Discover the Best Medical Bill Format in Word for Marketing

Medical bill format in word for Marketing

um well look good afternoon everybody and thanks for the for the invitation to come and speak to you about medical marketing what we wanted to do this morning I guess was just really briefly introduce who we are we have been specializing in medical marketing for over 10 years I guess that's probably the the main thing that you will want to know about in terms of taking any advice from us and it is an area that we got into strategically my background but most of my family have a medical professionals of one type or another and so I really wanted to start an agency that would help medical practices and doctors and medical businesses across the board we're a full-service agency which means that we offer a broad range of services depending what on what practices need so enough about us let's spend the majority of our time actually on on medical marketing and what we're doing as Karen has said is a bit of a an introduction I guess into medical marketing and so what better place to start than actually asking the question what is medical marketing and I find that new doctors that I speak to or new clients that I speak to often have varying I guess expectations or understanding about marketing I think back to when my father was a practicing medical specialist it was virtually illegal in Australia for him to do any kind of advertising or promotion or communications of any type and things have obviously changed quite a bit both in New Zealand and Australia and around the world to be honest in the last 10 to 20 years or so but when we think about medical marketing there's one thing that I definitely want you to understand and that is that marketing and sales are two very different things they come at the whole question from two very different perspectives where sales is all about taking what I have in trying to convince someone to buy marketing actually looks at things from the other perspective and starts with the question well what are my end-users well what are my customers needs and wants and how can we best deliver that service and here's a definition that I love it's from the Australian Marketing Association and it actually says a marketing is the activity and processes for creating communicating and delivering value and managing relationships in ways that benefit customers patients Partners hospitals imaging centers perhaps specialists and GP relationships and society and at large and I guess I just wanted to take a moment to set the context when we talk about medical marketing obviously it needs to be ethical obviously it needs to have the end-user the patient in mind and delivering the best health outcomes and best value lifestyle value to them that we can but it also needs to be within all the guidelines around medical marketing for each country for each college as well so when it comes to medical marketing from our experience and we've done obviously worked with a lot of businesses and done a lot of research around what works and what doesn't work and we found four key pillars that we've found make a really big difference to medical practices to how effectively they can operate how well they can do as a business but also how well they can service their patients and their referral base if there are specialists practice and a lot of it really comes down to three key things one is awareness making sure that you're known getting your name out there and the second one is a really big one and that's education making sure that you give information freely to share and to leverage your expertise and the third one is just aligning customer expectations with the experience that you can provide and making sure that every customer every patient every referral source gets the type of experience from your practice that you would want them to get and with many medical practices there are there are many moving parts so that can sometimes you know take intentional effort to a make sure that everyone knows what they're doing and how they should be doing it but then also be looking at making sure you have measurements and feedback loops so that you can maintain user experience moving forward so what I thought we'd do this morning or this afternoon is just have a look at these four areas briefly to give you an overview of some of the key areas that you should be within each of these that you should be I guess thinking about and focusing on so let's start with strategy strategy for a medical practice is actually really important there was a Harvard Business study not too long ago that found that generally speaking in business people with goals are about two times more successful than people without them and those with written goals are at least ten times more successful than those who only had them in their heads so developing a marketing plan both forces you to make goals and also to document them and that's a that's an instant step in the right direction because it means that you actually have something to measure against and hold yourself and your team accountable towards now if you're anything like me if you go to the grocery store you you're doing some shopping for the weekly shop you've probably found that if you don't make a list of what you want you'll probably walk out of the store buying a whole lot of things you didn't really need and possibly even forgetting some of the things that you did go there for or that you need most and that's another area where making sure that you have a clear marketing plan and strategy is a little bit like that shopping list it tells you what you need so that you don't waste your money on the wrong things and that's obviously a very important part of making sure you get the highest return on investment from your marketing investment as well so what are some of the reasons to to develop a marketing plan well you maximize your return in return on investment it forces you to to set your goals and your key performance indicators and it can really increase the value that you get out of your practice it also means that your customer service becomes intentional that you understand exactly who you're your customer base your patient base perhaps you know other cus other types of customers you might have as well like your refers and so on are receiving the sort of service that that they should be getting from your practice your processes and sis you know you're the software that you use and and how that can help to impact I guess the customer journey and experience is really important to me so how to value and from that perspective as well and finally in the context of positioning your practice in the marketplace who you are what makes you different why people should come to you how you communicate to people what you communicate to people and any of the opportunities around it as well is something that should always be set within your marketing plan for the