With the movement towards more and more hospitals and health systems employing physicians, organizational leaders are getting geared up to embrace these new members of the family. Your physician relations team can be the engine that drives practice development support for this important audience.
A key to success will be the focus on getting these physicians busy and productive in their practice. That is their priority — and if you show support to make this happen, the relationship will grow from there.
Consider these steps in engaging your employed physician and setting the stage for a productive physician-hospital relationship. Remember, the idea is to make it a win-win for both the employed physician and your organization.
Physician engagement has never been more important. Seize this golden opportunity to bind relationships between your organization and your physician network. Help them to be successful, and chance are you will be too.
A key to success will be the focus on getting these physicians busy and productive in their practice. That is their priority — and if you show support to make this happen, the relationship will grow from there.
Consider these steps in engaging your employed physician and setting the stage for a productive physician-hospital relationship. Remember, the idea is to make it a win-win for both the employed physician and your organization.
- Define your approach as an "offer" to newly employed physicians. Approach this effort with objectives and purpose. Don't want until they come to you with concerns about their practice volume. Give it some structure, develop a strategy and action plan with accountabilities; create a practice marketing plan template that you use for all of the employed clinics and a menu of tools that you can offer these clinics to help grow their business.
- Coordinate efforts with the marketing department. There's a need for both marketing and physician relations. Marketing can provide the overall marketing strategy and branding expertise and can manage the tools and messages for the consumer audience. Physician relations directs the tools and messages for the physician audience and manages the relationship with the clinic.
- Assign a budget. Having a budget — specific to practice development for employed physicians — gives the initiative more 'weight' and allows for a proactive strategy instead of reactive actions randomly throughout the year.
- Involve practice leaders. Before any campaign is launched meet with the clinic's leaders to formalize the effort. This is a good time to outline how the strategy fits into your organization's business development efforts and be sure to script messages about mutually beneficial goals and the importance of coordinated efforts.
- Analyze the practice first. Before a plan is developed, take time to assess the practice's brand position, market readiness and customer experience. Not only does this preliminary work reveal important factors that impact their business but it also engages the clinic staff in the early stages for buy-in later.
- Include in-office activities in the plan. In addition to the marketing strategies, think about other important factors to the success of a practice, starting with business management assistance, in‐office communications and staff training and scripting needs.
- Engage with new physicians. This should ideally be done before they arrive to start work — to talk about their practice objectives; then develop marketing strategies and tactics to drive patients to their practice as quickly as possible.
- Push for referral development protocols. Drive the development of standardized referral communications protocols and templates for your employed clinics. It could be that one of the most valuable services you can provide to your employed physicians is some structure to help them keep their referral sources in the loop on the patients they refer.
- Track and measure. Your efforts should be outcome focused. Develop a system that tracks and measures progress of each practice's marketing plan; keep and build on what worked and evaluate and modify what didn't. Then connect the dots to referral business for your hospital.
- Don't forget about the delivery. Resist the temptation to launch marketing tactics before you are sure the practice can deliver on the experience. Consider secret shopping key factors of the customer experience such as appointment scheduling process, responsiveness of the staff, physician interactions, etc. to reveal vulnerabilities that may need attention before you bring new patients to the door.
Physician engagement has never been more important. Seize this golden opportunity to bind relationships between your organization and your physician network. Help them to be successful, and chance are you will be too.