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For providers, the modern healthcare landscape is more competitive than ever. With more choices and options for care than ever before, it’s a buyer’s market for patients – and practices need to market themselves effectively in order to increase patient acquisition, retention, and revenue. 

In today’s digitally-driven world, effective marketing means digital marketing. An intuitive and functional website, effective use of social media, management of your online reviews and reputation, search engine optimization and much more are all strategies that can drive patients to your website and through the door of your practice. 

In this episode of the Medical Advantage podcast, we revisit a conversation with medical practice marketing expert at iHealthSpot, as well as Medical Advantage Practice Marketing Consultant Scott Podgor, to find out why these techniques are important and how practices can utilize them. 

This is the fifteenth 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 healthcare. 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 it. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Medical Advantage podcast series. On this week’s episode, we’ve put together an audio version of Medical Advantage’s recent webinar on re engaging patients with practice marketing. In this webinar, our very own Mary Hall, Vice President of Practice marketing growth and Scott Podgor, a practice marketing consultant teamed up to discuss the role practice marketing plays in reengaging and recruiting patients in a post COVID world. This conversation was part of a larger webinar series. So to watch this and previous episodes, please visit our website at medicaladvantage.com or just sit back relax and enjoy the audio version of this webinar. Thanks for listening.  

Bill Riley: Hey everyone, this is Bill Riley and on behalf of all of us, welcome to our session. We’re going to talk about practice marketing and getting your patients back. It is my pleasure to introduce our panelists for today. First is Mary Hall. She’s the founder and CEO of the practice marketing firm, iHealthSpot Interactive and following the acquisition earlier this spring, now a part of the medical advantage family.  

So where to start Mary? I think in my mind, if you boil it all down, Mary’s an entrepreneur with, with well over 20 years of experience in media, online media. I think we could honestly say, Mary was in show business, online entertainment also some experience in, in early days of online ticketing services as, as well as e commerce sites. So along the way, founded iHealthSpot Interactive, serving as the company CEO. We’re very fortunate to have Mary a part of the Medical Advantage team and where she continues to support our practice marketing client engagements and our Go to market efforts.  

Scott Podgor works closely with Mary, one of our lead practice marketing consultants. Scott brings many years of consulting and relationship management experience and serves really as a key point of contact for so many of our practice marketing clients. Welcome to you both .Let me talk quickly about Medical Advantage. For those of you who maybe knew we’re part of The Doctor’s Company, we fit under the umbrella of the TDC group. 

The Doctor’s Company is the largest physician owned MedMal insurer in the country with roughly a hundred thousand physicians insured nationwide, over $6 billion in assets. TDC consists of different business units. We are the subsidiary. The only subsidiary not in the professional liability space, but providing a range of services for physicians and groups at the point of care. 

Now, historically, this has been around the use of proper use of practice technology specifically electronic health records, system optimization clinical services, helping practices and groups identify and improve performance with quality measures and gaps in care, for example, or financial help with the revenue cycle, improving the RCM workflow, reducing denied claims, optimizing the overall reimbursement process. 

So we’re very excited to have practice marketing services now part of our portfolio. Before we go to Mary, I wanted to give sort of my perspective I should say I’m Bill Riley, I’m the marketing leader here at Medical Advantage. I wanted to give my perspective on coming together with iHealthSpot. 

So going back to April of this year this is when we confirmed our company’s coming together. I wanted to give a little perspective as to why. Why I practice marketing. The first is kind of obvious, but I’ll say it anyway and that’s just around skyrocketing demand from the clients we currently serve, the practices, the specialties, the groups that we support today. Increasing demand for these kinds of marketing website and marketing services. This also includes requests from the private equity firms that we support. These are firms that have made investments in practices, groups, specialties, and they seek to accelerate the valuation of the practices rolled up in their portfolio. 

And in addition to other things. They see practice marketing as critical. So this was another key driver for us when it comes down to why iHealthSpot? Why not another firm? I I’ll tell you, frankly, I think so much of it just starts with Mary and, the leadership team that Mary has assembled at iHealthSpot, their expertise, their knowledge the priority placed on best possible customer service. Leading to any number of very long term relationships very much aligned culturally with our approach at Medical Advantage. Beyond that we were very impressed with the full service nature of the company. With so many of the alternatives we saw, there are companies out there that are great at starting up a website, you know, you get a website ready, but then the vendor’s kind of gone forever, and the practice is sort of left on their own iHealthSpot has a very long history of providing a portfolio of marketing services ongoing, which Scott and Mary are going to talk about shortly. 

