Healthcare is changing more rapidly than ever – and payers, providers, and patients should be aware of trends in the industry to position themselves for success.
Our guest this episode is John Lynn, founder and editor of HealthcareScene.com, long-time EHR consultant, and expert on all things healthcare IT. Hear Medical Advantage’s own Director of Marketing, Bill Riley, sit down with Lynn to discuss the growing trend toward practice marketing, online reputation management, the industry’s shift to digital, the lasting impact of COVID-19 on healthcare, and much more.
This is the fourth and final episode in our four-part patient engagement series, and the nineteenth episode in the Medical Advantage Podcast, where each we take time each episode to discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare, and the best practices your organization can take to stay productive and profitable. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
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Full Episode Transcript
Medical Advantage Podcast: Welcome to the Medical Advantage Podcast, where you can hear healthcare professionals, expert consultants, and industry thought leaders discuss the exciting new ideas and technologies that are changing the business of health care. Tune in to each episode as we hear from some of the most innovative minds in medicine about the future of healthcare and how your organization can stay profitable, efficient, and on top of industry best practices.
Bill Riley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Medical Advantage Podcast. I’m Bill Riley, the Director of Marketing here at Medical Advantage. I’m filling in today for our usual host, Celina Dusseau. Thank you for joining us. Today’s episode, I’m very excited to announce our featured guest John Lynn, the editor and founder of Healthcare IT, a longtime EHR consultants specialist in all things healthcare IT related. John, thank you very much for joining us today.
John Lynn: Thanks for having me, Bill. I’m excited to have this discussion.
Bill Riley: Excellent. Yeah so John, you’ve got an extensive background in healthcare in general starting with your Healthcare IT Today podcast, which actually is where we found you, we’re big fans of your podcast.
You’ve got thousands of healthcare related, healthcare IT related articles over time. Yourself, your partner Colin Hung very highly regarded with your ability to take what can sometimes be rather dry material and make it interesting. So congratulations on that. We appreciate that.
But beyond the podcast, you have many other properties. Can you give us a little bit of background on your portfolio?
John Lynn: Yeah, of course. So Healthcare Scene is our overarching company and organization. And within Healthcare Scene we have two communities and we like to talk about them as communities because it’s really about bringing a community of people together to share, to learn.
Obviously we lead the discussion, but in a community, everyone can help everyone. So that’s how we kind of look at it in our two communities. We have our Health IT community, which you described. We have Healthcare IT Today, which has over 14,000 articles that have published. We actually have three podcasts.
One that I do, we have a CIO podcast, we have an interviews podcast. You know, all basically health IT content for the health IT professional, for practices that wanna understand how to apply technology to their organization. And we also do Twitter chats, the HITSM, Twitter chat, HCLDR.
We participate in a lot. And then we also do events. So at Expel Health, we do health IT events for people that want to understand technology and to better know how they can utilize technology to improve their organization. And then we have another community called the HIMIC Community, which is our healthcare and IT marketing community.
So, It’s a community of healthcare marketers that come together and say, how do I market my practice? How do I market my IT solution to practices, et cetera. So it’s basically what are the marketing skills that I need to be able to market more effectively? And healthcare, certainly there’s overlap with other industries, but healthcare’s pretty unique.
There’s certain things I can’t do or things I shouldn’t do, or ways that I could actually cause problems if I do it wrong. So that community, it has a publication at hitmic.com as well. We do conferences, we do Twitter chats, et cetera. So those are our main two communities.
Bill Riley: Excellent. And on the marketing topic, that’s something that I would like to come back to a little bit later in our discussion.
But before we get there, why don’t we start broad. I think you’ve got a unique vantage point on healthcare in general. So I’d love to get your thoughts on just the latest and greatest. I know that you’ve been a speaker at the HIMSS conference or many times over the years, and I know you were just there a month or so. Last month in, in Vegas.
Looks like you were very busy attending the event yourself, doing a lot of video interviews and other things like that. So let me just ask maybe we could start there, you know, your sense of the event maybe starting with the highlights, the topics, the ideas, new technology that stood out to you?
John Lynn: Yeah, so I mean, the event was somewhat muted, I’d say. Obviously, because of the COVID Delta spike, and so, you know, I think they, I forget if it was 18 to 22,000, somewhere in there was the number, but that included virtual attendees, whereas usually it’s 45,000. So, you know, for any other event, 10,000 people is the right place, it’s an awesome event. For HIMSS, it was quite different and felt interesting, but the people that were there were really engaged and you have a chance to just sit down with them and really engage with them and talk with them and understand, you know, sometimes commiserate at what, when we all went through with COVID.