next 12 months in the context of your longer term goals so there are a number of reasons why marketing plans are really valuable so what makes a great plan well I've tried to break this down for you in in three areas and and kind of relate it back to the clinical process I guess first of all you've got your testing phase or your research phase and there are a number of different areas that it's important to keep measurement and tabs on within a medical practice so you need to go through those and do a bit of an audit to see exactly where you're at and how things are going once you've done your testing then you can go to the diagnosis stage which is where you develop your strategy set your goals your positioning make sure you know your niche targets and your strengths weaknesses opportunities threats make sure you've got your key performance indicators all in place and once you have that that's when you can go to the third step which I find a lot of practice managers or a lot of practices actually like to sort of speed over the excuse me these two steps to really jump to the treatment phase but you think clinically that that wouldn't be the right approach to just give someone a treatment plan before you've done relevant testing and diagnose the same thing with with your business as well and when you get to that activity or treatment phase that's really when you stand start to set the the actual tactics and activities that you're going to be running through that's when you start looking at your budgets and how you're going to measure things sort of at a regular intervals so that's just a little bit for you around marketing strategy and how it can be important and what makes a great plan a medical practice so let's have a look at the second pillar and actually just before we do I'd like to challenge you this time of year is always a really good time for practice managers for any owners of practices to really take some time out and think about their planning for the new calendar year so I'd certainly challenge you to do that so let's have a look at the second pillar and let's consider branding for just a moment and I guess a lot of people don't really understand what branding is all about first of all I can tell you that branding a brand is not a logo a brand is no longer what we tell consumers it is it's actually what consumers tell each other a brand is and that's a really important point for for people to understand and internalize and simply put brands are perceptions and their perceptions that create reality around your practice so it's actually quite important to think about all the different touch points that your practice has with its customers with its patients whether this refers with other partners imaging centers hospitals etc to really think about how your what perceptions you're creating what realities you're creating about your brand I love this quote from Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon he says your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room a brand is actually the sum total of every touchpoint the results in herre refers and patients in the industry and even the local community around you perceive your particular practice and branding is I guess the act of shaping how your practice is perceived although it's really your customers who might decide what your brand is there are certain actions that you can take to put yourself in the driver's seat and all the steps that you take to build awareness and reputation around your practice and it's products/services that's really I guess what we're talking about when we talk about branding so why should a medical practice develop a brand well there's a whole bunch of reasons let me just quickly brush over a few of them for you just to make sure you understand some of the key points first of all we know that creating a brand builds value in loyalty over time we see that in all sorts of consumer brands we've seen that in medical brands over time in corporate medical brands and and other situations there as well so it absolutely builds value and loyalty another thing that it does it it it actually better positions you to expand your practice you know gone are the days when medical practices were just the name of you know the the key specialist that was there you know I remember back to my father dr. ian brodie obstetrician/gynecologist that that's who he was whereas these days if you have other specialists if you have other GPS joining a group practice if you have allied health being built in and and if you're really starting to expand your practice it's actually better to do that under a brand that you can build where the customer loyalty the patient loyalty is actually with the brand it also makes your practice more cloneable if you want to set up in new areas if you want to go into new geographic areas or anything like that it makes it a lot easier to to manage and implement that process and also it makes the practice more more saleable by adding that value to the practice by keeping the equity within the brand rather than individual doctors it actually means that when you start thinking about an exit strategy if you're an owner of the medical practice it's going to benefit you as well so the is what does your brand say about you I love this photo that I found of a inch front entrance to a medical practice where you can see the glass door on the left hand side at the front of the screen there and someone's obviously felt that it's more convenient for them to leave that gate open so that they can take the rubbish out but obviously that creates quite a negative first impression of this particular medical practice and what is your brand what does your practice say about you there's a few key things to think about in terms of what makes a successful brand and we don't have time to go into detail to each of these points but you know we we do we're more than happy to help people if you're interested in in developing your brand further but you need to make sure that you know who you are you need to make sure that you have clear vision and purpose for your practice and it's important because your whole team needs to be aligned on that as well they need to be aligned on you know what your values are so that they can know how to treat people how to deal with making decisions around particular instances that might come up in the day-to-day business of your practice you need to make sure that you have a compelling and memorable brand story that there's a reason for people to share the story about your about your practice and and the messaging that you create about your practice is something that actually resonates with your target audience and even though we like to think of ourselves as being quite logical in how we make our decisions we know from consumer research and psychology that we make decisions based on emotion or a lot of the time and that's where having strong visuals and and