The other thing, and from my own personal perspective, I’m a marketing person myself. We work with any number of agencies here at Medical Advantage over time, there are firms out there that will promise to do a website, but they’re also supporting the car dealership in town or the liquor store or the coffee shop or whatever. 

Healthcare is very complex. I think we, we all know healthcare is very complex and, and especially if we seek to drive ongoing performance and results having that focus and years of experience in the space is key. And that’s what iHealthSpot is all about. So, okay. Enough of all that Mary, let’s segue to you now if you could please give us an overview of iHealthSpot, and what we’re all about. 

Mary Hall: Okay, great. Thank you, Bill. And welcome everybody. I’m very glad to be here with you today. We’re going to talk a little bit about I health spotted a little bit about the services that we offer and then a little bit about how we can help you re engage with patients , as a result of what’s been happening in the world today with coven. 

So first a little bit about iHealthSpot we are a digital marketing agency that specializes in health care. The majority of our clients are health care practices. We service over 4, 000 clients around the country. We’re specialty agnostics. So we work with just about every specialty and we provide full service marketing. So everything from expert website design, whether it be templated website or custom we do offer both. We also have a search engine optimization a very robust platform that we host and develop our sites in that includes a number of features like accessibility tools for the disabled, SSL security, directory listing management for things like Google My Business and health grades. 

We also provide search engine marketing through paid ads on Google. And Facebook, and we are a Google partner. We also provide social media management. We help you with your Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn pages. And we also provide reputation management. Online reviews have become. 

Really a paramount piece of practice marketing as more and more patients are reviewing doctors online and searching for doctors online. So we really do provide that full service marketing and we get results. We have had clients that literally have increased. their you know, overall patient volume by over a thousand percent. 

So we put our money where our mouth is and we get good results for our clients. We are all about patient acquisition and driving those patients through your doors. So I’m going to hand it over to Scott now and he’s going to talk a little bit about what we saw happen during the pandemic and Scott take it away.  

Scott Podgor: Mary there’s kind of 2 things that we’ve seen over the last year and as things continue to evolve and the changes that are still happening with the C. D. C. Guidelines with patients and folks getting vaccinations, this continues to change. But a couple of the things that we we noticed, especially on the patient side and coming from the practice side was different experiences. 

So as a patient, when COVID 19 hit and everybody was worried about what was going to happen to them. There was definitely a fear of exposure and that definitely affected patients and their approach to seeking out care. Some of those elective procedures, some of those noncritical visits, people were afraid to go outside. People were afraid to set appointments with their physicians. I’m talking more personally. I have a grandmother in her eighties she has been putting off care for months now because she’s still worried about some exposure and being in those medical and clinical places. That’s definitely been something that’s been affecting patients. To that same effect, some providers were not able to get the telehealth options set up for their patients to have that interaction virtually and even if they were able to set it up, some patients are not versed in that type of technology. They don’t know how to use it. They don’t know how to access that. 

That’s definitely something that we’ve seen. There was some limitations and overall from the patient side, there was a lot less appointments. There was less people coming to see their primary care, less people sending appointments to see those specialists that they really needed. So on the patient side, there’s definitely been a downswing over the course of the last year. 

At the same time, looking at it from the practice side, some practices were majorly affected by this, depending on the areas that they were practicing in, some cases, temporary shutdowns, having to close your doors for a timeline that you really didn’t know and so at that point, a lot of practices were wondering what are they going to do now? How are we going to move through this? They had to then shift their priorities and make sure that they were either talking about the covid test and making sure that their patients were taken care of at the same time they were experiencing issues with their staff, is their staff going to come into work? Do they need to quarantine? How are we going to set them up to be safe to then interact and receive patients as well? Because I’m sure they have their own fears of exposure they’re worried about and then there was this juggling of how are we going to handle this? How are we gonna receive patients and talk to patients what we’ve seen is that to combat this, you need to have a really strong online presence because that online presence can communicate with your patients and your prospective patients. What have you been doing in your office? What procedures and policies have you put in place? Are you having mask mandates? Are you following all the local guidelines? Are we ready to receive you as a patient? And those are the types of things that you can communicate to your current patient base and encourage them. Hey, come out for care. It’s okay. We’re ready to receive you. It’s safe and same thing with new patients. We’re here, we’re available, and we can help you, and we’re ready  

Bill Riley: Thanks, Scott. So, Mary, before we get into the heart of our topic today. We should probably establish a foundation or a baseline that practices should be thinking about. So could you take us through this summary?  

