4 Easy Steps to Driving Patient Volume By Connecting on Facebook

Facebook allows people including you to connect with their community online and share in-depth information about their lives.

With the right strategy, Facebook can help you can build your volume, fundraise and create active advocates by targeting content to topics your patients feel passionate about.

Many people only go to a doctor or a hospital when they need to. An effective Facebook program allows you to integrate into everyday life. This integration connects you on a  personal level and drives a measurable results for your health system.

The four easy steps below allow you to create a strategy for reaching and engaging with your Facebook community.

1. Know your audience
2. Provide quality(relevant) regular content
3. Encourage discussion and engagement
4. Do take yourself to seriously

For more information on how to start your Facebook page, visit Mashable.com’s¬†”The Facebook Guide Book.”

Mashable.com’s Facebook 101 will help you understand the basics, manage your Facebook wall, see how you can use Facebook for your business. Get in there and start today. It is not going to get any easier starting tomorrow!

Utilizing Technorati Helps to Drive Patient Volume

8 million web searches occur everyday.  41% of patients searching the web for information as the first course of action. 

A key to increasing your volumes is to connect relevant content to patients at the moment they are looking for it.  

If you can help them solve their healthcare issue at the moment they are searching for information, not only will they be loyal to you, but they will disseminate that information to others. 

Technorati is a tool which can help amplify your content. 

Technorati is a search engine used to search blogs. Technorati indexes over 112.8 million blogs and over 250 pieces of tagged social media. 

By following a three simple steps below you can get your content to stand out on Technorati and increase the chances of connecting your content with patients. 

• Add the blog URL to the Technorati database
• “Claim” the blog entry
• Include¬†some hyperlinked URLs that can help categorize your post

Check Technorati out yourself or for a great demo “A Complimentary Tour of Technorati.”¬†

The Three Keys To Building Breast Cancer Patient Volume

An Academic Medical Center drove an additional 9700+ mammograms in just nine months, generating $2.7 million dollars in net Contribution Margin from imaging, lab work and biopsy surgeries.

Later much more Contribution Margin was realized from additional surgeries, medical oncology, and radiation.

They did this without advertising price discounts on mammograms, adding new facilities or recruiting new doctors. They also did this in spite of the national trend that fewer women are getting mammograms.

How did they do it? Of course they targeted the right demographic audience with a well executed and creative campaign- but every health system does that. What made their results so extraordinarily successful?

1. Be willing to do mammograms at convenient times (They understood that women are busy. Mammograms have to happen after work and on weekends.)
2. Make scheduling convenient with online and mobile sign up (If she can easily sign up on her computer at work or 24/7 when she has a minute, she is hundreds of times more likely to sign up.
3. Make it a girls group thing (They ran programs like “Good Morning Mammogram” that had group coffee on weekends or “Girls Night Out” that started with a mammogram. She was likely to go if recruited by her friends.)

Your mammogram marketing is probably 99% of the way there. But by adding the three keys above into your marketing, the last 1% can bring explosive growth.

How Can Google Buzz Drive Patient Volume?

Social Media drives patient volume by connecting relevant content to patients when they are searching for it.

With the over 176 million Gmail users, Google Buzz has a large audience of perspective patients for you to connect with.

With the addition of Google Buzz to the social media landscape one thing remains true, the social media landscape is constantly changing.

Douglas MacMillan’s¬†Business Week article, describes the situation as:

‘Ultimately, Google Buzz can succeed without taking share from social network rivals, Jackson admits. “We don’t think there is a finite pie where everyone is competing for a slice,” he says. “We think over time the pie increases in size.”‘

With over 176 million users of Gmail, Google has a ready audience to tap into with Google Buzz. So what does Google Buzz offer? Google Buzz, a service for sharing short messages, images, videos, and links to articles on the Web.

Specifically:

• Gmail users will be able to write a message about what they’re doing, or upload multimedia, and share it with everyone in their contact list.
• Then, certain friends and colleagues‚Äîthose with Gmail and whom the user has allowed to view messages‚Äîcan jump in with commentary.

