Posted by Brian Halstrom on Thu, May 20, 2010 @ 11:32 AM
It is critical to measure traffic, sources, successes and returns to make sure your doing a good job as a hospital. I see patient surveys and comment cards as what most hospitals consider the most effective method to do this. These survey's are done on patients "inside" the hospital. The ones that won't ever come back because they were upset are never measured. The patients not there for any other reason when the survey's are done are also not measured. How can this possibly be an accurate measurement of patient satisfaction?
We are in the year 2010 and we have things like email to communicate with patients, yet less than 20% of hospitals today collect email addreses let alone use them. Hospitals today are just now converting the focus a tiny bit from "acute care" to well care or prevention. Caring for patients goes well beyond the traditional visit and involves a retail healthcare strategy well known by chain drug stores and large discount chain stores like Wal-Mart.
This is a "Consumer Engagement Strategy." It requires retail applications for effective results. The hospital can offer supurb treatments and all employees could have wonderful relationships with thier patients and the hospital could still miss the boat on getting new patients or return patients through simple failures in marketing efforts. Success requires this effecient retail stratgy to really net results, repetition and acuratly measured effectiveness of efforts.
Paquin Healthcare who specializes in retail healthcare also use the marketing measures for building the retail traffic to drive traffic back to hospital core programs and services. Each componant functions as ideal for brand recognition, loyalty strategies, core business builders, and extend core customer base. Get the most bank for your efforts by using effecient, effective tools to generate tangible and properly measured results.
For example; hospital retail efforts like a gift shop tune up or an online store with health and wellness products can extend care to a patient long after the visit. Patients not currently inside the hospital building can benefit from these efforts online. If you include healthy monthly newsletters where your hospital can place ads for core programs and services in front of patients each month then you build awareness, extend care and drive traffic back. If you include loyalty card programs and include a point system for participation in diagnostic fairs then your capturing patients, extending additional billable services, building repeat business and your once again extending care to the individual. The capturing of emails in this online retail process allows you to effectively communicate your traditional surveys to the stream of people in your community who are not physicially at your facility and they can answer at thier convenience.
Service my friends goes beyond the visit and the sooner hospital exceutives take hold of this concept and run with it the sooner they will start enjoying the revenue streams that retail healthcare offers for hospitals including the millions currently going to local drug store chains.
Health, prevention and wellness care currently abused by a few in this open retail market need to go back into the trusted hands of the hospitals and healthcare professionals. Hospitals need to focus not just on acute care but on prevention and well care too. That is the only future of good hospital patient care.
Attend a Free webinar by Paquin Healthcare to find out more: http://bit.ly/PaqWebinar or call today: 407-566-1010 and we can help you get on the right road to success.
Posted by Brian Halstrom on Mon, May 10, 2010 @ 11:25 AM
Just how far are your marketing efforts, dollars and time going? Do they generate only a blast of traffic and then leave you with no residual revenue stream? Are they really generating future revenue that keeps on coming? Just how often is that the case at your hospital? Marketing is usually pretty traditional in hospitals, billboards, magazines, newspaper ads, brochures etc. Most people who view often are not captivated by it or interacting with it. How do you measure your results? Do the numbers show you it really did work? For how long?
The new model from the nation's capital indicates that financial times are changing dramatically for hospitals. Between healthcare reform and Medicare cuts hospitals are challenged to find new sources of revenue just to stay alive. It is critical to consider healthcare in a completely new way with consumers also struggling to pay basic healthcare costs in a down market.
The biggest healthcare cost is unhealthy behaviors in this country. I think we all have resolved to accept that much. What we are doing to promote prevention and wellness is a staggard and slow response to a huge problem.
Wellness is a factor that people are willing to pay for to get. Shows like "The Biggest Looser" and the huge numbers of baby boomers with youthful glows and healthier lifestyles; have consumers pushing and easily accessing the health and wellness movement. In fact, most of American's are looking online first for just such solutions.
Consumers armed with the plethora of online health information are wanting to get healthy, hoping to avoid large hospital bills and live longer are now focused on the internet for new solutions to wellness care and prevention of illness. More and more American's today are spending more dollars on retail wellness options. There are organizations cashing in on this like Walgreens, and CVS pharmacy and Wal-Mart but really should that not be something the medical experts provide?
