Key Resources Mentioned in Today's Episode
- Modern Healthcare article: California hospitals ask governor for $1 billion in immediate aid
- Bain article: The U.S. is not fully prepared to resume elective medical care
- Modern Healthcare article: U.S. faces 'truly daunting' challenges on needed COVID tests:
- ‘Plandemic’ article
Key TakeAways
Observations About Patient Acquisition
- Consumers are trusting their local health experts to provide guidance during this time, and are thinking about their health more than ever.
- 6/10 people are willing to switch providers, according to our latest research, even if they already had a planned surgery before the COVID-19 shutdown.
3 Primary Levers to Pull for Patient Acquisition
- Direct response
- Before proactively marketing a service line, the organization must be ready for those seeking care by maximizing reactive tactics.
- Example tactics include:
- Always-on search
- Website content (particularly on service line pages)
- Call center capabilities
- ORM
- Find-a-Physician tool
- Physician referrals
- The quickest and most powerful way to impact volumes is by understanding and improving physician referral patterns.
- What does your outreach program look like?
- What can you do to make your referral process as easy as possible?
- Provide educational messages so referring doctors know they’re sending patients to a safe place.
- Don't forget physician-to-physician communication.
- Demand generation – How can you be top of mind?
- Once direct response and physician referral tactics are in place, systems can generate demand for service line volume through targeted personalized marketing, promotional campaigns, and content marketing programs.
- Example demand generation tactics include:
- Personalized marketing campaigns
- Promotional campaigns
- Content marketing
- The luxury of building relationships isn’t available during this time. We’re advocating that health systems think about unifying their service line campaigns for efficiency.