Mary Hall: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Bill. So when, when we’re talking about marketing for your practice, there’s a couple of things to note that are very important. Most patients are using the internet nowadays to make decisions about their care. Googling the conditions and treatments that they’re worried about and thinking about, but they’re using the internet to seek out providers to learn about the providers, even if they’re being referred by another doctor or using insurance to find the provider, they’re still Googling that doctor. They’re still looking at the websites. They’re looking at reviews. So there’s some very specific things that you need to make sure you’re doing to make sure that your website becomes your front door. You really want patients to be able to learn about what you do to understand your philosophy of care and you want to give them tools to be able to interact as well. 

So obviously that starts with a state of the art website. It is critical that you have a modern website that is mobile friendly, that loads fast and that again, offers patients different services. Whether it’s appointment requests online, bill pay, filling out forms or getting into the patient portal you want to give them that access and you also want to talk about why you’re different, what makes you different what makes you the provider that they should choose. We also want to make sure that we talk about finding you, the old adage of build it and they will come is not necessarily true when it comes to the Internet, they have to be able to find you. 

So, in order to find you, you need to make sure that you’re doing ongoing search engine optimization. So that organically you come up in those searches, when somebody looks for a doctor near me. You want to make sure that they’re finding you. So its critical that you do ongoing outreach and search engine optimization. 

You also need to be using social media. to both gain followers for your practice and engage with patients. Social media is a great venue to keep patients informed and to build your following. You also want to be doing reputation management. We know that 72 percent of patients now read reviews and look at physician reviews before making a decision about going to a provider. It is critical that you know exactly what patients are saying about you and that you have some control over that and the only way to do that is to manage your online reputation carefully. Then finally Google and Facebook ads those allow you to get to the top of the search engine very quickly and to gain more patients. Again, everything you do should be about patient acquisition and patient interaction. That sort of rounds out what you should be doing from a marketing perspective.  

 Now we want to talk a little bit about, as Scott mentioned the pandemic really did create a barrier and we want to break down that barrier. This particular stage, there are some things that you can be doing using the internet to get patients back, to welcome those patients back into your practice, and to acquire new patients along the way. Obviously, one of the things you want to do is use your website for outreach and giving patients good information about what you’re doing related to COVID is very important. You want to make sure that you are continuously providing updates on your mask policy on handwashing, on whether or not they can bring somebody with them to their visit, things that you’re doing to keep them safe. You want to make sure that you are giving patients the comfort that they are looking for to come back to the doctor. Again, your website can provide that tool. You also want to make sure that your website is user friendly and that patients can request appointments online. They can book an appointment and they can get to you at any time. Remember that patients are surfing the internet at night and on the weekends when you’re not necessarily open. So giving them a way to reach out when you’re not available ensures that they’re able to get in touch with the practice. We also want to make sure that patients use your patient portal. You want to have a direct link into your patient portal that’s visible. Their patients can look at lab results, they can see their records, they can do various things within that portal. Making sure that the portal is readily available and easy to get to is critical. You also want to make sure that patients can make payments through your website whether it’s a co pay or a patient responsibility payment, giving them access to that website to be able to go in and make a payment easily and quickly is again a service that they’re looking for, that they expect, and that you want to make your practice more visible.  

 It’s critical that you include them in your site. You also want to make sure that if you’re requesting patients update their forms, it’s a year later. You may be getting more updated information. Make sure those forms are easily accessible on your website, whether they’re downloadable or whether you have interactive forms where patients can actually fill out their paperwork online. Give them easy access and an easy way to do that. You also want to make sure that you’re promoting your website within the practice. Make sure that your URL is everywhere, on your business cards, on your door, on your invoices so that they know they can get to the website and they know what the URL is. Make sure that you promote the website within the practice. Also make sure that you have accurate directory listings, like Google My Business, which is the section that comes up when somebody Googles it with a map it gives a link to the website. It gives a description of your practice. Make sure that your COVID messages are in that listing. Have listings across several websites, be it health grades, vitals, google, Yelp, , Apple. Anywhere a patient can find your information make sure that that information is up to date and accurate, you also want to make sure that you’re doing search engine optimization so that patients are able to find you. Whether they’re new patients or existing patients that you’re bringing back into your practice, you want them to be able to find you quickly and easily, whether they type your name, they type your specialty. You want to make sure you’re coming up. So make sure that your search engine optimization is ongoing and that you are working to ensure that patients can find you. Also that you’re using social media to post messages about COVID, give people the latest information and, same messaging that you have on your website related to COVID should also be in your social media channels. 

