With the ability to capture sales information and provide analysis tools, these products have been a critical piece for many customer service departments and business development teams. And we have seen an increasing number of hospitals turn to these tools to help them track several key pieces of information and identify an outcome measure for their marketing efforts.

It is not uncommon to see a hospital or IDN needing to “Sell” services since what they really do is provide patient care reactively once a patient is sick and is admitted. With the shrinking reimbursements, increased competition and increasing operational costs, hospitals must attempt to win more new “clients” or patients over.

CRM’s value comes in many different flavors in the healthcare setting:

• Tracking patient’s feedback and measuring patient satisfaction through survey responses
• Tracking the outcome of campaigns (phone, mailers, online ads) and applying BI and linking new patients to the different campaigns.
• Streamlining the process of converting prospects to clients (Patients)
• Tracking referrals from different sources (While ensuring that the hospital is inline with the current regulations associated with referrals and kick backs).
• Keeping patients informed of new physicians, new specialties, new procedures and new physician practices through mailers and newsletters.
• Improving patient satisfaction through automated follow up activities after discharge

As search engines continue to be one of many places patients first turn to for medical advice, hospitals must ensure they have a strong online presences and employ creative ways to draw patients to their doors. But in order to succeed and better track the outcomes of these efforts they must utilize a CRM products to help maximize the conversion rate of prospects to patients.

Original Article

Reda Chouffani is the Co-Founder of Biz Technology Solutions, Inc and an active Healthcare Information Technology writer for Healthcare IT Insider and TechTarget’s Health IT Exchange.

Social Media as part of your marketing plan is used by companies to change mindsets, reinforce their practice’s “brand”, and extend their organizational goals. Social Media should always be a complementary part of your marketing mix and your practice should begin by considering your total marketing goals before creating your Social Media presence. If your practice already has a website that contains educational materials, use your Social Media apps to drive traffic to this already present content. When you are offering a new product or service that your patients might not fully understand, create a long-term strategy to educate them about the product or service by posting updates with a new piece of information each time.

Your selection of Social Media applications should be used to apply the practice’s marketing goals while targeting distinct social communities. Your patients currently meet in different online spaces where they learn about, comment on, and influence others opinions about products and services they personally care about. With over 200 different Social Media applications to start your conversation from, it is important to understand what applications make the most sense for your practice. Having a Facebook fanpage so you can update your patients on what is going on at the practice might make sense for some, while having a YouTube account and posting educational videos about procedures might be more beneficial to others. Using your Twitter account to link your latest press releases to, or the use of educational blogs about specific ailments, is a quick and easy way to spread awareness of your practice’s products and services. Your Social Media goals should focus on corporate awareness, public relations duties, and a recognizable increase in patients and improved search engine rankings for your company’s website.

As with most marketing initiatives, reaching your Social Media marketing goals requires commitment and a desire to engage your end client. What makes Social Media different from other marketing tools is that it requires dedicated manpower to maintain. Once a website has been created, it will continue to bring information to prospective and current clients when that patient reviews your corporate site. Newspaper, radio, and television ads need only to be created once and then set against an automated schedule that will provide results assuming your message is powerful enough. On the average, a successful Social Media campaign requires someone to be committed to managing the practice’s Social Media strategy for at least 1-2 hours per day. With that being said, it is important that your employees don’t allow Social Media to become a distraction from their day-to-day responsibilities and kill their productivity. The need for dedicated manpower is why it is important to have top level and employee buy-in in order to have contributors for content.

A solid user policy must be set in place to ensure everyone understands the boundaries of Social Media tools while at work. Your Marketing team lead should develop a policy explaining your practice’s guidelines for the use and integration of Social Media. This step becomes more important when multiple people are responsible for updating and contributing to the practice’s Social Media sites. The policy should describe the Social Media tools that are acceptable for use at work, what is appropriate or inappropriate to discuss through the practices’ site, and even what to do in the case of discovery of bad publicity about the practice from Social Media sites. Each practice, as part of their Social Media strategy needs to define what your company culture is and what kind of participation can be expected from your staff.

Finally, a way to measure the results of your Social Media efforts need to be put in place so that changes to the overall marketing plan can be adjusted. There are range of paid analytics tools, like Omniture, and free analytics tools, like Google Analytics, Quantcast or YouTube Analytics, can be implemented by your inhouse marketing team to review the fruits of your efforts. Whether you are looking to increase patient traffic to your office, enhance your reputation in the community, or just want to supplement your other marketing efforts, a benchmark needs to be set.

A majority of the time, healthcare practices believe they are safe and sound when the economy declines. The belief is that there will always be people who become ill and will need healthcare.   Just as other consumers in this decline, healthcare patients are feeling the sting.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 47 million Americans under the age of 65 were without insurance in 2008. Those Americans that do have health insurance are facing coverage cutbacks, rising co-pay fees and other out of pocket expenses.

As a result, healthcare practices are seeing a considerable decline in revenue. According to the MGMA’s Cost Survey (a 2009 report based on 2008 Data for Single-Specialty Practices), “between 2006 and 2008, the number of procedures dropped 9.9% and the number of patients dropped 11.3%.”