So it was good in that regard. And you know, the fact that they held an event in a safe way, at least as safe as possible. It portends good for the future that we can hold other events, but as far as topics that came out of it, I would say the biggest topic I saw was around automation. It’s how do I automate a lot of the tasks that need to be done?
And we see that being applied across a wide variety of things, whether it’s your revenue cycle, how do I automate the revenue cycle to improve my collections because cashflow has become so important to my organization. Or whether it’s, how do I automate the documentation and the clinical documentation using something like ambient clinical voice or something like that to be able to automate that documentation, which is such a burden on healthcare organizations. Or, you know, whether it’s talking about how do I market my practice and how do I automate that because I’m a doctor, I’m a practice manager, I have enough to deal with, so what can I do to automate that effort?
And do it effectively. Ensure I wanna be involved and I wanna understand what you’re doing with my brand. That matters to me too, but how do I automate that to make sure I’m getting a ton of Google reviews or Yelp reviews, or Angie list reviews, whatever, as part of my marketing effort. So automating that.
There’s another one that I think is really strong, which is around the digital front door, which kind of plays into a bunch of those as well. And that was another interesting topic that COVID forced to the forefront for so many organizations. And now we’re saying, okay, now how should we really do this long term?
Because patients now expect a different digital experience. I can’t just rely on the waiting room to do what I’m doing. I need to provide a digital experience because every single restaurants doing this. I mean, for goodness sakes, the DMV is doing this. If the DMV can do this, I should be able to do this as a practice too. So I think that was another big topic is like, how do I do this?
Bill Riley: Fantastic. What about the flip side? Were there some things you were expecting to hear about and maybe didn’t see?
John Lynn: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t hear one mention of blockchain, which is shocking, right? I thought for sure the blockchain, cryptocurrency people would be all out, but it kind of disappeared this year. I don’t know why that was interesting.
There was less cloud discussion, but I think that had to do with many of the large cloud vendors pulling out because of, you know, corporate COVID restrictions. So I don’t know if I can necessarily say that’s a huge trend, right?
But it certainly was less conversation there. So I think those are a couple things. You know, I certainly I have a bias perspective because it’s who do you run into, right? But you know, the nice thing is I think we see also people talking more about the tangible value.
So maybe that’s the thing that’s missing, you know, a little less hype and a little more, Hey, here’s what we actually did and accomplished. And so that was a good change that we didn’t hear as much of, right? Where it’s like, oh yeah, we’re working on some AI to help you solve something, and you’re like, what ai? And that’s not really AI and wait, you don’t really know if it’s gonna work, you don’t have a practice? Okay, next.
Right. So I think that was a change is that the maturity of the organizations and what they’ve been able to accomplish has been good as well.
Bill Riley: Very good. Very good. So why don’t we from there, let me just pick up on some of the things you just mentioned when you were speaking of automation.
I think all the examples you mentioned could be applied to a traditional ambulatory, internal medicine, primary care kind of kind of practice and wanna talk about that a little bit. Many of the clients that we Medical Advantage serve are these ambulatory practices and specialties, and we see them under just enormous pressure from all different angles, whether it’s COVID related whether it’s new competition, new types of competition. The private equity MSO trend depending on the location. So I’d love to hear your perspective on any of that, all of that.
John Lynn: Yeah. I mean, I think what’s interesting about this is that COVID is probably the least of their concern. I mean, it was challenging for a time period, but I think they figured it out and I think we’re back to a more normal from an ambulatory practice perspective. There’s some marketing to do, there’s some messaging to do, but I think all of that is pretty manageable. What’s harder to manage is all of the people that are coming after ambulatory practices, and in many cases, they’re coming after the low hanging fruit of those ambulatory practices, which is where most of the profit is coming from.
So whether, like let’s look at some of the macro trends. Walmart, even Dollar General announced an effort to put practices in their stores and they’re doing this in a big way and they have money to spend. And guess what they don’t need the margins that regular ambulatory practice needs, because if you’re in the store, that’s a benefit to them and they’re gonna make money off of you being in the store.
They’re gonna make money off of the goodwill that you’re doing so they can do a different business model than you can. Now they’re not gonna be as comprehensive and different. So you know they’re going to eat off that really easy patient that, you know, just has a cold or flu and comes in and you know, you get paid quickly, you diagnose it quickly and they’re out. That’s gonna be a problem for many practices. So that’s one macro trend is kind of the retail side of things.