 Finally, make sure you’re monitoring and responding to online reviews, what patients are saying about you. That you are on top of it and that you’re dealing with anything that may be negative. You also want to work to solicit more reviews. The more positive reviews you have, the better you index and search and obviously the better your reputation online the more patients you’re going to acquire. So those are some things, some helpful tips that we recommend for maximizing your marketing efforts and making sure that you are welcoming patients back into your practice. 

We have a couple of examples that I wanted to show you of clients that we work with. The 1st is a practice in Saint Peter’s Missouri called advanced Bone and Joint. They have 12 providers in 2 locations. So they’re fairly large practice. We provide them with a custom website reputation management, enhanced search engine optimization. So that ongoing SEO and Google ads with our efforts, their website has all of the things that we talked about today, and they’re doing all of the things that we talked about today with our help. They are achieving some unbelievably good results. They have more than 20, 000 visits to their website every single month. They are getting more than 600 appointment requests every single month from their website and they have page one rankings for 50 plus keywords in their local market in both the locations they’re in. They’re in St. Peter’s and O’Fallon, Missouri. These are the things, again the proof is in the pudding, and we see that these clients perform incredibly well with the efforts that we have made and their willingness to employ all of the things that we have suggested for them. This is on their homepage and again, speaks loudly to patients about exactly what they’re doing, they’re seeing patients, they’re offering telehealth, they have their phone number front and center, and those are the things that you want to be doing. 

We also have a newer client who’s been with us since late last year and his website is doing fantastic. He has a custom website with us our platform the directory listing management enhanced SEO and Google AdWords and his site is also performing very well in just a few months, we’ve seen a 268 percent increase in traffic to his website, 400 percent increase in new appointment requests and a 341 percent increase in his page one rankings. This site has all of the features and all of the components that we have talked about, and they’re doing the marketing that we recommend and the results are speaking for themselves. This client has a page on Covid. They also have a Covid message on their Google listing its very important that these things are being done in order to, propel your practice to the next level and bring those patients back who have been afraid to come to the doctor.  

Bill Riley: All right. Fantastic. Thank you, Mary. Scott, I see a number of questions have come in, so I’ll let you lead the way.  

Scott Podgor: Yeah, let’s take a look. I know we’ve had some questions coming in as Mary has been talking here. Let’s see. Mary, one came in. How long does it take to build a new website? 

Mary Hall: Well, it depends on the site. We have a couple of different websites that we build. We have a templated website that’s usually a quicker build. In the case of a template website you get to pick from four different themes, and then we customize the theme with colors and graphics then your logo and all of the information the content and so forth. That site usually takes around 4 to 6 weeks to build. If we do a completely custom site, it takes a little bit longer because we’re literally building the site from scratch. Instead of working from a pre designed theme, we actually build the site from The ground up so those can take a little bit longer, usually 8 to 12 weeks, depending on the size. You can pretty much figure that if you have a smaller site, 10 pages or less, you’re going to be looking at about 8 weeks. If it’s a larger site it can take a little bit longer, depending on what we’re building for it.  

Scott Podgor: Fantastic. Thank you for that. Looks like we have another one similar to talking about the website build. Who writes the content for the website?  

Mary Hall: In our agency, we do. We have very experienced medical marketing writers who write the copy for the website. In some cases, our writers are nurse practitioners. We have a couple of RNs. We have you know people that have written for the medical industry specifically and we write all the copy. We work with you to determine what those pages are going to be for your website, and then we write the content. You obviously get a chance to review it, though.  

Scott Podgor: Okay awesome and then, we’re talking about return on investment. A lot. If I take advanced at that when can I see results?  

Mary Hall: You usually see results with search engine optimization 60 to 90 days is what we tell clients. It takes a little bit of time when we do search engine optimization. The search engines are all about relevancy and the way we build relevancy for your website is by adding content. With the keywords that you want to rank for. So for example, if you’re an orthopedic surgeon, we would want to expound on the word orthopedic surgeon in your local market. So that when somebody searches for one, you come up. So we do content marketing and blogging as a way to add. content to your site regularly. And so it can take a little bit of time for those blogs to take effect and for the algorithms to pick up those keywords. But usually after 60 to 90 days we start to see our clients ranking on page one for a number of keywords in their local area. 