In today’s economy, healthcare practices are looking for ways to cut costs. During a recession, marketing is usually the pink elephant in the room drawing immediate attention for budget cuts. Practices in the past have learned that cutting marketing budgets in a recession could be a big mistake. By eliminating marketing efforts, practices may lose current patients, new patients, and even referrals. Patients that rely on appointment reminders in the mail or by phone may question the practices standing if these simple marketing tasks cease. Potential new patients may not even know your practice exists if you stop advertising or abandon your website.  Referring colleagues may also stop sending referrals if they no longer receive marketing materials or feel they have lost communication with you.

Businesses with a solid grasp on marketing see slower economic times as a huge potential to expand within their market.  Your competitors may be reducing staff, services, and marketing efforts making this the best time for your practice to fill the void where your competition is not present.

Below is a list of marketing practices important to your organization:

• One of the most important processes in marketing your healthcare practice is maintaining relationships with your current patients.  Your current patients are a vital and priceless marketing tool.  Your patients play an important role in recommending family and friends which will further help your bottom line.
• Developing and maintaining relationships with colleagues is very important.  A good recommendation from another healthcare provider will only help your practice.
• If you do not already have a patient reminder system in place, you should implement one. Patient reminders can be as simple as a phone call, email or even a text message.  Software can also be implemented to streamline this process alleviating your staff from doing so manually.
• Advertising your practice should be at the center spoke of your marketing efforts.  Not all advertising efforts are suited for all budgets.  There are however, numerous options depending on funds allocated to marketing.
• If your practice does not have a website, you should make it a top priority. The internet has become a standard method of finding information. If your practice cannot be found on the internet, you are losing money.  A website will give your practice constant visibility as well as credibility amongst current and new patients as well as colleagues.
• Publish a newsletter or blog. Today on the internet it couldn’t be easier to setup your own newsletter or blog. There are numerous websites online that provide access to these utilities. Writing your own publication will give you credibility and assists with networking.  A newsletter also addresses a key factor in marketing and that is consistency.  If done right, a newsletter or blog consistently updated will provide patients and colleagues constant broadcasts regarding you and your practice.
• Email marketing is becoming very popular as more people are using email as a daily form of communication.  Email marketing can be used for many purposes in your practice.  It can be used to market new service offerings, specials, update practice news and announce events. Many healthcare practices are already collecting patient email addresses in their practice management software. These addresses can be exported from your practice management software and utilized in online email marketing applications to send mass marketing emails.

The success of this site where over 300,000,000 active users gather, offers a great opportunity for medical practices to solicit and connect with these clients or in this case – patients.  Traditional marketing methods required purchasing mailing lists from marketing firms, and running a campaign that’s hit or miss.  With the increasing costs of stamps and patients turning to the internet to locate medical offices, it makes perfect sense to consider Facebook as part of your next marketing plan.

In evaluating all the business benefits of Facebook, here are just a few that can assist the Practice Administrator capture new revenue by forming a strategic and creative marketing plan.

Patient Engagement:
Use Facebook to communicate with your patients regarding new procedures and services you are offering in your practice.  Whether it is an Eye Center adding new state-of-the-art iLASIK equipment, or an OBGYN practice offering procedures using the da Vinci® Robot Surgical System; keeping your patients informed is critical in retaining them as well as allowing them to share with others who may become your next patient.

Exposure and Branding:
With the ability to select your audience based on demographics such as age range, sex, and   location, a practice can effectively target potential new patients and generate powerful brand awareness.

Feedback collection:
Many Facebook users are sent quizzes and questionnaires online daily. These data capture methods are perfect for practices trying to collect patient feedback on how well they are doing, and what they can do to improve.  This brings tremendous time and money saving opportunities to the organization.  It is completely free and will generate more response than traditional mailed feedback.

Patient Lead Generation:
As a practice searches for new ways to attract new patients, Facebook enables a practice to identify potential patients using specific criteria from their profile, and qualify them as a prospect.

Increase traffic to your site:
Facebook can increase your ranking on many search engines.  With its dynamic content and popularity, you are able to draw attention to your practice name and drive them directly to your web site where you can report statistics and capture their information.

Reduce your web site maintenance cost:
In the past, healthcare practices required a full content management system to enable them to publish dynamic content and manage events.  From online videos, articles and events, Facebook enables a practice to eliminate the maintenance and development costs. Without any expertise in web site design, an administrator can successfully publish medical content for its audience.

All in all, the reality is that medical practices are also a business.  Attracting and competing for patients will always remain part of the practices objectives.  While in some cases you might hire a marketing firm to assist with advertisement and marketing, there are many techniques you can  perform on your own to reduce spending.  These are technologies that will allow patients to come to us.  One day, these same technologies will enable us to bring healthcare to them, from assisting in chronic disease management groups, to integrating with  Facebook apps, all the way to communicating securely with patients through these portals.  So, look for the Facebook guru at your practice, and make good use of this free tool.