CRM: Patient Relations Management and Concierge Medicine

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Characteristics of a Retainer or Cash-Based Practice

By DeeVee Devarakonda; MBA [Former CMO of Quaero, Inc]

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko; MBA http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

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A young concierge medical practice is a business with challenges in these Customer [Patient] Relationship Management’s [CRM] areas that are critical for success.

Areas of Most Challenge

Maturity of Processes:

Processes are often associated with bureaucracy or stuffy hierarchical healthcare systems that are anathema to emerging concierge medical practices. At small practices, doctors are often owners who fiercely pride themselves on flat structures, autonomy and flexibility. However, processes are imperative to conduct a streamlined practice that can be woven around a CM culture that still ensures practice business is conducted in a systematic manner.

Organization Structure:

Young concierge medical practices have challenges managing growth while grappling to incorporate an organization structure that promotes the elite private practice culture.

Multi-tasking, rapidly growing work places:

Young CM practices are often characterized by employees who multi-task and assume several roles to make their resources stretch farther. Especially in the current healthcare reform climate, young practice employees take up a broader set of responsibilities. In addition, as young private CM practices grow, they may become anguished with a growing office workplace that may not be equipped with an evolving infrastructure to cope. They have a fierce need to carefully control growth with tightly managed resources.

Changing business needs and strategy:

In an era after the golden age of traditional medicine, profitability is critical for emerging concierge practices. It is imperative to be nimble and change marketing strategies as socio-political and competitive climates dictate. A good C[P] RM system is tightly integrated, but loosely coupled, to allow CM practices to communicate appropriately with patients.

Little room for Slack:

Small concierge medical practices do not have as much established name-brand equity as larger, established practices of any model type, and patients are less willing to tolerate mistakes. Concierge practices have to run a much tighter ship and build impeccable patient experiences.

Fierce Competition:

The cash or retainer medicine landscape today looks very different from just five years ago. Competition is becoming fierce and practices are fighting for mindshare and patients. Young practices are competing with older concierge practices – large traditional practices, micro-practices, behemoth healthcare systems, enterprise-wide medical corporations and every other practice model in-between – to attract and retain patients with private resources.

Assessment

The above characteristics form the basis of a compelling strategy to embrace C[P]RM and streamline patient relationships and cash revenue opportunities. Concierge practices still need to build scalable marketing programs that can easily ramp up and down effortlessly as needs and economic environments demand. But, they do need to establish marketing metrics and processes that can demonstrate the Return on Investment (ROI) on their CRM, and marketing programs, and for getting critical cash-paying patient buy-in.

Related link: https://healthcarefinancials.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/defining-and-understanding-%e2%80%9cboutique-medicine%e2%80%9d/

MORE: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2009/10/30/return-on-investment-calculations-for-concierge-medical-practice-marketing-initiatives/

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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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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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CRM Considerations for a Health 2.0 Medical Practice

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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The Build vs. Buy vs. Outsource Conundrum

By DeeVee Devarakonda MBA

There are several options to build, buy or outsource a medical practice Customer Resource Management infrastructure. And, there are advantages and disadvantages to all three options. I will review all three for our ME-P readers. 

Build:

Rapid technology advances are transforming the business landscape. This makes it very challenging for healthcare organizations to keep abreast of the technologies, to train and manage resources on tools, to grapple with cross-functional, cross-departmental dynamics and build the CRM application. In addition mergers/ acquisitions and other market realities can make CRM operations complex and distract healthcare organizations from delivering excellent patient experience.

It is very tempting for small healthcare organizations to think they can develop what they need in-house themselves. May be May be not. It is very essential to stay focused on your main business and see if the solution is available elsewhere. Figure out if you are in the business of whatever you are doing or let us say in the business to develop patient survey tool or a low-end database. It is best to get outside help wherever you are dealing with an initiative/ task that is not your core competence or where it is to your strategic advantage- be it time-to-value or cost savings.

Buy:

Depending on your business needs you can either buy CRM package solution and implement or build best of breed solutions that are suited to your business needs. You need to pay very close attention to what the software vendors are promising. Naturally they will be more interested in making the sale, than advising on whether it integrates well with your existing technologies, so the onus is on you as a buyer to ask the right questions and make appropriate purchases.

