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The Reason Healthcare Marketing Executives Are On The Payroll
By Richard D. Stier, MBA
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Healthcare marketing executives must embrace a new mindset, a fresh imperative. Healthcare marketing executives must live a new role and attain mastery of new skills. Action must be taken yesterday. The alternative is to insure irrelevance, to confirm obsolescence. Polish your resume.
The New Imperative
Managing cost and optimizing quality are essential baseline survival requirements. They are not enough. Today's healthcare realities require the effective management of access. To ignore this imperative is the equivalent of applying a stamp to an envelope while your competitor sends e-mail. What is fueling this imperative?
Healthcare has not traditionally been a consumer driven purchase. Because someone else was paying the bill, consumers have not shopped critically for healthcare, as they would, for example, for a new car. Only recently have we seen the rate of increase in healthcare expenditures by consumers exceed the rate of increase in healthcare expenditures as a whole. This change suggests that because consumers are spending more of their discretionary income on healthcare, they will pay more attention. They will become more critical shoppers.
Consumers are paying more attention. They are becoming more informed, more active healthcare shoppers. The Internet is accelerating consumer driven access of health information. A recent Harris poll suggests that approximately 68 percent of the adult population, over 60 million individuals, use the Web to search for healthcare information. The survey also indicated that 91 percent stated that the most recent time they searched the Web for health information they found what they were seeking. Access to health information is transformed forever.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical firms are using direct to consumer "supply push" advertising. Consumer directed ads are becoming commonplace for everything from Tagamet to Viagra. This has reinforced Web inquiries, and has encouraged consumers to ask their physicians about these products by name.
Concurrently, health network affiliations of the mid- and late-1990s has left us with a healthcare system that is consolidated (to varying degrees) but not integrated. We have decentralized redundancy: multiple systems that don't talk to each other. Consequently, we request similar demographic, insurance, and clinical information multiple times, add bureaucracy to the clinical care path, create longer episodes of care, incur unnecessary cost, and irritate consumers.
Capitation has been decapitated. Most managed care plans are still discounted fee for service arrangements. Pharmaceutical costs are rising far more rapidly than the consumer price index for healthcare as a whole. For some west coast HMOs, drug costs can exceed inpatient hospital costs. Health plan premiums are rising, but not fast enough to cover rampant increases in pharmaceutical expense. Many plans are combating shrinking or negative margins.
Concurrently, employers are reducing their exposure to increasing premiums by shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution plans. That is, rather than defining the healthcare benefits in advance, the employer defines their contribution ceiling. Employees can trade up to a higher level of benefit with their own money. The net result is that consumers are paying more out of pocket for healthcare. That means increased consumer-driven scrutiny in their selection of healthcare services.
These indicators combine to demand previously unparalleled ease of access with consistently consumer-responsive relationships. Access management is not a requirement of the future. It is the requirement to have a future.
What is Access Management?
Access management is the integration of multiple entry portals or touch points into a central customer relationship nerve center. The focus is on strengthening relationships. Access management connects with, and responds to, all customer groups in all modes of communication (Internet, fax, phone, mail, in-person). It is barrier free, interactive, and omnipresent.
According to author Ian Morrison in HealthCare in the New Millennium, "A combination of computer-supported case management, remote telemetry via sensors, and better informed patients will create new ways of delivering health care. The vast increase in health information available via the Internet and through a whole series of potentially linked devices could have profound effects on the health system of the future."
For example, when your customer is on your website and expresses specific needs, she can request and interact with a live relationship advocate. Her advocate "pushes" tailored content to her screen, confirms her to be e-mailed subsequent related information, offers relevant health network resources based on her profile, makes an appointment with her preferred physician, or schedules her for a physician-prescribed procedure.
This same customer relationship nerve center assures the effective, critical communication between referring (primary care) physicians in outlying areas and (faculty) specialists. For example, Dr. Rural, who referred his high risk obstetrics patient, Mrs. Mommy, to Dr. Faculty Specialist, understands Mrs. Mommy's clinical disposition while under Dr. Faculty Specialist's care. Dr. Rural is informed about Mrs. Mommy's in-hospital complication and responds knowledgeably at her subsequent post discharge visit.
The Purpose of the Chief Marketing Executive
The future for the healthcare marketing executive is not about managing functions. It does not pivot on the axis of crafting the premier website.
The future is about expanding access and optimizing relationships. Unless the chief marketing executive is improving access and strengthening relationships with the organization's stakeholders, there is no justification for her to be on the payroll.
The natural consequence of easing access and deepening relationships is increased client quantity and enhanced client loyalty. Stated simply, more business now and more repeat business later. As futurist Dr. Leland Kaiser states it: "He who controls access controls the bank." Here are a few examples:
- One health system experienced a 5.3 percent increase in market share within 12 months of incorporating a strategy for access into their overall strategic plan
- Another health system documented an 18 percent increase in outpatient procedures by centralizing scheduling
- A multi-site group practice experienced a 40 percent reduction in FTEs by consolidating appointment scheduling functions
- Within four months of one health system activating an access center, their volume of contacts was 212 percent over their previous "physician referral program" volume
To effectively improve access, the marketing executive must connect with her peers like never before. Access Management requires the partnered action of the senior leaders of four key disciplines: marketing, information technology, clinical practice, and operations. Without marketing depth represented at the table, the strategy for access will be incomplete and anemic. Conversely, an access strategy driven exclusively by marketing will fail.
What does the marketing executive bring to the access management initiative? She brings two critical resources: the healthcare contact center, and proven knowledge of how to facilitate exchange relationships using the four "p's" of the traditional marketing mix. Her experience in shaping market-responsive clinical products, streamlining access (place), identifying finance-partnered pricing, and crafting effective promotion (marketing communications) are important, foundational skills.
The tenure of marketing in an insular silo is over. Access management requires the marketing executive to be inclusive, not exclusive. It requires integration, not isolation. The focus of access management is realizing tangible outcomes. The vehicle for achieving those outcomes is teamwork.
Conclusion
If we are going to impact access, it requires more than the next good conference to inspire our dialogue over coffee. Access management requires intentional action.
It demands a higher level of healthcare marketing practice. It requires marketing executives who understand that if they haven't yet taken action, they're already behind.
Access management requires the partnered commitment of the senior-most leaders to shared objectives. Finally, access management requires a clearly defined plan that is flexible to accommodate regular refinement based on incremental outcomes.
For more information, please visit us at http://www.healthlinesystems.com, call 1 800 733-8737 extension 7265, or contact us via e-mail at
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