What do patients want in 2011?  They want information, communication and a real connection with you.  Use social media and technology innovations to make it happen.

Photo credit Image by gumption via Flickr

Posted in: Innovation, Social Media

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