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The demand in the healthcare industry for practice marketing is skyrocketing. Practice marketing connects businesses and consumers to a health practice using advertising techniques to drive revenue. Medical Advantage Podcast discusses the conception of practice marketing, what practice marketing looks like today, and the three major causes for the surging demand.

Does your organization want to drive revenue in the changing healthcare industry? Listen in to hear Bill Riley, Director of Sales Operation and Marketing at Medical Advantage, share ways to stay current in the transforming healthcare field.

This is the tenth episode in the Medical Advantage Podcast, where 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 industry best practices. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Welcome everyone to the Medical Advantage podcast series. As always, I am your host, Celina Dusseau, and today we are joined by Bill Riley, our Director of Marketing and Business Development here at Medical Advantage. Bill and I are excited to bring you part two of our quarterly series for our podcast to finger on the pulse of healthcare, where we discuss hot topics and changes happening in our industry every day. 

Today we will be discussing the growing interest and need for medical practice marketing in the digital age of healthcare from a long history of traditional advertising and snail mail to the new age of social media and online reputations. We are thrilled to discuss it all with you here today. So as we get started, Bill, thank you so much for joining us today. 

I’m very excited for our quarter two series update here to kick us off. Do you want to just take a moment to reintroduce yourself, what you do and what brings us here today?  

Bill Riley: Sure. Thank you, Celina. Hey everyone. I’m Bill Riley, the Director of Marketing and Sales Operations here at Medical Advantage. 

So the topic is very timely near and dear to my own heart. I’m responsible for everything from our own company website and our own social media presence, the development of campaign content, where we’re looking to express our value, our differentiation in the marketplace leading to lead generation, and then, you know, closely working with our sales teams to follow up and fulfill on those leads. So excited to talk about marketing on this podcast today. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thank you, Bill. And of course, practice marketing has taken many different shapes over the years. And now in the age of social media and online reputation, it has morphed once again. Especially with the age of telehealth emerging from the onset of COVID, we’ve really had to become very creative with the use of technology and marketing and running medical practices, specifically how it drives success in a modern healthcare environment. 

So I, would like to get your perspective a little bit on that. Just what does that history look like? And really what brings us into that topic today?  

Bill Riley: Yeah. So why don’t we go back like into the way back machine? Like, even as far as maybe the eighties or early nineties the idea of marketing within healthcare is, certainly not a new idea. 

Back in those days, it was not always the kind of marketing that we’re starting to see today. It was, I think, in many ways, hospitals marketing themselves to prospective physicians or pharmaceutical companies marketing themselves to different hospitals or clinics or you know, members of the delivery network, if you will. 

I think that’s a lot of where it started and we see a lot of this continuing today, you know, pharma companies who advertise aggressively in all different forms of media. Medical device companies are another example where we see the standard push and pull of, marketing where.  

For example, the pharma company is, advertising on television regarding a new medication marketing directly to the consumer. Then at the same time, they’re marketing aggressively to physicians and providing samples to those physicians. So, you know, working both ends the push and pull, if you will. Very common is happening forever in other industries if you think of automotive companies that are advertising discounts to the end consumer, while at the same time providing incentives to dealerships. Travel industry and travel agents, is another simple example. 

So you know, this is the kind of thing that’s been going on for quite a while now. You know, I’ll go back to hospitals for a second. I think just even on the ride into work, you know, I was thinking about this a little bit today. There are signs on the side of the highway, you know, different hospitals here in the Detroit area where I’m located, where they’re trying to differentiate themselves, whether it’s promoting shorter wait times in their ER or we see other hospitals that will talk about best outcomes for a given specialty, you know, world renowned cancer research or, leading orthopedic specialists, or whatever it might be. So I think this is where we’ve been with marketing and healthcare. I think we’re now entering this new area where it’s more at the practice level.  

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Absolutely. Thank you, Bill. And I, you know, from the consumer perspective, I think I speak for everyone when I think back to what used to be mailing ads for pharmaceuticals with coupons and as you mentioned, you know, cheesy TV commercials and highway billboards. This concept has had a very long history in our healthcare system. However, although many of these things are still happening today, they’re sort of starting to lose their impact a little bit with the shift to modern media and more creative outlets, many practices have had to become much more involved and creative with their messaging and advertising and marketing. 

So from that broad history, let’s start to drill down a little bit and what that looks like at today’s modern medical practices. What are some of the trends that we have been seeing?  

Bill Riley: So, I think we can trace this back. If we talk about the marketing now by just a specific practice, I think we can trace it back really to the emergence of specialty medicine or you know, elective medicine, elective procedures from given specialists. 