So how can you use Google Buzz to drive patient volume? Follow the same easy process for all your social media tools:

• Develop a comprehensive digital strategy
• identify your target
• Connect to them with consistent relevant messages
• Evolve your strategy as the landscape changes

To Drive Patient Volumes Stay Focused on What Matters to Your Target

Drive Volume: Beware of the Not So Low Hanging Fruit

Screenings are one way of driving volume. They are also an easy way for pre-episode patients to find your health system.  However, not all screening campaigns will produce the same results.

Let’s take colorectal cancer for example.¬†¬†According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cancer statistics:

• Colorectal cancer (14.6): Third among women of all races and Hispanic origin populations.
• Colorectal cancer (21.0): Third among men of all races and Hispanic origin populations.

When colorectal cancer is found early and treated, the 5-year relative survival rate is 90%. Because screening rates are low, less than 40% of colorectal cancers are found early.

This should be a slam dunk volume driver. However, screening campaigns targeted at men generally don’t produce half the results of a screening campaign targeting women. The statistics¬†point to this low rate of screening.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) use their resources to promote screenings such as these public service announcements (PSA) on YouTube.

These spots are good because the focus on the personal call to action or plea. However, the celebrity endorsement creates a barrier to the personal approach and is unlikely to motive a man to take action. ¬†Check out this spot and see what you think: “Your Wakeup Call”

Idea:   Use a sports star or more relatable messenger to Middle America.

Nine Steps To Drive Measurable Patient Volume

With 9 simple steps, hospital marketing can go from an expense to a revenue producer.

My basic philosophy is that is if hospital marketing departments do not drive patient volume in a measurable way, they will always be an overhead expense.

But if hospital marketers deliver measurable Return on Investment (ROI), they will be valued as a key component of long-term sustainability.

Here are my nine proven things you can start doing right away to begin driving measurable patient volume.

1. Target a very specific patient (No General Targets like “women 35 – 64″. Every service line has a specific segment of the market they are targeting- many have several. Ortho, for instance, has different segmentation for joint replacement, shoulder surgery and sports medicine)
2. Collaborate with Finance to set measurable goals (Maybe admissions data. Maybe filter out previous patients. Whatever it is, set it upfront.)
3. Choose your DRG’s wisely the most profitable DRG’s where the organization has excess capacity (Where do you have capacity AND Contribution Margin? Where those intersect is your sweet spot.)
4. Target “pre-episode patients” (For immediate results, risk assessments and seminars will bring in patients faster than you can effect a change in referral patterns. We recently saw a CV program drive over 400 new procedures this way.)
5. Master the 3M’s: 1) Media Mix, 2) Message, and 3) Movement ( 1) reach your target in surprising places where they can listen; 2) use a message that will stir them to action; 3) and then clearly give a call to action so they know exactly what to do next.)
6. Opt-In Marketing is not optional (Don’t talk at them, give them an opportunity to ask you questions. Start a dialog.)
7. Become the Patient Distribution Czar (We believe the Marketing Department is best suited to set up a system to sort patients that ask for risk assessments.)
8. Capitalize on Co-risks (See #7 above. Did you know 30% of Ortho patients have a CV problem that needs surgery? Or 45% of CV patients have either an ortho or cancer problem? Once you find these profitable patients, sort and distribute them.)
9. Follow the downstream revenue (You set up the metrics with finance in step #2, now track these patients through the system. Marketing job security depends on it!)

For more information on the 9 steps, download the Free “9 Things all Healthcare marketers should do to drive the right patient with the right payer to the right service line” eBook.

Drive Patient Volume into the Right Facilities Through Customer Relationship Management

Academic medical centers typically have many facilities at which their services are offered. But, the goal is no longer to just drive the right patient into the right service line, but now you must drive them into the right facility.

