Building a Meaningful Medical Practice Marketing Campaign

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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What it Is – How it Works

[By Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA, CMP™]

[By DeeVee Devarakonda MBA]

The success of a knowledge driven healthcare organization depends on not only how data can be converted to information – and information into marketing insight – but also by acting upon and converting those insights into building meaningful patient acquisition campaigns.

Definition of Patient Recruitment

Patient recruitment or campaign managementis the process of designing, executing, and measuring marketing campaigns through the use of applications that help to:

  • Select and segment patients
  • Design campaigns and execute the campaigns to contact patients
  • Track the contacts made with patients
  • Measure the results of those contacts
  • Learn from these results to more efficiently target patients in the future.

Key Queries

Some key questions to ask while you build campaigns:

  • Do you have a Customer [Patient] Relations Management roadmap that fits in with your overall patient vision and strategies and outlines the course of action for campaign management?
  • What is your privacy policy and strategy? – It is imperative for healthcare organizations to be proactive and self-regulate with a coherent privacy policy and design their systems to comply with this strategy. This may affect the way you design and execute campaigns.
  • What tools should you use? – There are several campaign management tools available today but no one tool may solve all business problems. You need to decide: what works best for my technical/ business environment? Is any integration effort required, if yes, how much will it cost me? How user-friendly are the tools? How much should I invest in training?

Important Campaign Components

Critical components of campaign management include the following activities:

  • Patient Segmentation: Process of identifying groups of patients for better targeting marketing and communications efforts. Segmentation is critical for effective and intelligent one on one communications with your patient.
  1. Ensure your data quality is excellent which can give you meaningful segmentation.
  2. Consistency of treatments and processes are of paramount importance.
  3. Buying a software tool is not enough for effective segmentation. You also need to understand what the software tool does in the backend. Watch out for anomalies and take steps to make reparations.
  4. Make sure you administer the initiative to a small sample and the business rules are in place before you roll out your campaign to the larger group.
  • Personalization: Ability to customize your product/service to each patient:
  1. Good personalization is possible especially when you have a good patient past history.
  2. You also need to have all business rules in place for effective personalization.
  3. Ensure your patient data is of high quality (e.g. addressing a female patient as a Mr. or sending mails to sign up for your service to a person who is already your patient can defeat the purpose of personalization)
  4. If you model data before personalization, you can target more effectively and personalize.
  5. It pays to have a clear privacy policy and ensure your personalization philosophies are in tune with that policy.
  • Execution – Actual implementation of your marketing programs and messages
  1. Before you execute, ensure you are equipped to fulfill promises you are making in the campaigns (e.g. If you are printing a toll free phone number in your direct mail piece for your patients to use, that toll free telephone number should work)
  2. Make sure your sales and service channels are aware of the campaigns and publish a general calendar for the whole company
  3. Develop business rules and strategies for follow-up campaigns.

Learn more: http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

The Mindset

Successful patient marketing campaigns begin with the proper mindset and practice culture. There is no technology silver bullet to any P[C]RM campaign. And today, patient privacy is the key element of loyalty with a commitment to build long lasting and profitable campaigns through mutual trust and engaging cross-functional teams that can pick and deploy the elements mentioned above, across the entire enterprise and IT network, as needed.

Assessment

Healthcare organizations should keep privacy and the above components as their laundry list of action items when considering a C(P)RM plan.

Conclusion

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Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com

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