having stories and illustrations that can actually engage with people on an emotive and deeper level can be an effective part of your branding and communication strategy so just thought I'll show you a quick example of a practice a small to medium-size specialist practice that we've been working with for a little while we've got tons of these sorts of examples but I'm starting wanted to show you that there's a lot more to how you communicate your brand or your practice then you may have originally thought you know there's there's a it all comes back to thinking about what your patients need what their pain points are what they're looking for what sort of education and information that they looking for and how can you help to fulfill those gaps so for these guys you know there's a number of different things that they've been developing over time from practice brochures to different infographics and and online resources also including you know questionnaires and surveys with different information that can be become available for for patients depending on their health needs obviously a website's important and we'll talk about that under digital as well as your social presence and even ebooks and and resources that that various people can take away with them depending on on what they're looking for there's a lot that you can do in that space so that's the branding side of things and and that is quite important but when it comes to how you communicate your practice how people find your practice and interact with your practice there's really probably nothing more influential these days than your website and your digital marketing so that was the third pillar let's just take a quick moment to have a look at this as well so when we think about websites for medical practices and it's interesting I was having a you know recently doing a bit of an audit of a number of New Zealand GP and specialist websites for some research that we were doing you may not be aware of this but recent stats show us that 8 out of 10 new patients will actually visit your website before they visit you so that means for new patients a lot of the time depending on whether you're a GP or a specialist practice I guess this is a little bit different but generally speaking the first impressions are often performed to some degree by your website and that's where this becomes quite important for you and there are a few key website considerations that you need to keep in mind when you think about your website the first one the content management system is something that can actually make a really big difference to how effective your website can be for you and I'll show you a couple of examples of that just in the next couple of slides but making sure that you have a responsive design that that the actual design changes for different types of screens and for mobile devices is something that Google now basically demands but also from a user experience point of view it's something that you want to make sure you're doing quite well also and thats related to point three which is the user experience making sure that people can find the information that they're after that they can find the online bookings being a portal that they can find the forms and information that they need that they can make payments online all those sorts of things just makes such a difference to the user experience and I'm actually I'll give you some stats around that in a moment as well you know the content the images video that you have on the on the site that's all obviously important and it's actually we found especially with video patients are looking for education if they have health concerns or health needs this is one of the areas that is searched more online than almost anything else so it's actually it creates an opportunity for medical practices to differentiate themselves by actually fulfilling that information need and becoming a an information portal for patients who are searching and then the functionality of the site is obviously important as well needs to low quickly it needs to be easy to use it needs to have all those different functions that patients or referrers are looking for on their website so let me just show you just a couple of these and again fairly top-line but let's just have a look at the content management system or CMS and there are number of different we're talking about the software that your website is built on and each one's a little bit different but probably the biggest thing I want to draw to your attention is that your website needs to be the content on your website in particular it needs to be easily managed by your team by your admin team by your staff it's not something it shouldn't be expensive it shouldn't be something you have to keep going back to someone else to do for you and here a couple of screenshots this is from the Drupal content management system and there are plenty of others like it out there where what you can edit and what you can change and how that works can be a little bit limiting and and it can be not so user-friendly I guess is the point here we build all of our websites on the WordPress content management system um and we actually do it a little bit differently as well with WordPress there are a number of different modules it's one of the largest open source CMS's available and by choosing the right combination of of options for when we're building a website we can actually make it really easy for people to use so you can see here in the example that you know if you want to edit the content that's on a on a page here everything's drag-and-drop so if I want to move the content over to the right-hand side and the image over to the left-hand side all I have to do is just click it and drag it and things will move around if I want to edit text I can edit anything on the page and simply just click the spanner button and then that'll go in there and I can edit all the content and settings and so on so it's really important to make sure that your practice is your website is easy to manage I'm just another thing to be considerate of with your website and I have talked about this already so I won't go on but making sure that you have the information that patients are looking for that you have those smart forms that help to increase efficiencies within the practice and make things more convenient for for clients as well for customers that you have the resources that you have the information downloads and fa cues that you're interacting with your patients and giving them information around seasonal health concerns and and other things is actually really really valuable to patients and something that your website should do well now earlier Chrissy spoke about with med tech the the functionality there around booking online bookings and that's something that we've done a bit of research into as well we've actually found that 42% of patients so that's quite a significant number would like to be