When it comes to healthcare there is really only one expert I trust with my health and that is my Doctor! I cannot go to him for every sniffle and every headache he nor I have the time.
Doctor's today can extend the care to their patients by developing well care strategies and resources for getting the patients products they need to get healthy. Doctors and hospitals not retail chain stores should be the ones cashing in on the wellness care market and lowering insurance and medical costs. Not just to add the revenue streams, more importantly to provide responsible preventative care to their patients.
Most hospitals unfortunately do not have the staff or the time to research great health and wellness products, create a convenient online store, manage the plethora of technology to make sure it operates efficiently, the distribution and customer care and to develop marketing strategies for consumers not only to show up at the store but to show up at the hospital's core programs and services. There is a good reason why. Hospitals are in the business of making folks healthy through treatment after the patients are sick. Not to worry, there is an expert and a great solution and both are in the business of prevention and wellness care.
That does not mean to give up. Paquin Healthcare can get your hospital in the prevention and wellness care business too without giving up that new hospital wing to do it. The solution is a turn-key ecommerce and engagement system with professionally screened quality healthcare products to promote wellness and home care. This resource can be at your fingertips and your patient's homes faster than you think!
Posted by Tina O'Oconnell on Fri, May 07, 2010 @ 01:32 PM
Our current reimbursement-based system will fail: that's not a predication, but a certainty. The question is when, and what can be done alternately to make healthcare profitable while maintaining its core mission of serving the needs of the community.
Healthcare costs increase the cost of everything manufactured and every service provided in this country, which creates financial pressure first on the company, then on the consumer, and ultimately leads to outsourcing of jobs and importing of products manufactured for less overseas.
After World War II the federal government decided to get in the healthcare business by proxy: new regulations allowed employers to list employee healthcare costs as untaxed pay, allowing companies to lower their payroll taxes. Suddenly there was a way to compensate employees essentially off the books, and seeking benefits in addition to salary was a new employee priority because benefits also weren't taxed as personal income. The healthcare industry that evolved from this revelatory decision no longer survived by selling insurance one policy at a time; they sold to entire companies, and for the first time corporate America had a vested interest in employee health, even if it wasn't for the most noble reason. Initially everyone profited from the business arrangement.
The insurance and pharmaceutical industries also came to realize that there was profit to be made in creating products that provided quick-fix solutions and treatments for common problems that aren't necessarily medical problems (e.g. Viagra). Conventional medicine in our culture has always been more focused on cure rather than prevention: what if "cures" were invented for conditions that weren't necessarily medical in nature.
Why is health insurance so expensive? Our increased longevity is one reason, of course, and not just because we're in the healthcare system longer but because elderly people require more healthcare. A second reason is that the decline of the birth rate following the boom that produced the Baby Boomers has put fewer Payors into the system. A third factor, the same one that's responsible for the huge increase in the wellness industry, is that patients who were once content to receive treatment are now aware that wellness matters, too, and that quality of life is as if not more important than mere longevity, and the pharmaceutical companies are eager to create more drugs that require prescriptions, potentially furthering your health and certainly furthering their profits.
A recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers study points to increased utilization created by increased consumer demand as a cost factor; in other words, consumers seeking wellness options and the best care available and not merely the most convenient. The study also showed that new treatments and more intensive diagnostic testing have also increased costs; the newer treatments and better medicines are often the more expensive.
The good news for the retail healthcare industry is that many wellness choices are made by consumers regardless of whether their insurance company will reimburse the expense. Retail healthcare has not only expanded into areas not addressed by traditional sick-care insurance; it has ignored the conventional sick-care notions and ventured out on its own.
So fewer Payors, better and more healthcare options and an aging population are the most significant contributors to the current crisis, but there are others. Even though the cost to a hospital of a particular procedure may be nearly incalculable, human behavior is quite predictable. Life and health insurance are actuarial-based industries; companies can analyze certain data and predict not only how long you'll likely live, but what you're most likely to die of.