The other one, like you said, is private equity coming in and buying it up. Now you have to think, what does private equity do when they go into a thing? They buy it up, they squeeze the margins and they go aggressively marketing after it to grow the base. Then they squeeze the margins and they sell, right? I mean, that’s just the nature of private equity. You know, we won’t get into whether that’s good, bad, evil or otherwise, but that’s what they do, right? So they’re gonna come in and they’re gonna aggressively go after the market cuz they wanna own the market.
And practices are gonna have to think about that. How am I competing with these private equity groups that are investing in to grow and to own that market? Right?
And then I’d throw in, you know, kind of a third one, which is the concierge, kind of DPC, direct primary care, they’re coming in where people are saying, let me just pay cash for this and let me disrupt this model completely.
In some ways, that one’s can be synergistic with many, especially the specialty care because they’re largely focused on primary care. But they’re coming in in a big way. And I don’t know, I’m a little torn on that one scaling up across healthcare, I think it could still focus largely on the affluent communities.
I don’t think it’s gonna scale much beyond that. So maybe they’re less of a concern. But here’s a bigger concern, which is the last group I’ll highlight here, and that’s the Amazon Cares of the world, the employer healthcare, which is a mix of telehealth, primary care through secure techs. And so text-based primary care coming in and they’re going through the employers.
And so the employers are gonna pay for it, and that’s going to eat into the margins of practices as well. So you combine all those four forces and you’re like, wow, it’s a tough time to be in a practice. I gotta compete with them. Unless you live in a place where you’re the monopoly and you’re the only one, maybe you’re okay then. But if you’re in, if you’re in a big city where there’s options, it’s gotten really competitive.
Bill Riley: Yeah, we agree. We’ve seen the same. And you know, it’s interesting, it kind of depends on where an individual physician or a group of physician owners are in their own careers. We’ve had some that very much see this as a competitive threat, and they wanna do everything they can to be competitive in their market. We have others that maybe they’re towards the end of their careers.
John Lynn: Sure.
Bill Riley: The COVID scenario was exhausting for everyone and maybe they had thoughts of retiring in three to five years. COVID has really squeezed them, and now they’re thinking about they might just be done. So for them the private equity initiative is not a bad thing. And we get into discussions around, okay, what can I be doing in the next 18 months to increase the value of my practice such that these people are calling me. I don’t know what to say exactly, but you know, in the time I have what could I be doing to increase my value? When ultimately I do sell.
John Lynn: Yep. With every challenge there’s an opportunity, right? I mean and don’t get me wrong, practices have an opportunity as well, cuz all of the other organizations I just described are totally impersonal, corporate, you know, juggernauts if you will, right?
Whereas you as a practice, have something they don’t have, and that’s that personal relationship. But here’s the thing, if it’s about personal relationship, or convenience. Convenience is a challenging competitor. So you, you need to think, okay, how can I leverage my personal relationship and convenience and be able to fight back against them?
Or to your point, what do I need to do to really accelerate my practice so I can take advantage of being acquired by private equity? Those are opportunities that are available to practices today.
Bill Riley: Very good, very good. So I’d love to take your example, a brilliant one. You know, if the DMV can make it easy for a consumer to engage. Historically, why is it so difficult for me to confirm an appointment with my local physician or my practice? So let’s, let’s jump into that. This idea of practices marketing themselves and leveraging the digital technologies, whether it’s website or other tools to get into this space.
So, why don’t we just start, what are you seeing John? Are there trends or other things that you could point to?
John Lynn: Yeah. Well, I mean to step to your first question around why didn’t they do this? Right? And the answer is they didn’t have to. Like, let’s be honest, there was so much demand that there wasn’t a need to, and so it wasn’t necessarily all that competitive.
You opened the practice, you put MD up on your title and you’re on the insurance list and they’d come. Right? And that’s the shift that I think we have to think about is, okay, if you build it, they may not come anymore. Right? You have to do more work to market your practice.
And I look at marketing from a much wider angle. It’s not just am I buying ads or am I doing things like that? No and I’m not even sure that’s the right approach. Right? Instead, it’s more about, what am I doing in my practice to make it special? Because we know that the number one referral source in healthcare is a referral from a friend.
So what am I doing in my practice to make the experience special for patients so that they hop on Facebook and they say, OMG, what is this, I checked in digitally for my practice and I was seen in 15 minutes. I didn’t have to wait in the waiting room at all. Right? Like that is genius marketing.
