With the continuing weak economy and the advent of health reform, bundled reimbursement and accountable care organizations expected to ratchet up the financial pressure on their businesses, physicians are increasingly looking to health systems as employers. Thirty-six percent of hospital CEOs reported an increase in the number of doctors asking them to buy their practices and 74 percent said physicians had approached them for employment, according to a 2009 report American Hospital Association. As marketing resources and staff continue to be cut or remain static, it is increasingly important for hospitals to focus their marketing efforts to provide the greatest return.
Whether facilities buy practices, employ physicians, or look to increase volume from existing referrals sources, their ability to monitor their return on investment from those hospital/physician alignment activities, and build and maintain strong relationships with referring physicians, will be challenged. Typically, facilities employ someone to market to and manage their relationship with referring physicians. Whether focused internally on medical staff, or externally on referring physicians, the role of physician liaisons within hospitals has become increasingly strategic. In some cases, these liaisons must manage physician relationships through a manual, paper-based system or home-grown electronic database. These manual forms of managing physician information make it impossible or extremely laborious to analyze data for trends and patterns.
Some facilities have more robust, electronic contact management systems for physician outreach. While these systems do make it easier for liaisons to track physician interactions and issues, they do not interface with disparate information systems and patient information to paint a complete picture of referral patterns and physician trends. On top of that, these systems often rely on the IT department to run robust reports. It is not uncommon for turnaround times on such reports to run between six weeks and three months – or up to six months – depending on the IT department’s priorities and whether it misunderstood or missed data parameters. And, with the top IT priorities for hospitals revolving around meeting the meaningful use requirements of electronic health records, physician liaisons are often pushed even further down the totem pole in their requests.
To cut out the middle man, enable physician liaisons to access real-time, actionable information and nimbly respond to the same financial challenges confronting physician offices, innovative hospitals are beginning to use Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) software to market to doctors. The software allows hospitals among other things to quickly:
· Leverage information stored in the database to easily customize physician outreach efforts and marketing campaigns at the individual level
· Learn whether the facility is losing business to competitors because a physician is dissatisfied with them, and resolve issues before they reach the point of no return
· Discover whether the facility is losing money on a specific service line and identify specialists they can target who can drive patients in that area
· Link patient activity to physician activity
· Allow liaisons to create and access real-time reports without burdening IT resources, including measuring ROI from the activity to show impact on the bottom line
In this era of healthcare reform and meaningful use, hospitals need not forget about relationship management technology that drives business and the bottom line. Fortune 500 companies rely these robust databases to define their target audience and implement highly targeted marketing outreach initiatives; hospitals can do the same. The stakes are too high for them to maintain the status quo when an affiliated physician generates an average of $1.5 million in annual revenue for a hospital, according to a recent Merritt Hawkins & Associates survey.
Lori Brenner is director of physician referral builder at REACH3, a healthcare CRM provider