Outsource:

Especially for very young healthcare organizations today, outsourcing can be an option worth exploring to de-risk technology decisions. Outsourcing de-risks marketing program – avoids unnecessary, upfront, massive capital investment and will also equip the marketers with the flexibility to ramp up or down as situation demands. Outsourcing does not mean healthcare organizations can wash their hands off the CRM function. Still it is the business that will have to provide the strategic direction and control the CRM process and outcome. There are also Application Service Provider (ASP) solutions which de-risk technology decisions.

Assessment

One of the attractions of going the hosted route becomes very clear when you have a two doctor practice marketing medical services that require 24×7 availability of information, transaction and service. They have attractive pricing that encourage “pay as you go” paradigm which is of enormous help to young businesses. However, the disadvantages of an ASP [SaaS] are: 1) you can’t integrate with your other enterprise systems for patient 360-degree view 2) you can’t customize to reflect your exact needs 3) you can’t work offline, which can be a disadvantage if you are a mobile “new-wave” medical practice.

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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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Return on Investment Calculations for [Concierge] Medical Practice Marketing Initiatives

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Calculating Tangible ROI for Intangible Activities

By DeeVee Devarakonda; MBA [Former CMO of Quaero, Inc]

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko; MBA [Publisher-in-Chief]Doctor with Advisor

Gone are the days when money was freely spent on medical practice marketing activities such as the yellow pages, radio or TV advertisements. And, today’s internet based business climate is especially harsh for ethereal programs that can not present a clear Return on Investment [ROI] for their existence. Concierge and cash-based medical practice marketing is especially vulnerable in this climate unless supported with a sound ROI argument.

The Challenge

A very basic challenge all medical practices is not only pooling the resources but also allocating them wisely. ROI arguments help practices make those choices. Typically marketing budget and outlay decisions focus on operating expenses like public relations, podcasts, webcasts and internet advertising. However, marketing can also involve capital investment decisions. To be successful, medical practitioners should learn to speak the language of business and build ROI analysis to support such initiatives.

How do you calculate the ROI for internet marketing initiatives?

Here are some basic steps to help you build the ROI scenario for your marketing initiatives:

  1. Detail the marketing costs:
  2. Estimate the revenue impacts:
  • Hardware – computers, servers, accessories
  • Software  – database, campaign management software
  • Implementation costs of hardware and/or software
  • Internal resource costs associated with the deployment of the capital improvement
  • Upfront investments in call centers, staff, equipment and so on.
  • Increase in patient response rates
  • Increase in patient conversion and practice acceptance rates
  • Increase cross-sell product and services ratios
  • Decreased account patient attrition rates
  • Increase in practice CM fees
  • Increase in average spend per patient/account
  • Increase in average number of patient transactions.

Practices can use past experiences to guesstimate the revenue impact; others like-minded colleagues.

Net Present Value

Once you calculate the revenue and cost impacts, you need to calculate the Net Present Value (NPV) of your marketing initiative. For a marketing project, if the NPV is greater than zero that means your project will make money; if it is less than zero – it will not (and you typically need a compelling business reason to implement a marketing project with an NPV less than zero).

NPV calculations include:

1) Investment – money you expend for the initiative at the beginning

2) Revenues – that accrue as a result of the initiative over a period – can be one time or a recurring revenue

3) Costs – that accrue as a result of the initiative over a period – can be one time or a recurring item

4) Discount rate – your accountant can give this rate.

5) Time Period – define the time period for which you would like to compute the NPV.

6) NPV is the cumulative differential between the revenue and cost stream discounted at the discounted rate minus the investment.

NPV=SUM ((Rt-Ct) / (1+r)t) – I

t=1

Given:

where t represents time, n  represents the number of time periods, R is revenue impacts, C is cost impacts, r is the discount rate and I is the Investment.

An NPV >0 means the project will pay for itself, <0 means the project does not pay for itself and an NPV of zero will give you a break even.

Assessment

Remember NPV is simply a guideline to help quantify the marketing results to make informed investment decisions. Note: NPV calculations that include assumptions also allow room for error. Spreadsheets help calculate the NPV for any initiative. Simple software can also help develop “what-if” scenarios with various values for NPV components and marketing options. The model can be used for non-marketing, or any initiative, as well.

Conclusion

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