Marketing Beyond the Physician at Your Community Hospital
September 1, 2010
When marketing your community hospital’s services to gain referrals, focusing your efforts and educating the entire patient care team, not just physicians, can strengthen your effectiveness and boost referrals.
We spend much of our time marketing to consumers, but we all understand the importance of creating strong, lasting relationships with referring physicians. Depending on the level of referral, the physician may be the ultimate decision maker, but often times the decision isn’t made by the doctor alone.
Nurses and other members of the patient care team could have a lot of influence on suggesting options to a patient or family. They often have more patient interaction, which increases the importance of educating all care team members on your hospital’s services.
HealthLeaders’ marketing editor, Marianne Aiello, recently highlighted a campaign developed by Kindred Healthcare that targeted the entire patient care team. Kindred believes that physicians aren’t the only ones who influence where a patient goes for care, and discussed how they created a successful campaign.
Here are 3 Tips When Marketing to the Entire Patient Care Team:
- Reach out to all patient influencers. Anyone who interacts with a patient or their family members is worth reaching out to and educating about the services your organization offers.
- Communicate quality and data. When developing messaging to reach a certain group within the patient care team, it’s important to understand each audience and what is motivating their referral decisions. Data and quality outcomes are very important and influence all members of the patient care team in different ways, so communicating this data to key groups is critical.
- Get in front of the referrers. Chose the right marketing mediums to get your message in front of referrers. Kindred used a mix of consumer marketing channels and traditional referral methods. This included placing billboards around referring hospitals, running radio spots on NPR and placing ads in trade publications.
Educating the entire patient care team on your organization’s services will not only help boost your referrals, but will lead to a better patient experience. Keep this in mind and think beyond the physician alone when marketing your hospital’s referral services.
Read Marianne Aiello’s complete HealthLeaders Media article, “Marketing Beyond Physicians“
10 Tips for Boosting Physician Referrals for Community Hospitals
August 27, 2010
To build patient volume, you need a successful physician sales strategy that builds relationships and boosts referrals.
In today’s competitive healthcare market, maintaining and increasing physician referrals is the lifeblood of your community hospital. Many hospitals focus on building relationships with their physicians through liaison activities, but could your hospital benefit from taking a stronger sales approach with your physicians?
I know what you are thinking, sales…really? The term “sales” isn’t our favorite word, but that is exactly what we are doing to consumers with every ad we place, tv spot we run and web page we build. Hospitals provide services instead of products, but they must sell their services to prosper like any other business.
In a recent article, Michael Krivicich, Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives, shared these 10 Tips to Boost Physician Referrals:
- Use a common sales strategy across the board. Leaving people to their own methods can result in incorrect messaging and using poorly designed materials, which could have some significant legal repercussions for your organization. Your activities are about relationship selling and acting as the liaison for the physician to your organization. If you don’t have a method and training, chances are you will not be as effective as your competition.
- Use a database system to collect information and track your physician interactions.
- Create an interdisciplinary marketing and sales advisory committee to build better relationships and improve communications.
- Train your marketing department in the sale approach that your sales people are using.
- Let your marketing team go on sales calls and include them in major presentations to provide new insights and perspectives.
- No more than 10 slides per presentation. Cut out the fluff and focus exactly on what you need for physicians to take away from your presentation.
- Have your marketing department review materials the sales departments have created.
- Combine marketing and sales meetings.
- Establish joint marketing and sales goals.
- Constantly evaluate and revise.
Hospitals depend on physician referrals to thrive and grow, and this is increasingly important in today’s environment. The physician is your customer, and selling them on your hospital’s services is key. Think about these rules of thumb to help increase your referrals.
Read Michael Krivicich’s entire article, “Selling to Physicians Through Integrated Marketing and Sales”
Top 30 Resource Blogs for the Community Hospital Marketer
August 20, 2010
These 30 blogs will provide insights from CEO’s, physicians, overall hospital communication, patients and marketers. Even though all of the blogs speak on healthcare issues, it is important to study how each group’s unique views help as you communicate to your diverse patient audience.
As a marketer, your goal is to communicate for your hospital its new and value-added services to your diverse patient audience. Blogs are a great way to stay on top of new communication practices and resource from a wide audience base. Blogs allow you to read information from a targeted audience which makes your research as a marketer more relevant.
The Top 30 Community Hospital Resource Blogs
- Mayo Clinic: One of the top two hospital blogs in the country.
- Johns Hopkins: One of the top two hospital blogs in the country.
- Lexington Medical Center: This is the official hospital blog for the Lexington Medical Center, located in Lexington, South Carolina.
- Science Life: A guide to the changing world of biomedicine, as seen from the perspective of writers at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Pediatric Hospital Blogs
- Children’s Hospital and Health System: This blog belongs to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, which serves Wisconsin, Northern Illinois and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and beyond with information about the health system and news about children’s health.
- Riley Children’s Hospital
- Thrive: Children’s Hospital Boston blog is devoted to all things pediatric, healthcare and scientific research. They help consumers and reporters touch base with some of the world’s foremost experts on topics from sleep problems to autism genetics.
