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Email marketing in private practice

I love email.  It’s efficient, versatile, and just about everyone uses it.  If done right, email can convey emotion, professionalism, and can strengthen (or quickly harm) one’s reputation.  I use email for a variety of purposes including personal communications, education and learning, professional communications, and even marketing.

Marketing with email is a slippery slope, and can as easily build a business as it can tear it down.  If not done correctly, email marketing can take the form of “spam,” or unsolicited mass distribution of a sales pitch or marketing message.

The good news is that email marketing done correctly can build one’s reputation and market appeal by offering genuine, unique information that is relevant to recipients, and in a manner that isn’t obnoxious or invasive.  This application is just the right fit for clinical practices, as by and large, we offer services to a fairly homogeneous group of customers (patients), all of which can benefit from scheduled updates, education, and information regarding their health.

Email as a marketing tool for private practices is efficient, cost-effective, and convenient for both the creator and the recipient of the marketing message.  Below are a few ideas for how to craft an email marketing campaign for any type of private practice, and here is a link to a great article about email marketing at the Small Business Branding blog.

1. Add “Email Address” to your patient intake form, and a check box to “opt-in” to your email newsletter.  This is a quick way to build your distribution list and is a good point of conversation to patients as they become familiar will all of the services offered by your practice.  The likelihood of patients opting-in is much higher in a personal setting such as a healthcare practice than it is on a website.
2. Use your email campaign to promote upcoming events at your practice.
3. Notify your distribution list of community events and sponsorships that your practice is involved with.  This can help to increase attendance at these events, but most importantly it communicates the message to your audience that you are active in the community, and on the local radar.
4. Provide links within your newsletter to resources outside of those offered only by your practice.  This builds credibility and adds value to the newsletter as it can be a means of educating your audience about information that can help them.
5. Include a link that allows recipients to “ask a question” or otherwise interact with practitioners in a way that is informative and approachable.
6. Include original content published by clinic practitioners so that your audience can begin to understand that your expertise is both broad and multi-dimensional.

There are hundreds of other ideas for your email campaign, and I know of no other industry where building a “community” around your business is as conducive as it is in healthcare.  Your patients most likely love what you have to offer, and by communicating with them on a regular basis through a simple and cost-effective email campaign, you are providing yourself with an easy way to strengthen your relationship with them, while providing them with value that your competitors may not.

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Tannus Quatre PT, MBA is a private practice consultant and principal with Vantage Clinical Solutions, Inc., a national healthcare consulting and management firm located in Bend, OR and Denver, CO.  Tannus specializes in the areas of healthcare marketing, strategy, and finance, and can be reached through the Vantage Clinical Solutions website by clicking here.

Build it and they won’t necessarily come

If the “it” is e-medicine, and the “they” refers to patients, the “build it and they will come” strategy doesn’t necessarily apply - not without a bit of work, that is.

Readers of this blog will know that we support efforts to challenge normative business models in the practice of healthcare, including those that incorporate the use of the Internet to communicate and interact with patients (here are some posts about Jay Parkinson and the use of e-communication in medicine).  We don’t know exactly what the practice of healthcare is going to look like in 20 years, but the Internet will definitely play an increasingly important role in the future – and we will be there to greet it.

Many of the healthcare providers that are using the Internet to provide care to patients today will someday be acknowledged as pioneers that helped to shape the evolution of the industry, regardless of whether or not their efforts were immediately successful in today’s healthcare economy.  One of these pioneers, Dr. Ben Brewer, has developed a savvy and secure electronic interface for patients of his Illinois medical practice - one that helps define “cutting edge” e-medicine in today’s largely status quo healthcare economy. 

The problem is – patients aren’t interested.  It’s a common problem in business, where great products in the absence of interested markets do vastly worse than decent products in ripe markets.  Dr. Brewer likely has a great service, but if patients aren’t interested in (more likely, not ready for) it, it’s not going to sell, and the doors will have to close if changes aren’t made.