By utilizing a customer relationship management tool to drive the right patient volume into the right service lines and facilities, you will accomplish:

1. Reduced costs for marketing
2. Better targeted outreach
3. Managed ROI reporting from preset measurable objectives

Over the past five years, hospital inpatient and outpatient admissions are growing at a much smaller rate than non-hospital based outpatient services.

A clear case in the point being outpatient surgeries. Increasingly, outpatient surgeries are moving to non-hospital based settings, taking with them the observation, follow-up and possibly some Med surg volumes – Healthcare Management Blog

In addition to assessing capacity, outcomes and profitability per facility, it’s time to better target your consumers and drive them into the better defined facilities through customer relationship management.

Once a service line has defined its core targets through primary and secondary data and the message has been crafted accordingly, a customer relationship management tool can hone in on that target hitting them with direct mail, email or any other direct marketing.

An additional benefit to more precisely targeting your marketing efforts is that you can drive elective procedure volume into those preset facilities and open up the beds in the facilities that are able to take on the high acuity, high profitability cases.

You Need to Know the Six Ways Money Gets into Your Healthcare System

Want to be a successful Marketer in a Health System or hospital? Then you have to understand how a Health System makes money. Only then you will understand how YOU can play a part in making money for the system.

Here is a simplified explanation of the six ways money gets into your healthcare system:

#1 Legislative Process and Public Policy

Did you know that, on the average, 76% of all hospital revenue comes from the government is some way. More than just medicare and medicaid, your State legislature controls many policies that affect revenue. And as everyone knows, it is only going to become more influential in the coming years.

#2 Finance

Finance is managing the bond rating, maximizing the income from investments and getting the best from all the revenue cycle issues.

#3 Business Development

Acquisitions of hospitals and practices, Joint Ventures with docs, starting up new programs and service lines, and any other deals to better position the hospitals to succeed is what Business Development people do.

#4 Operational Excellence

Figuring out how to give the best possible care with the most cost efficiency. Interesting: innovation in cost savings can lead to innovation in clinical care. The key is the word “innovation”.

#5 Philanthropy

Your hospital foundation makes many capital improvements and services possible that a just couldn’t happen any other way.

#6 Marketing

This is you. If all you are doing is PR and Community Relations, your department will be considered needless overhead and will soon be slashed (if they aren’t already). You must drive measurable contribution margin, or profit, into the system.

You must drive Patient Volume at the intersection of capacity AND profitability- that’s the sweet spot. I call it driving “the Right Patient with the Right Payer to the Right Service Line“.

StumbleUpon New Tools to Increase Patient Volume

A key part of your digital strategy to driving patient volume should be delivering relevant content to consumers when they are looking for it.

StumbleUpon’s unique advertising platform and personalized recommendation engine tools can drive significant traffic to your hospital’s website.

Unlike other traffic sources, this traffic will be from people who are actively looking for healthcare information and more likely to take action and disseminate information.

StumbleUpon is an internet community that allows users to discover and rate web pages, photos and videos frequently called as “personalized recommendation engine”.

Customer Think has 4 compelling reasons to become a heavy StumbleUpon user.

Bottom line is becoming a heavy user of StumbleUpon educates you allowing you to create relevant information people are looking for. If you can do this, you are well on your way to increasing your patient volumes.

1. StumbleUpon Helps You Discover the Best of the Web … in Less Time

Finding relevant content today on the web can be difficult. StumbleUpon makes it simple: you install the StumbleUpon browser toolbar, and whenever you see something you like or dislike, you select the thumbs-up or thumbs-down button. You don’t have to do it for every site, but the more you do it, the more StumbleUpon will know about you and your interests.

2. StumbleUpon Helps You Find Interesting People to Follow

Once you find a website that you like, assuming that you are not the first to submit the site to StumbleUpon, you can also see who first submitted the site as well as who else favorite the post. You can then go to their profiles for more potential informative websites to discover. You can consider it “social networking connected by ideas‚Äù because these people are giving the same opinions on the same websites that you are!