Physician Blogs
- KevinMD: Kevin Pho, a primary care doctor board-certified in Internal Medicine, writes a blog that Wall St. Journal states is “punchy, prolific…that chronicles America’s often dysfunctional health care system…”
- Roper on Health: This blog is offered by William L. Roper, MD, MPH CEO, University of North Carolina Health Care System. He focuses on health policy, science and news.
- Notes of an Anesthesioboist: This doctor focuses on the literary aspects of medicine and hospital care and has won an award for her efforts.
Hospital CEO Blogs
- Social Hospital: Social Hospital was founded by a hospital CFO who sees tremendous value in the usage of social media tools to build relationships with the communities that hospitals serve.
- More Than Medicine: Tom Quin, President & CEO of Community General Hospital in Syracuse, New York, provides his insights into hospital progress, philosophies and news.
- Running a Hospital: Possibly one of the most popular and candid hospital CEO blogs. Mr. Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is forthright in his outlook and covers many issues that could pertain to any hospital.
- St. Joseph Medical Center: Scott Kashman is ex-officio CEO for St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. He talks about hospital news, and takes an upbeat philosophy to encourage personnel as well as other readers.
- Nick Jacobs: Formerly “Ask a Hospital President,” Jacobs has stepped down, written the book, Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare, and re-focused his blog to look at health policies.
Patient Blogs
- Patient Power: Andrew Schorr, leukemia survivor and patient advocate, keeps a focus on patient care with his blog.
- Dr. David’s Blog: Focus is on childhood cancer, written by a pediatric oncologist.
- My Overweight Child: Looks at childhood obesity and what you can do to help your child get healthier.
- Kids Health Pediatrics: This site provides child-friendly information on health and wellness.
Professional Networking for Hospital Marketing Blogs
- Healthcare Marketing: Articles and examples of passionate healthcare marketing by Don Dunlop.
- Hospital Marketing Education: A great blog if you like to watch videos as you research hospital marketing tips.
- Health Care and Hospital Communicators on myragan.com: The Health Care and Hospital Communicators section allows members to interact through bulletin boards and other features. They also provide communication-related publications and seminar information.
Hospital Marketing Blogs and Podcasts
- Marketshare: A marketing blog from HealthLeaders Media.
- Unsolicited Marketing Advice: A wide range of tools and tips of interest to the marketing or public relations manager. It has a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on healthcare.
- Weekly Probe: This blog is completely different. Deep, humorous insights into healthcare marketing.
- Healthy Conversations: A healthcare branding blog.
- Interval: Chris Bevolo.
- ND&P: Neathawk Dubuque & Packett.
- The Marketing Edge Blog & Podcast Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners. Covers healthcare, social media and other general new media topics.
- Hospital Impact: This blog is dedicated to providing information for current and emerging hospital leaders, thinkers and enablers. The blog’s mission is to answer the question, “What will it take for hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?”
Blogs inspire, feed conversation and give valuable insights – QUICKLY. When the ever-evolving world of multi-channel marketing and the Web changes daily, these blogs provide up-to-date technology advancements, newly released advertising campaigns and valuable insight on your target audiences.
Do you have a blog that inspires you?
Social media marketing can be used as major communication tool for your hospital.
Are you like most healthcare marketers who are quickly trying to get on board with a social media plan for your community hospital? Well, you are not alone. A study by Greystone.net found only one in three current hospitals or health systems has a formal social media plan in place.
I had the benefit to attending the “SCHA’s one-day social media workshop” where Ed Bennett, a social media guru spoke. Ed has been following social media data for years, and he shared some amazing statistics on social media users that had us all singing the praises of social media marketing. He said that in the past year the mega social website, Facebook, a relative newcomer to the scene has surpassed Google in website visits. At the same time there has been a 10% decrease in non-social media web traffic as people spend more time on social media sites.
Tony Chin, principal of Launch Your Movement, wrote a fantastic article on hospital success stories.
10 Hospital Social Media Success Stories
Proactive Outreach
1. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy blogs to run a better hospital.
2. Geisinger uses Twitter/Facebook to recruit gastroenterologists.
3. Lifespan reaches out to patients and family personally through Twitter.
4. Ob/gyn practice patient-to-patient interaction success using Twitter and Facebook. (PDF)
Concierge Services
5. Scripps uses Twitter to turn angry patients into loyal ones.
6. Norman Regional Health System spends 30 minutes a day on Twitter and Facebook.
Live Event Coverage
7. Children’s Medical Center in Dallas tweeted about a kidney transplant from a father to his son.
8. Twitter during live surgery.
- St. Luke’s in Cedar Rapids
- UNC Hospitals
- Henry Ford
- Sherman Hospital
- OSF St Joseph
- Sinai Hospital in Baltimore
- Methodist University Hospital in Memphis
9. South Coast Health System uses Twitter for real-time crisis communication.
10. St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital
If you weren’t a believer in how social media can inspire, educate, recruit and create loyal ambassadors for your brand, you will soon be singing the social media jingle too! For more details, be sure to check out his article, “10 Hospital Social Media Success Stories”
Do you have a social media success story? If so, please share it in the comment section below.