able to schedule their own appointments and about this is from general research and 34% wants a book outside of business hours it's not convenient for them to do it during business hours because they're busy so they want to do about third of patients but only about 17% of patients find that it's actually easy to book medical appointments online now we did some of our own research in this space as well not too long ago and it was around medical websites including specialist GPS dental websites allied health websites and we were looking at the online booking functionalities so we basically categorized all the websites into two groups and one had a book online button which took people through to a form like a contact us form where people could fill in their details and the practice would contact them back to actually book the the booking and the other type the other group were the people who who had a true online booking system built into their website so the first group that had the the form essentially only averaged the negligible six percent conversion rate of people actually completing that contact us form in order to try to make a booking in contrast the the web sites that had the online booking system experience 76% patient engagement in booking appointments through the website and what we found was that a lot of those sites that the bookings were happening outside irregular hours in fact one larger practice had 40% of their online bookings occurring outside of regular hours so you know this is certainly significant and it's something that you really need to be considering so when we think about your digital presence your website is important but your actual digital marketing is is just as important really and here what we found is and Google has seen this as well that 85% of people contacts businesses found in local searches and from what I've seen that number can even be higher for for example for GP practices where people are really I mean you know what it's like these days if you want to book travel or you know if you're even looking to buy a house or anything else we do it all online now we do it all through search engines and this is where for your digital marketing there's a lot that you can be doing in that space which is all within medical marketing guidelines all you know ethical as well but can actually increase the convenience for people who are looking for the sorts of solutions and services and treatments that you're providing so let's just have a quick look at a few of these different areas first of all just so that we're all on the same page when we're looking at a general search engine yeah response we've typed something in here in this case obstetrician Sydney generally what you'll find is there's three different types of results that you're going to get first of all at the top here you can see we've got the green ads so these are the paid ads or the Google ads which we're seeing at the top of the page here then we get the maps block which is driven by Google my business which is essentially Google's business directory I guess and and this is something that is quite important as well because Google places a lot of emphasis on making sure that your practice is listed properly and that you have good information there the other thing that you'll notice with the Google my business directory listings is that you also get these reviews in here as well now obviously testimonials are something that medical practices can't do shouldn't do and there's a few reasons around that but generally speaking sites like Google my business form a bit of a gray area and that can be to a double-edged sword as well one of the big questions that we get is how do I deal with negative Google reviews what can I do about that and all I'll show you something specifically on that in just a moment but then under these listings here the GMB listings then you have your organic listings and these are the websites that Google is putting at the top of page one based on the content and the structure of the actual website Google is constantly scanning every website that's out there and when they do they're looking at the information that you have and then they're matching that up with what people are searching for and depending on the quality of your content the extent of your content and a few other factors as well like backlinks and and some of your SEO that you're doing in that space that will determine where you sit in terms of a google search and you I don't think I need to tell you if you're not as high up on page one as possible chances are you might be found and that's where these Google Ads become quite important especially on mobile devices you think about on your mobile phone when someone does a search on a mobile phone they're going to see all these paid ads first and they actually have to scroll down on that small screen quite away before they start to see the organic listings so just I guess to quickly summarize some of the different areas you should be thinking about here first of all you've got your search digital marketing and that's really in relation to exactly what we were just looking at when someone puts in a search term in in their in their you know Google or their search engine what's going to come up and how are you going to come up compared to other people and there are so many little things that many medical practices miss you know it's not just about people searching for doctor in your area or suburb you know it's people are searching for symptoms for conditions for treatments treatment options for all sorts of different things and it's a matter of ranking well for a number of different search queries you've also got display ads and these are the types of ads that you see on social media platforms as well as on websites and they're the graphical ads that you see and there's actually quite a bit that you can do with those depending on the field of medicine in particular where you can really interact with patients and we find that educating or education related ads can actually work really well in that display space you've also got a thing called and if you have ever perhaps gone to an online store to look at a particular type of product you may have found that for the next week or two all the ads that you see tend to be around that type of product that you are shopping for or researching or looking for and that's a form of retargeting now in medicine we don't want to annoy patients by you know by by following them around or stalking them online too much or that sort of thing but there are certain instances where that can actually be a really effective way of just reinforcing messaging for your practice and the last one I just wanted to mention was also your social presence there is a lot that you can do in that space as well that can be really effective for your medical practice now we were looking at Google my business just a moment ago and we you know I