You have probably seen these guys perform before (think Breathe) but take a two minute break and enjoy.  Waking Up Is Hard to Do by The Laryngospasms

In the majority of cases, patients choose your service or your practice because someone they know suggested it – the old “word-of-mouth” rule.  Whether that person is their primary care physician or their Aunt Millie, that referral gets the patient in the door.  That’s where the 80/20 rule comes into play.  That referral is only 20% of starting the relationship.  What happens next to that patient creates the bulk of their sentiment toward your service.  It sets the platform on whether they will come back and what they will say to their family and friends.

Fortunately or not fortunately, in health care, we have a pretty low bar when it comes to the patient experience.  While you might want to make a site visit to your competition and see what they are actually up to when it comes to the 80% factors, you can run down the following list and ask yourself the likelihood of any medical organization doing the following things well:

• Will your patient have an easy time parking?
• Will it be easy for your patient to make their way to your office?
• Will your patient be greeted warmly and with rapt attention?
• Will visit expectations be established and communicated to the patient so there will be few surprises for the patient?
• Will anyone coming in contact with the patient be polite and attentive and limit conversation to others if not relevant to the patient?
• Will the patient’s privacy be respected?
• Will the patient’s comfort be of the utmost concern for all who come in contact with the patient?
• Will the process and procedure be explained in advance of action and with the patient’s comprehension?
• Will the service being provided be for the patient’s convenience?
• Will the providers who come in contact with your patient act as if the patient were a close family friend?
• Will instructions and expectations for after the visit be explained, perhaps even written,for the patient?
• Will follow-up calls be made to check-in on the patient after they have gone home?
• Will family members or those accompanying the patient be kept apprised of the patient’s progress and made to feel comfortable?

You can make your own check-lists and be more specific, but the point is make a difference in the life of your patient by working on those 80% factors that will help the patient prefer your service to your competition’s service. This good and hard work will help the patient choose your organization for other services and establish the foundation for a long-term relationship.

By creating customer profiles or segmenting your overall market, you can reach out to customers on a more targeted, more needs-based approach. Doing this saves you the expense of using unnecessary resources and reduces the annoyance a customer might feel for having non-relevant outreach directed to them.

We have all heard the wisdom that 80% of your profits are likely generated by 20% of your customers. This nugget has to be followed up with these questions – which customers drive my profits? Are there common factors? Who are my competitors targeting? How can I best deliver my services to meet specific customer’s needs?

Retailers, banks and large organizations use sophisticated systems and programs to help identify and segment their best customers so they can provide better service and deepen profit and prospective profits. Healthcare organizations, likewise, can enhance their marketing and their service delivery by creating specific customer targets based on demographics, behaviors, and most especially — needs.

Every organization is different with varied resources, so the segmentation process will vary based on the organization, but the first analytical pass should be generated by identifying patients that are the most profitable. If you do this based on service line, you may miss important factors, so the best manner is to cull data from all of your data repositories (patient data, financial data, marketing data, etc.) across all services.

Your profit segmentation analysis may reveal which group stands out. This is good information to have but don’t stop there. Think about your patients’ needs. The 40 – 55 year old woman may have a higher interest in peri-menopause issues, nutrition and adolescent medicine if she is married and with children. If she is not married, her interests will skew away from adolescent issues and have more focus on female-only topics. You might segment your customers based on gender, age, marital status and payer.

The more you know about your customer’s needs the more direct your approach and the more value added to developing the relationship. If a local hospital sends a new mother a wonderful flyer on wound-care or elder services, they will be missing their target. Reaching out to a 56 year-old-male about prostate concerns might find a more receptive audience. The more you can do for your patient, prospective patient, the stronger the relationship will be and the more relevant your organization becomes.

The smaller the segment, the better targeting of their needs, leading to increased customer value. The segmentation process needs to be balanced with the organization’s resources. A moderate-sized medical practice may have four or five segments early on while a hospital might have several more. As time moves on, the segmentation profiling will alter because the process is fluid and “refinable” and people’s needs change. Start slowly and refine as you go along and as more data allows more refinement.

Action steps – in a nutshell:

1. Integrate your data sources.
2. Identify your most profitable patients.
3. Identify habits, behaviors, demographics or needs that you want to focus on.
4. Create profiles of these market segments.
5. Determine how you can best meet the needs of a segment.
6. Reach out and deliver your service based on the segment needs.
7. Assess and refine your segments.
8. Assess and refine your marketing outreach and service delivery based on feedback and data.

Top 10 Health Industry Issues for 2010, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute

I like this quote. It sums up the vast pressure points in the healthcare industry in one sentence. What I don’t like is the ominous sentiment. Of course, it is not just PricewaterhouseCoopers that takes that warning tone. You can open just about any trade journal and find looming doom and gloom advisories. All of this is fine as long as the warning creates positive action versus paralytic analysis and no-action. Dissecting the quote further makes me consider what is controllable?

You can be a voice in the continuing healthcare reform issues, but your solitary efforts are not likely to foment change in the exact manner you prefer. But what about consumer demands? There is a rushing tide of changing American consumers especially when it concerns healthcare demands. Consumers are more informed, more connected, and more emboldened. Control elements center on the consumer and not on the provider. While it is essential to be tuned in to the healthcare consumer and to provide services they seek, there is little that can be done to alter the changing nature of our consumers.

The only part of the quote that we can effectively engage is the first part about relationships: squeezing the most value out of new and existing relationships. The word “squeezing” implies that we have already pressed our relationships and there is not much left to attain. This is a point of consideration – where do relationships stand with our patients, our referral sources – our consumers?

Have we squeezed the value? Is there more that can be done? As you face the new year and the new decade, why not create a new focus, call it what you will, but put your energies into those consumer relationships: maybe not to squeeze them of value but to enhance them with an outward and invigorated attention. See your practice, your habits, and your organization through the eyes of your consumers. To get you started, here are five push points that merit careful consideration and most likely some adjustments as you work to create more value in those important relationships:

• Do you treat all of your consumers the same?
• How does your service treat your consumer differently that your competition’s?
• How high is your satisfaction bar for the patient experience?
• How well do you employ technology to assist you in developing your consumer relationships?
• Literally sample your workflow through the eyes of your consumer (patient or referring physician), what adjustments can be made to signal your consumer that you are working to better the relationship?

“It takes courage to hold visions that are not in the social mainstream…But it is exactly that courage to take a stand for one’s vision that distinguishes people…”  Peter Senge

Okay…this is harder that most people think and it’s not about the time. Blogging is thinking. Have you ever heard someone say, “Bear with me, I am thinking out loud?” In a similar fashion, blogging is thinking in prose. It is humbling and exciting at the same time. After launching our blog in the spring, we had a quick flurry of posts. And then, a blogging vacation happened accidentally. But this was a good accident.

Blogging is not article writing. It is a bit about problem solving and it is a lot about sharing of oneself. I took some time to look around at other blog postings to see what and how people are writing. What I discovered was that the blogs that made impressions, were informative sometimes, motivating sometimes and risk-taking oft times. Just like thinking can stretch us – that’s what blogging can do. We can focus on the meta-cognitive process and see if there is a problem that can be solved or a direction to be taken.

While this blog will almost always be about business development, we want it to also be about creating good and working for change within us and in our world. We hope that in time, there can be a dialogue between writers and readers. We hope we can create a productive environment where we problem solve, think out-loud, share concerns, offer critical analysis and push at complacency.

Onward!