The key to selling “cutting edge” services, especially in healthcare, is to make sure a market exists that will demand the service, and if no market exists, create the market yourself through a combination of customer education and market hype.  This takes a lot of work to do, and though it may be too late to pay off for Dr. Brewer, there will likely be no shortage of opportunity to introduce cutting edge services into the healthcare market in the coming years.

The Wall Street Jounal’s Health Blog recently commented on the fate of Dr. Brewer’s practice:

Brewer counts himself among the minority of doctors willing to take the online plunge. “Most doctors I know seem unwilling or unable to make even email part of the way they practice medicine,” he writes. Legal worries and data overload are the deterrents.

At Brewer’s office the technical end works as promised, but patients don’t really seem interested. They don’t want to pay the (usually unreimbursed) $30 for the online visit with Brewer, and they’d rather just send a regular email, even though it’s vulnerable to snooping.

Email in medical care: Starting to catch on?

On April 23rd I wrote about the benefits of using email in physician-patient communication, and how trends in this area are inevitably going to change the standards of communication in years to come.  I’ve also written about Dr. Jay Parkinson and the company, Myca, who are pushing the use of technology to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the physician-patient relationship through the use of instant messaging, video-conferencing and email.

Email and other efficient modes of communication are undoubtedly in our near future as healthcare providers.  Now if we could just get the payers to notice…

Well, it looks like they are starting to notice.  As part of the medical home model, Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan is entering a 2 year pilot program which will, among other things, pay physicians for using communications such as email to improve the efficiency of interaction with patients.  This article from Times Union explains.

Currently, doctors are paid only for face-to-face visits. There’s little incentive for busy doctors to explore other types of interactions, said Bruce Nash, chief medical officer and senior vice president of medical affairs at CDPHP.

“The rest of the world’s used e-mail for a decade,” he said. “It’s been limited to a physician, because it hasn’t been paid for.”

Email: The new frontier in physician-patient communication?

For many of us, email has become a primary means of building relationships, conducting business, and keeping in touch.  It is very effective in doing so, and while it isn’t a full replacement for phone and face-to-face interaction, it does provide a very efficient means by which to communicate.

In business, email has another important benefit; it provides a document trail that can be used to record activity and conversation, creating a transcript of all that is said (and not said) via electronic format.  Along with other benefits, the efficiency of use and ability to document in real time provides some obvious appeal to those who communicate with clients on a regular basis.

Enter physicians, dentists, physical therapists, and other healthcare providers that interact with clients (i.e., patients) on a daily basis.  While drawbacks exist in the use of email as a means of communicating with patients, we are finding that patients like it and doctors are on the verge of getting reimbursed for it; both important drivers for the regular use of email in the near term.  There will be many pitfalls to avoid for the physician and patient alike, but we will soon be seeing more and more use of email between provider and patients in the years to come.

This article in Modern Medicine explains in detail the key benefits associated with the use of email between physicians and patients, and speaks to the trends that are currently underway in this important area of medical practice.

If you haven’t yet begun using e-mail to communicate with patients, there are plenty of reasons to start. First is the increasingly loud patient clamor for e-mail, as indicated in one survey after another. The latest is a Harris Interactive/Wall Street Journal poll in which three out of four respondents said they should be able to schedule medical appointments via e-mail or the Internet, and e-mail their doctors as part of their overall medical care—at no extra charge.

Ironically, that proviso is precisely what has discouraged many time-pressed doctors from giving their patients e-mail access. But as patient demand rises, the “no extra charge” barrier is slowly but surely coming down.

Late last year, Aetna and Cigna HealthCare announced that they would dramatically expand programs that reimburse physicians for “virtual visits.” Until recently, only a handful of health plans paid doctors for this service, and the news has sparked speculation that other insurers will soon follow. Not surprisingly, the number of physicians who communicate with patients electronically is also on the rise—going from 19 percent in 2003 to 31 percent in 2007, according to a Manhattan Research survey of more than 1,300 doctors. Among physicians who did not yet use a secure online messaging service, one in four said they intended to start in the next 12 months.

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