Actuaries can predict, based on lifestyle choices and demographic statistics, what the probability is that an individual will die before his next birthday. From this starting point a number of statistics can be derived, including the probability of surviving any particular year of age, the remaining life expectancy for people at different ages, and estimates of one's peers longevity characteristics. Insuring against illness and death are both business calculations; the only way for the insurer to make money is to develop accurate projections of future events.
Some factors identified by the PriceWatershouseCoopers study that increase insurance utilization (and therefore insurance prices) are lifestyle-related: smoking, obesity caused by insufficient exercise and excessive and unhealthy eating, excessive drinking, and drug use. These are some of the same factors that increase insurance costs as well: logically, high rates of alcoholism, smoking and obesity lead to long-term health problems, which actuaries can use to predict health-related issues and life expectancy.
Private health insurance and insurance provided by employers is expensive because of all these factors, but some are preventable. With so much federal tax money going to Medicare to treat chronic medical conditions it's not unreasonable to expect prevention and wellness to take precedence, but that will require the insurance and pharmaceutical companies to have more of a financial stake in keeping people well as opposed to merely treating illness. Companies seeking to reduce healthcare costs already know that smoking cessation programs and nicotine patches are far less expensive than treating emphysema and lung cancer, and time spent regularly exercising is less costly than quadruple-bypass surgery or years of Glucophage for Type II diabetes.
As an example, Modern Healthcare reported in its Dec. 24, 2007 "By the Numbers" issue that in 2007 the cost for fighting heart disease, the nation's number one killer, was $431.8 billion. A high percentage of heart disease is a direct result of poor diet, exercise and smoking, all issues that fall under the "wellness" umbrella. (The number two killer, cancer, cost $263.3 billion in the same year, another expenditure affected by smoking.)
Clearly, the cost of treating sickness rather than addressing wellness in the United States has not been as profitable for American businesses and the populace as a whole as it has been for the companies that treat sickness.
Too often the prevention of illness and disease has been ignored as a partial treatment for the cost of rising health insurance, but both medical institutions, which are pledged to maintaining community wellness, and the federal government, which is pledged to protecting the populace (even if it's protecting people from themselves) need to be proactive in promoting wellness and healthy lifestyles. Chronic illnesses and diseases bred by poor health maintenance and treated by the healthcare industry primarily in the no-turning-back illness stage of the problem are economically debilitating. (Pharmaceutical sales in 2007, meanwhile, were a robust $643 billion worldwide.)
Wellness isn't just what consumers seek: it's what the public needs to demand from healthcare purveyors, insurers and pharmaceutical companies. A logical federal action would be promoting wellness rather than allowing profit-driven industries to set the standards for appropriate care.
Meanwhile, wellness products and treatments are constantly emerging on the market, not compensated by traditional insurance carriers but sought by the public anyway.
Medicine that's primarily concerned with treating illness rather than preventing it is losing its sway with the informed consumer, and they're willing to take their business elsewhere, even to experimental or un-reimbursed remedies if the remedy will achieve what conventional sick-care can not.
Meanwhile, Medicare has reduced compensation to hospitals for certain procedures and treatments; hospitals are still obligated to treat Medicare patients, but now at additional uncompensated expense, another indicator of where the reimbursement system is headed.
Help doesn't appear to be on the way, either from the government or from profit-driven industries like pharmaceuticals and insurers. For physicians and hospitals, not treating isn't an option and not receiving Medicare patients isn't an option. The only option, other than to allow the dysfunctional healthcare industry to drag providers under, is to actively keep people healthier, and supplement traditional healthcare with a retail element.
Promoting wellness isn't only a community benefit, but also an economic benefit to the institutions that implement care. Mission-based healthcare, seeking to serve the community at large, seems incompatible with economic security, but that's not the case if adjustments are made that enable the hospital/clinic/physician to add a retail element to the business model.
Hospitals already engender trust and provide health and wellness services and products. All they need to capture a corner of an existing market that already generates billions of dollars each year is engage the consumer where the need is: providing products and services that promote wellness.
Paquin Healthcare can provide wellness service and solutions for your hospital to get the retail healthcare dollars your hospital's revenue stream could use! Call Paquin at: 407-566-1010 for more information or log into: www.paquinhealthcare.com/webinars to sign up for a free webinar.
This is an excerpt from the book: "Retail Healthcare Revolution" by: Tony Paquin