That is way more effective than, oh, I’m gonna buy a billboard or something. Right? So I think that’s where you have to start in your marketing efforts and saying what experience am I providing to my patients That’s gonna be so memorable that when I send them a thing to say, “Hey, will you review me on Yelp?” They say, yeah, of course. This experience was amazing.
And so I think that’s what people need to start thinking of is it’s not just, okay, where can I spend some dollars on social media? Or how do I upgrade my website so that it’s prettier and markets me better? Or where, can, should I be paying for the yellowpages? Which is, you know, what we did that in the past, right? And it was pretty effective.
Well, these days it’s about the experience you create and then how that experience translates to the various social sharing platforms that exist. And that’s, I think the biggest shift. And then to your point and to the discussion before, it’s much more competitive now and the consumer is much more empowered to know what your experience is like, that they’re going to make a different decision, you know, to go with maybe something that’s more convenient or that’s a better experience than maybe someone who you know is local to them or whatever.
So that decision making process has changed and you have to be proactive in marketing how you approach patient care.
Bill Riley: So, yeah, very good. Completely agree. I also think we can look at this from a patient demographic or age group perspective. And especially if we look at young adults out of college, starting their careers, coming off of their parents’ medical benefit, you know, getting out on their own.
They don’t have that history of knowing that for the local physician the patients come to me, I’ve got a full waiting room and you schedule an appointment. And that’s just the way it is. I think these young adults from other parts of their life, whether it’s reserving a rental car or making a dinner reservation or going on vacation, there’s a certain expectation around easy and to your point the best imaginable customer experience or great service.
So that’s a great perspective.
John Lynn: And demographics do play a role, and you’re a hundred percent right. The long-term trend is even more stark, right? Like if you look long-term, then the next generation, I mean, even my generation, which I’m not all that young, right? Has an expectation that is different when it comes to the experience that I want and what I’m willing to do, and maybe even switch providers because you don’t provide the experience I want.
We saw it in banking. I wouldn’t have gone when I started my banking in college, if they didn’t have online services, I wouldn’t have gone to ’em. And I made that decision because of course, now everyone has it, right? Yeah. Well, we’re gonna see the same evolution in healthcare.
People are gonna say, wait, you don’t have online self scheduling? You mean I have to call and wait on the phone line? I can’t call. I’m at work. I wanna just schedule the appointment. Right? So it is a change in mindset for that generation, but I wouldn’t downplay the senior population either. I mean, COVID forced this to some extent, but they’re much more tech savvy than people want to admit.
They’re able to do a lot of things online that you know it’s kind of a myth that they aren’t able to do the stuff online. And then to add to that is that often it’s not the senior that’s doing, it’s me, right? Helping my mom that needs to get care and I’m gonna go online and review the doctors that my mom’s gonna get, right?
So even if the senior can’t get online, the children of those seniors, the caregivers of those seniors, they’re the ones that are gonna do that work and they’re gonna review, oh, this doctor doesn’t have a good bedside manner. Right? And they want a good patient experience because they have to be the caregiver and they gotta get back to work or to back to their kids, right?
So they’re gonna be really specific about wanting that good experience because they’re helping their mom or their dad get the care that they need and they need it to be efficient so they can get back to their lives. So, you know, let’s not underestimate how important this is across every demographic, not just the next generation.
Bill Riley: Very good. So John, can you give us some examples of, maybe it’s in the automation category that you mentioned earlier, maybe it’s in the best imaginable customer service category of whether it’s a technology or best practices that in your mind, if you imagine a leading practice who’s leveraging marketing to the fullest extent? If you had some examples you could share.
John Lynn: Yeah. So let’s go through this digital front door, right, that we see evolving. I think it highlights a number of examples of why this needs to happen. So here’s the start that we kind of briefly touched on. I need to be able to schedule an appointment online. We need to be able to do this and you know, I understand the fears around that, but guess what? There’s a lot of people who have dealt with this solution, this problem.
And there are solutions out there to be able to allow for online self-scheduling. And yes, it takes into account all the things of what if they’re gonna schedule too long, or what if they schedule too short or what if they double book or what if they do it yet?
Yeah, they figured that out. It’s possible. Right? So that’s the first step, right? I mean, being able to schedule online is a powerful thing. Now, how am I gonna fill out the forms? Should I be sitting in the waiting room, filling out these forms and that I don’t even know the information for?