3. StumbleUpon has a Unique Advertising System: You Can Buy Traffic to Your Website

StumbleUpon actually welcomes advertisements, at 5 cents apiece, to the URL and category of your choice. StumbleUpon reviews each advertisement submission to ensure that the content matches the proposed category, but if it does, you can now insert whatever website you want into the stream of content that stumblers view.

4. Yes, Using StumbleUpon will Lead to More Traffic to Your Website Organically

At the end of the day, similar to a Twitter ReTweet, as you stumble more content and hopefully start discovering a lot of new content that has yet to be stumbled, you will gain new subscribers who will see more and more of your content.

Social Media: a Powerful Tool to Drive Patient Volume

It is no secret that social marketing is a powerful tool for driving patient volume if used correctly. You can use already existing tools and influencers in the social media world to drive significant patient volume. This is accomplished by taking advantage of savvy internet users who know how to generate online communities.

Harvard Business Review did a case study on “How Ford Got Social Marketing Right”. Even though this is outside of the hospital marketing realm, we can learn from the principles of this case study.

The effects utilizing a relatively small cost:

• 6.5 million YouTube views
• 50,000 requests for information about the car- virtually none from the people who already had a Ford in the garage.
• Ford sold 10,000 units in the first six days of sales.

Bud Caddell at Undercurrent, a digital strategy firm who was responsible for Ford’s plan was quoted:

” The idea was: let’s go find the twenty-something YouTube storytellers who’ve learned how to earn a fan community of their own. [People] who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let’s go talk to them. People are not just telling stories for the sake of telling stories, though certainly, these stories have their own rewards. They were making narratives that would create economic value.”

They reached out to consumers not just to pitch them, but to ask them to help pitch the product. All of the stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

To create the Ford Fiesta Movement for your health system, follow these three easy steps:

• Engage culturally creative consumers to create content
• Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency
• Craft this is a way that rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital¬†currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.

Patient-Centered Strategy Drives Patient Volume

New sources of competition are emerging in health care, including physicians who used to be your best patient referral sources. And now patients are asserting themselves in decision-making, expecting more transparency with outcome and price data.

If Health care organizations implement a real patient-centered strategy, thinking creatively about all the services they can provide to give health care consumers what they really want, volume can be driven in from new sources.

Hospitals and Health Networks’ article “Competing for Patients” outlines the new realities of patient acquisition.

To make sure you are on the forefront og this trend:

• Rethink¬†your business models
• Challenge fundamental assumptions about¬†your markets, who their customers are, what products and services they should offer, and how they should bring them to market.

Hospitals and Health Networks suggests the number on thing your consumer wants is to avoid a stay in the hospital. As one hospital executive puts it, “If we’re really providing health care, we’re putting ourselves out of business as we’ve traditionally known it.”

A Winning Value Proposition

Imagine a single health care organization, with:

• the whole range of clinical expertise you’re ever likely to need over the course of your lifetime;
• integration of this expertise into new care approaches with evidence of great outcomes;
• the flexibility to provide the least intrusive and most convenient form of health care possible in any circumstance;
• clear pricing of a range of service options to make it easy to purchase only what you need;
• seamless transfer between care options; and
• a single, comprehensive personal medical record that all of your care providers use to integrate and coordinate your care.

As a marketer, you may not be able to create an integrated care path overnight. You can accentuate the key points and implement operation elements which facilitate the patient experience. A few examples include:

• Care coordinator
• Nurse Triage to funnel patients to the correct treatment course
• Call center “hospitality plan”

Drive Patient Volume With a Positive Patient Experience

Defining an operational procedure and adhering to it for each marketing campaign will ensure effective ROI reporting and allow for maximum patient conversions to be achieved.

It’s hard enough to drive patient volume through marketing, but when¬†a new patient opt-ins¬†and then¬†has a negative experience, you’ve established a¬†negative relationship typically resulting in a loose of a patient and ill-will which is hard to reverse. It doesn’t have to be that way!

