BILL APPLING

The allocation of marketing dollars will be an even more challenging decision after healthcare reform. We will continue to see medical groups identifying their competitors, as well as how to maintain their existing patient base and how to grow. The question is, what do we have to tackle today to make a good tomorrow? 

The problems and issues that need to be looked at when making your decisions on marketing and spending marketing dollars: 

• information technology and health care technology;
• decline of bigger business and the corporate titans, which are still adjusting from the current economic environment;
• social changes, aging population and reform;
• global forces that we see outside of our practices but aren’t taking into account.

When I am working with a medical practice I include these in the due diligence. I teach the concept of relational marketing in the business course at the University of Memphis Business School. Not many of the cases we study are healthcare; however, the challenges that face other industries are the same.

I will have to say that the bottom line is going to be about relationship marketing. When I say relationship marketing, I am talking about both internal and external. You need to identify your market for relationship building using pre-boomer, baby boomers, Generation X and Generation Y. Identify both internal (physicians and employees) and external.

Let’s use my recent medical encounter as an example of how relational marketing is used. I am a baby boomer and I know my medical family history. I work in an environment that for me to turn out a good “product” I will be interacting both internally with the different generation who will help me as staff and support people to deliver a good product. I also understand the motivations and challenges of the different generations. 

Here are some of the generational issues of my encounter. This particular group has electronic medical records. I checked in and they pulled me up on their computer. I had been a patient previously, but not since the installation of their EMR. They scanned in some of the basic information on me. While sitting in the waiting room, I noticed that I was one of the younger people in the room. In fact, I made up 5 percent of the people in the waiting room. When my name was called out, a staffer met me at the door with a tablet and was asking me questions while we walked to the exam room. The physician came in and asked what brought me there (as he looked at the information entered into my record by the person that took me into the exam room). This physician was a generation younger than me. He was entering in clinical information as he asked questions, all while listening intently and making eye contact. He finished the exam and we decided that a procedure was necessary. The doctor gave me a print out on my diagnosis. When I walked out of the exam room, a time for the procedure was scheduled and instructions were given. I was also told that I still had an amount that had not been met. I was politely told I would be responsible for that amount and I could bring a check the morning of the procedure. I received an email reminding me of the date and time and any other instruction by email. I also received an automated telephone call to remind me. Overall, I had a patient friendly experience. 

I learned that they understood my generation and my levels of acceptance with technology. I also learned the type of skills the employees and the staff had regarding technology and what they appeared to know about technology. I am sure I was treated differently than their patients older or younger than myself.

This is relational marketing.

Bill Appling, MBA, FACMPE, is president of Watkins Uiberall Health Care Consulting.  He has faculty appointments at the University of Memphis in the Fogelman College of Economics and Business, where he teaches in the Masters of Health Care Administration program.