Scott Podgor: Okay and we have another one. How many new patient appointments should I expect from my new site? I’m sure that’s a big week, a big one everyones wondering. 

Mary Hall: Well, again, it depends on a lot at the end of the day . The bigger practices with more providers, more locations you know, may see a larger number of appointment requests coming through the site just because their volume is larger but you can pretty much get a figure that if you’re in a. small to medium market with a single provider that you’re going to get 12 to 15 new appointment requests from your site every month. Again, you then can expand that number for additional providers and we do have clients that literally, you know, are getting five to 600 appointment requests a month in our, our larger practices. 

Scott Podgor: That’s great. Bill, do we have, I have a couple more in the chat. Do we have time for a couple more questions?  

Bill Riley: Let’s take one more.  

Scott Podgor: Let me see. We’ve got Do you monitor and update the listings on going? 

Mary Hall: Yes, so with directory listings we do monitor them ongoing. So what we do is we initially claim those listings we go in we make sure that the address, the phone number, that there’s a picture, that your office hours are there that there’s a description of the practice. If there’s any special messages, like for coven, we add them. We make sure that there’s a link to your website. And then on an ongoing basis, we manage them for you. Let’s say you’re in Florida and there’s a hurricane coming. You would just need to reach out to us and tell us to add a message that you’re going to be closed due to an impending storm. We would update all the listings with that information. Let’s say you’re going to be closed or have special holiday hours. We can go in and update the hours. So we manage those ongoing for the client and, and make sure that they’re always with the most accurate and up to date information. 

Scott Podgor: That’s awesome. Essentially working with the practice and running alongside with them as things change and evolve.  

Mary Hall: Yes, absolutely. We are very customer service oriented. And you know, we’re all about making sure that our clients Get what they need. And, and you know, during COVID, we really worked hard to make sure that the messaging that needed to be on the websites was there and it’s going to be very important, regardless of the agency that you work with you know, whoever you decide to work with that you working with somebody that provides that kind of service. You know, you need, fast reaction time. We’ve heard horror stories from clients in the past about, I submit a change for my website and it takes 10 days to hear from anybody and that’s just not acceptable in our world.  

Scott Podgor: Absolutely so, I have a couple of more questions in the interest of time, I think we’re going to cut off there, but I will be replying back to folks and making sure we get all of your questions answered after we’re wrapped up here. 

Bill Riley: Very good. Scott, Mary, thank you. Let me bring the slides back. We want to talk about a promotion that, that we’re running. So, Mary, if you could take us through this.  

Mary Hall: Yes, absolutely. We provide a website analysis. For those of you that have an existing website that are thinking it needs to be redesigned or thinking about redoing it and we have a tool that provides a very detailed report on the website it talks about everything from whether or not the site is ADA friendly you know, whether or not the site is optimized well for search what kind of bounce rate you’re getting for the website it literally, goes through website speed so lots of great information on the overall performance of your website. So we’re giving a free analysis right now. You can come to our website ihealthspot.com and the tool is right there on the homepage. And we are also offering a special promotion right now for 500 off any website. So we, we are running that promotion for the next few weeks and, you know, we’d love to have you take advantage of it if it’s something that you are considering. 

Bill Riley: Very good, so let me start to wrap up here if you’re interested in any of the services that Mary and Scott have talked about we have their contact information available. Scott is probably the best point of contact. Second is we’re doing sessions like this all the time and we tend to promote them through the social channels. So if you haven’t already, please like and subscribe to the iHealthSpot LinkedIn, Facebook and like Mary said, not only do we do this for our clients, but we do it for ourselves. We’re always adding new content, whether it’s webinar recordings, blog articles, et cetera, to the blog area on the iHealthSpot website. So please check that out.  

All right, so with that, I think that wraps us up. Mary, Scott, great job. Thank you so much for presenting today and for our audience, we certainly hope that you found this session helpful and informative and we hope to see you again at a future session down the road. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thanks again for listening into some of the key points from our webinar discussing the impact practice marketing can have on your practice. To view this webinar, additional entries in the series, and further resources regarding Medical Advantage’s practice marketing solutions, please visit our website at medicaladvantage.com. Thanks for listening and see you next time. 

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.