told you that the whole negative review issue is one that we see a lot of so we've actually got an online resource that's free if anyone does want to download that feel free to just write down that URL at the top of the screen vividness comes at a you /resource /name review and you're certainly able just to access that it's some quite an in-depth resource that we put together because we've just been getting so many questions on this topic so look we're we're almost at the end here just a couple of things I guess to to raise with you as well that final pillar was really all about reputation which is closely linked to referral whether that be word-of-mouth referral for example with GPS and allied health often you know what one patient says to their friends family neighbors etc about a particular doctor or practice but it's also referral from the perspective of GP referrals to specialists as well so that's what we're talking about with reputation and the biggest part to reputation marketing is really all around the experience that you provide you know it used to be that you could differentiate yourself years ago based on product and then service but what we've found is that because of the I guess the shrinking of the world through social media and through the internet you know one person might start to provide a service that's unique in one way and all of a sudden everyone else is doing it as well because of that shrinking world effects through social media and the Internet and what we're finding now is that really the best way to differentiate your service and your practice is around how you make people feel you know how how are they really doing when they leave your practice where are they at and and depending on you know the health challenges that individual patients may be facing obviously that can be difficult but there's certainly ways of differentiating your practice on how you make people feel and there's a few key things that you need to be doing in order to intentionally and consistently provide a high level experience for your patients and for your referral base so things like making sure that you have feedback loops in place that you have the opportunity for people to provide feedback on on their experience things like blind shopper is something that we do quite a bit with practices where we will have someone actually go through the process of making a booking and visiting the practice so that we can report back to the the leadership or the ownership of the practice to let them know how they're doing in terms of patient experience making sure that anyone who's answering phones is really well trained in how to deal with Indians issues and making sure that everyone feels welcomed as well the waiting environment is something that Chrissy spoke about in terms with kiosks and another thing to keep in mind here as well is what we call proxy perceptions and I don't have a lot of time to go into exactly how they work but it's basically perceptions or realities that are built on a proxy so what I'm talking about are things like if for example all the reading material in your waiting room is outdated then patients are going to start asking themselves questions lie well if this is outdated what else is outdated in the practice if they go to your bathrooms and they're not clean and tidy that's another proxy perception where they'll start asking themselves questions like if the bathrooms not tidy are they sterilizing properly are they cleaning anything everything else properly so it's really important and you know there's another number of other points there that I've listed under experience in terms of pre to post consult experience callbacks team evaluation and PD there's certainly a whole program that needs to be developed around your practice to make sure that you're doing this well and there are a number of things that you can do to actually build loyalty and Trust for GPS and specialists and allied health you know with your patient there are things you can be doing in regards to electronic direct mail or email marketing social platforms webinars resources different things like calculators and so on which can actually provide reliable healthcare information to your practice to your patients and for specialists building loyalty and Trust with GPS you know there are a lot of things that you can be doing in that space as well just to provide valuable information and also just to make sure that you're managing relationships effectively we are pretty much out of time but just very quickly I thought I'd just give you a couple of examples here's an example of some educational emails that have been sent out to patients and to GPS and what we find if if these are done well you can actually get really high open and click-through rates which just goes again to prove how interested people are in high-value educated material webinars just like the one you're on here is something that we actually hosted a lot of webinars for specialists who are building close relationships with their GP base and that's something that can actually work really well also both in fostering relationships as well as in getting new referrers for the practice for the doctor so there are a few common mistakes GM specialist this is really for you I guess just one slide at the end we have a whole session that we do on referral marketing for specialists but look there's just a few things to be keeping in mind you need to make sure that you are differentiating you need to be answering that question why should a GP refer to you as opposed to any of the other options in your field you need to make sure that people feel valued and there's a whole bunch of things that specialists really need to be looking at from that perspective especially for the GP practices that are referring to them you know it's important that you know your prioritize referral list and some software is really good at exporting this sort of data and running these reports and others can be really clunky so it's something that should be done regularly and if it's not easy for your practice manager to to do this then it's probably worthwhile just giving us a dropping us quick line and we can give you some tips on how to do that better there's a bunch of other points there as well not being proactive in terms of building loyalty not asking for referrals and that obviously needs to be done appropriately and that's that's a whole our session in itself and yeah you know using appropriate incentives for referrals and and for example saying thank you can be an incentive and inconsistent experiences and interactions is obviously something that hurts in that space if you're not doing it well so look everyone I hope that you have received some really good value out of that and hope that you know that's got you thinking about a few different areas of your marketing that you can improve for the next calendar year and perhaps be intentional and work on as well