Many hospitals are now requiring all touch points to the patient experience to go through etiquette training.

“May we help you? Telephone firm¬†teaches manners to hospital workers?¬†describes:

telephone firms can teach staff to be more “user-friendly” when dealing with patients. It is part of a reform of “consumer culture” to give a more personal service.

Many times operations falls outside the scope of marketing, but besides checking and rechecking the phone numbers on call to actions, there are many things that should be on a standard checklist for patient acquisition through marketing:

1. Double check the website or phone number to be listed correctly.
2. Inform the person responsible for the patient experience of the campaign launch date.
3. Educate the patient experience manager on the marketing message.
4. Clearly define a process for the patient experience manager to follow.
5. Ensure the patients are trackable to appropriately measure ROI.

Three Fast Ways to Build General Surgery Volume

If you look at what brings the most bottom line Contribution Margin (or Profit) into your hospitals, it is probably General Surgery. More that Othro, Neuro, Cardio, or Cancer, good ole’ General Surgery brings in the most profit.

But General Surgery is almost never promoted like a service line. It never gets the love like the big sub-specialty procedures. But this Plain Jane is a big bottom line producer. So how do you drive in more of this business?

#1 Emergency Department Promotion

We will talk about all the ways to promote the right kind of ER traffic in another post. But this much is true, the money you spend on driving the community to the ER when they have abdominal pain or any other hard to explain symptoms pays off in spades.

#2 Promoting Minimally Invasive Surgery and Other Technologies

Everybody gets it: a scope through a tiny hole in my belly is much better that cutting me wide open. Studies show that people will drive past other hospitals to go to the one that promotes MIS or da Vinci surgical systems. I know it has been done a million times before, but TV news crews still show up like clockwork when you have a da Vinci peel a grape at one of your community day events.

#3 Hold Nice CME Events For Primary Care Docs

Those over-worked underpaid Primary Care docs do not have time for your lousy demo of a da Vinci or other MIS procedures- they have seen it before. But when you invite them to a genuinely interesting event, they will make time in the schedule to show.

What makes a nice event?

• First of all, great meaningful information. If doc can really learn something, she will show
• Secondly, your senior people must attend and be truly grateful and happy to see them. Nothing says love like C-suite participation
• Bring in a celebrity to talk and meet-n-greet. A sports celebrity is great. Some current newsmaker is even better
• Great food and drink

Why do we say Right Patient, Right Payer, Right Service Line?

A health system CEO once told instructed me “Bring the right patient with the right payer to the right service line!“.¬† That CEO was a genius for bringing focus to a task.

Let’s break it down:

Right Patient: 1) Pre-Episode- 2) with Loose Medical Relationships; 0r 3) the patient that just received a catastrophic diagnosis.

1. Generally hospital marketing and advertising must be focused on Pre-Episode patients. Why, because after a patient gets into the system they don’t make any more provider choices. For Example: When you have a heart attack you don’t go to the hospital that has the best branding- you go to the fastest place the ambulance can get you. BUT if you find out though a risk assessment and wellness training that you have a serious CV problem, then you can make choices.
2. Loose medical relationships: Almost everyone says they have a doctor, but almost no on has seen the doctor in years.¬† If a problem is detected in a risk assessment event, the patient that hasn’t seen their doctor recently is 90%+ likely to go see the available doctor you recommend.
3. Catastrophic diagnosis patient: someone that just got a complicated diagnosis, like a tumor for instance, has to make choices about their treatment. This is where you need a great digital strategy because they search for answers online.

Right Payer:¬†Whatever DRG’s you are bringing into the system have to contribute to the bottom line. Mostly, but not always, that generally means a patient with great private payer.

Right Service Line: This is at the intersection of Capacity, Profitability, and Expertise. You only use precious marketing resources to drive business at this intersection. Seems obvious but this is a very common mistake.

So look at one of your current ads: does it comply with all three prerequisites? This is a great way to quickly check the effectiveness of your communications.