Come on. Are we kidding? Like, send them electronically, let ’em fill ’em out from the their own home. It turns out that’s better for care as well, because the accuracy of the data is better when they fill it out from home rather than in the waiting room where they have a purse full of all the drugs that they’re taking and they’re trying to write what drug they’re taking. Like that’s not good at all. Right?
And then just to your automation point, backfill all that information for them. If you already know the information, stop asking it again. So, backfill it for ’em. Let ’em verify it. Let ’em update it, that’s fine. But you know those automation tools are there. Then you talk about how do they get to the office?
Do I need to come to the waiting room and sit, and how am I communicating with them around it? Did I tell ’em there’s three people in front of them in line? So yeah, maybe you do have time to go get your Starbucks before you come in, right? Like that makes for a great experience. You know, even if they do have to wait 45 minutes, them knowing that they have to wait 45 minutes cuz there’s six people in front of ’em, is still a powerful way to change the experience for the patient.
And then you work through there. I mean, turns out all these solutions actually automate the workflow for your staff too, if you choose the right solutions. I mean, the problem for many organizations is that their processes are so built on paper that they don’t know how to get away from it, but you can do it digitally and have those processes, you know, get shifted to digital and it actually makes you more efficient.
It makes the life easier for the nurse, and if the life’s easier for the nurse, if the life’s easier for the doctor, the patient has a better experience because the nurse isn’t frustrated and angry and the flow’s bad, and the doctor’s like, this is taking me too long to do so. That’s another example.
And then, you know, post discharge you know, if you’ve started with an initial digital patient experience, now you can leverage that in discharge. And whether that’s collecting the payment, which is really important, especially with high deductible plans and patients being more responsible, how you collect that payment can be integrated with that digital communication that you started before the visit.
And then here’s the one you’ll like best from a marketing perspective. How do you drive them to do reviews of you? It turns out it’s really hard because a patient, when they finish a visit says, you’re dead to me. Right? And they move on with their life, and that’s the ideal, right? Assuming they’ve gotten the treatment they needed, they feel healthy, they don’t do it.
But it turns out, if you use the right digital tools, you can drive as many reviews as you can imagine into the review site. So whether you choose, whether it’s Google, because they’ve started really dominating that with locations and stuff, or whether it’s Yelp, if you’re in San Francisco, if you’re in the South, you can do Angie’s List.
You know, using those digital tools to drive those types of reviews is a powerful marketing technique. Who, which doctor do you wanna go to? The doctor who has 10 reviews and three quarters of ’em are negative. Or the doctor who has 200 reviews and three of ’em are negative. Right? That’s what we’re talking about from a marketing perspective.
But here’s a little nugget for you. It’s powerful from a marketing perspective, but think about how cool it is for your staff. Staff usually only hear about the patients who are complaining, who go up to the doctor. They complain. They argue. They’re so angry about whatever happened often, not even their fault, right?
And that’s all they hear. Well, if you drive all these reviews and the good reviews, the people who had a good experience finally share because you asked them to. And there’s some incentives you can do there. When you do that, it helps the staff, they say, oh, okay, yeah. I mean, it helps staff morale to see all of these positive reviews rather than just the negative. So I think that’s the other kind of like gold nugget of doing this is that it’s great for marketing, but it’s also great for staff morale, which helps in so many ways.
Bill Riley: Very good, very good. We could do this all day, John. That brings us about to our time. So with that, I am afraid we gotta wrap things up for this session. Before we go though John, can you tell our listeners what’s the best place where they can find you?
John Lynn: Yeah, so I mean, I think for practices the most valuable thing is check out HealthcareITToday.com. You can subscribe to the email list, you can check out the podcast, you can see the latest that’s happening there.
Of course, you know, be sure to follow me on Twitter if you’re on Twitter at Tech Guy, easy to find. You know, I was early on, so I got @TechGuy. That’s a fun one. But yeah, definitely reach out to us if you have any questions. We love helping people. If you need help with something, if you want access to content, we’ve probably written about it.
So we’re happy to share those insights and perspectives. Or if we don’t know, maybe connect you to someone in the community who can.
Bill Riley: Okay. Very good. So with that, I think that wraps us up for this session. John, thanks again for joining us today, to you, our audience. Thank you for giving us some of your time. We hope you found this discussion useful and we hope to see you again at a future session. Thank you.
John Lynn: Thanks Bill.
Medical Advantage Podcast: Thanks for joining us this week on the Medical Advantage Podcast where we discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare and what they mean to your organization. For more information, visit us at medicaladvantage.com and make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, so you never miss a show.
