You referral coordinators + your physician liaisons should be your A team. While your physician liaisons go hunt every day, your referral coordinators should be taking care of the “house” per se. They are your farmers and every door your physician liaisons open, every account they “land”.. Your referral coordinators expand.Continue readingHow to create a great physician referral marketing team
Category: Medical Marketing
Healthcare, in many respects, is becoming a more competitive industry for providers. As you probably already know, health plans are increasingly narrowing down their offerings to smaller groups of providers (narrow networks). Clinically integrated networks are selecting preferred providers to be part of their organizations. Meanwhile, employers are creating their own clinics, and groups of providers or health systems – and their preferred external partners – are entering into risk-based contracts or accountable care organization (ACO) arrangements with payers.
This new and more competitive model of healthcare is increasingly requiring providers or practices to focus on acquiring patients by themselves. This is especially true for primary care providers (PCPs) because under most health plan contractual relationships, it is to them who patients are attributed; thus, if they want to be successful, primary care providers especially – and other providers too – must know what type of patients they want and how to both bring them into the practice and how to keep them attributed to the PCP practice.
To survive, every medical practice requires a patient acquisition strategy these days. Do you have one?
This requires not only a patient acquisition / medical marketing strategy but, also, a method for regularly tracking the return-on-investment (ROI) of the strategy to ensure that it is contributing to profitability and practice sustainability rather than just being another deadweight cost.
Learn more about medical marketing with our guides on marketing for today’s healthcare environment. These ideas for general practice marketing are geared towards healthcare marketers. These patient acquisition tips can also be implemented by practitioners and office managers if they are regimented enough.
Here are a few things to do to market to your existing patients, bring them back to the practice and at the same time, provide “managed care” even if you are not a PCMH.
1. Asking patients for referrals.
2. Regimented re-appointing of no show patients
3. Regimented re-appointing of patients that cancel appointments
4. Reactivating patients that have fallen out of care.Continue readingHow to market to your existing patients
How to empower your referrals team with the data and the tools they need to be effective? Let’s go through each item one by one. Start with the basics – provider and practice data.Continue readingHow to empower your referrals team with the data and the tools they need to be effective
Understand the critical role of the “farmer” or “referral coordinator”. Imagine yourself in a referral coordinator’s role. What do you need to be successful? You need… To be a true partner with your physician liaisons / hunters – you need to know which accounts they are hunting and who you are aligned with, to support them in their efforts.. To monitor.. Continue readingWhat does a referral coordinator need to do their jobs?
More often than not, we see that physician liaisons are being told to “call high”.. Aka, don’t leave without meeting the doctor. Truth is that this is not accurate…Continue readingHow to target the right contacts for referral marketing
We have seen that for most smaller practices, IT is a challenge and physician liaisons are thrown into the field with little to no tools nor correct data to hunt with. Imagine yourself in a physician liaison’s role. What do you need to be successful? You need the following.Continue readingWhat does a physician liaison need to do their job?
Physician referrals are a gold mine – we all know that. There are very few industries outside of healthcare where referral networks can work so well and can be so effective in business growth. Over time, we have noticed that the practices that grow rapidly are the ones that take physician referral networking and physician referral partnerships seriously… very seriously. It actually is very easy to do so if you master the individual components of this growth strategy.Continue readingHow to market to referring providers via physician liaisons
It’s pretty basic and simple, however, your team does need to be regimented about it. Set aside a few hours per day, every single week or have a person dedicated to this function, Have a marketing one pager that introduces your practice / medical services ready to go with some stats/numbers to speak of… more..Continue readingHow to market to referring providers via faxes, calls, emails
Many practices make the mistake of not being organized about their physician marketing program. They gather information here and there, download PDFs, print them out, then sort of mark the providers their rep has visited or the ones they have called to introduce themselves. That is not the way to approach marketing. You can certainly start that way, but very soon you are going to forget who you contacted, who you didn’t, how many times you contacted someone etc.Continue readingHow to market your practice using a simple CRM with referring provider data
Here’s an example of how you can achieve your SMART goal “I want to add one new referring physician partner per month”. Start with a list of referring physician prospects from NPI database, google, business listing websites or payer provider directories.Continue readingHow to grow by adding just one new referring physician partner per month