Here's what can happen when internal departments of a hospital or health system start working together: Marketers get better data and gain insight into new opportunities for growth.
At the foundation of the buzz-phrase, 'continuum of care,' is the aim to make healthcare seamless and easy for patients, as they pass from one entity to another, whether it be from a family physician to specialist, or from a hospital to a rehab facility or home.
There is much debate over how to achieve transitional nirvana as there are a lot of moving parts, but, in general, it is at least easy to visualize how healthcare organizations should work together, eventually.
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Likewise, the internal departments of a hospital or health system should also be working together (stop snickering), but work is more often done in silos, an approach that the healthcare industry seems to have perfected.
One health system is bucking that trend, at least with its marketing and physician liaison teams. Chattanooga-based Memorial Health Care System with 150 employed physicians, part of the third largest faith-based health system in the U.S., Catholic Health Initiatives, is breaking new ground.
Lisa McCluskey, vice president of marketing communications for Memorial, which serves southeastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, established a physician sales team in 2008. That's when she started working at Memorial and says she quickly surmised that the sale team and marketing needed to work closely together. Her vision five years ago has resulted in two major accomplishments: meaningful metrics, and a bigger seat at the table with the C-suite.
"Looking back at how far we've come since 2008, now we're seen as such key strategic partners," she says. "One battle that we [marketing execs] fight all the time is 'It's fluff' or, it's the first to get cut out of the budget, now we're seen as being a strategic partner."
McCluskey's journey to establishing a more fine-tuned physician relations and referral strategy team for Memorial started where many marketing departments remain today: Some consumer-based physician marketing with no real way to measure whether the marketing efforts were bringing in new patients.
"It was an evolution," says McCluskey. "Early on, we did not have a dashboard. That's the first place I started, trying to measure what we're doing. And then finding out what was valuable. From there, we developed metrics that they didn't even know they needed."
The metric McCluskey is referencing is new patient wait times, the amount of time it takes for a new patient to make get an appointment to see a physician. It's key to informing McCluskey if the targeted physician visits along with marketing are working to increase patient volume, which is another number they also measure, but it is markedly different from new patient wait times, explains McCluskey.
"Emphasis on measuring new patient wait times came up two years ago, as we more heavily marketed physicians. Then, it was more consumer-focused, but as we ramped up the number of referrals, it rose on our radar that having access was vital."
Patients don't want to wait a long time to see a physician, and McCluskey says if there is an emergency, the physician will work in a patient, but if there is an increase in how long it takes to make an appointment with a physician Memorial is heavily marketing, either through a traditional marketing campaign, or with physician liaison visits, or both, McCluskey knows two things: the demand exists for a particular service line and that the campaign is paying off.
It's a strategy she's used time and again since Memorial began tracking patient wait times. McCluskey gives a recent example of a campaign targeted for a specialist.
"At the start [of the campaign], the average new patient appointment wait time was four days," she says. "We conducted a series of targeted physician visits and combined that with consumer marketing. We then measured her new patient appointment wait time one month after the campaign concluded and it had increased to 4 weeks."
McCluskey says this data is more meaningful than simply reporting an increase in patient volume because it also informs customer service, highlights throughput issues, and reveals when it's time to recruit.
New patient wait times also tell the C-suite where growth opportunities exist. She says when she presented leadership with the information tied to strategic goals, a light bulb "most definitely" went off.
"It became more of a strategy conversation … such as, 'What are the barriers to growth?' " she says.
"It's that door-to-doc time; it prompts so many more conversations than just around, 'Well we're doing a marketing campaign'. That could be seen as soft, but instead you're tying [it to] metrics."
Jacqueline Fellows is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.