So, this is a very different form of healthcare. So, it’s not your typical you know, primary care family medicine where, you know, here’s my insurance card and I’m a patient attributed to that practice. You know, if it’s a cosmetic procedure, for example, dental or maybe hair replacement or plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery in most of these cases, there, there is no payer, right? Or insurance company, this is really cash out of pocket for the consumer. So these practices have had to market themselves in many ways. They’re operating more like a small business in many ways versus a traditional medical provider and,that’s driven a lot of the marketing that they’ve done.  

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Absolutely. And that brings us to really the need for practices to market themselves and their differentiation, you know, not only in their specialty and their industry, but also in their regions, really no different than a restaurant or any other business for that matter. 

Bill Riley: Yeah. No, that’s, exactly right. Celina. It really boils down to kind of marketing 101, you know, why do we do marketing? Why do firms choose to market themselves? And ultimately lots of reasons, of course, but ultimately it’s around driving revenue. It’s about engaging with target customers or target markets that we would not have had access to otherwise. So for many, it starts with just creating awareness that a typical service or specialty is available creating demand. I think, especially when we’re looking at more of these elective or non-essential procedures, the role of marketing begins to play on the wants and the wants versus the needs of people, right?  

Like I, drive an old beat-up Honda, right? Do I want a shiny new Tesla that magically drives itself? Well, yeah, of course I want that. Do I need it? Well, probably not, you know, and I think the same is true with marketing for some of these let’s say cosmetic procedures playing upon our emotions, playing upon our vanity that we have around ourselves is, I think part of the equation ultimately differentiating my practice, my services versus others in the area, kind of like you were saying, Celina, it’s positioning that unique value that my practice, my specialty can provide. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Absolutely and that, kind of hints back to the need for marketing and sort of the reemergence, of primary care and people developing really close relationships with their physicians and people are paying closer attention to their health. You know, primary care physicians are, sort of reemerging as people are stepping away from specialists, especially in this past year, having to have that close relationship with a trusted physician. So what does this look like for your traditional medical practice? What are you seeing?  

Bill Riley: So this is where I think it gets interesting. The traditional primary care, family medicine, internal medicine, OBGYN pediatrics, these, are the clients at Medical Advantage we’re serving every day, so we’re, putting consultants at the point of care, whether it’s technology challenges, helping the practice with the revenue cycle, and improve financial performance or even help with clinical performance, maybe it’s improving workflows in the practice to improve quality measures, reduce costs, ultimately increase the performance or accelerate payments in any value based or risk arrangements that practice may have. We see this more and more the need for marketing and in my mind, it really comes or starts to present itself in three different areas and we can talk through each of these three.  

One is new competition or, different forms of competition for your traditional neighborhood family medicine practice. The second is shifting patient demographic and, as we talk about not just the millennial or, generation Y, you know, however you want to call it, but there’s a certain set of young professionals that are very much digital first and I think that’s having an impact on how our practices are attracting new patients. 

Then the third thing is really just new business models made possible through technology and that’s telehealth. That you hit on a second ago that can be an opportunity or a threat depending on how you look at it. So these are the three things that we see, and I’d like to kind of hit on all three of these as we go. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thank you, Bill. I love that you mentioned new competition. So let’s start with that first. Does this involve sort of the concept of retail medicine, like the CVS’s, Walgreens, Village MD? What are organizations such as that doing in this modern age?  

Bill Riley: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. 

Today’s consumer, today’s patient has wider range of choices for where to go get their care than in the past. I don’t need to go visit my primary care provider for 100 percent of all of my medical needs. There’s certain things that I can now start to receive through other channels and I think all the current activity that we’re seeing right now around vaccines is a great example. You know, many people are getting their vaccine wherever they can get one. For many, that means their local Rite Aid or their local CVS wherever they can get in. 

Even before the pandemic, I think this has been a growing trend for, years now, just around the annual flu vaccine, like last year, I remember I went and I went to our local grocery store. No waiting room, no appointment, no one handed me a clipboard or paperwork to fill out. I just walk in, I got my shot and then I kept on shopping. So it’s a simple example, but I think it’s a growing trend around, alternate forms of receiving care that didn’t exist years ago, let’s say a decade ago. But then beyond just the retail, beyond the Walgreens and the CVSs we’re seeing a growth,in very highly specialized providers. 

So this is like Village MD that you mentioned a second ago, they actually have a relationship with Walgreens for Minute Clinics. Oak Street Health is another that we’ve begun to see popping up here in the state of Michigan.  

Companies that have raised an enormous amount of capital and have built out a very specialized delivery model, highly efficient delivery model that reduces a lot of the overhead that we would see in your typical family practice. It really runs like a machine and they’ve really done a great job of understanding, having a very narrow focus on their target set of customers and provide a lot of innovation specifically to meet the needs of that narrow set of target customers.  

So I think of Oak Street as an easy example where they’re serving a Medicare population they, provide free transportation to and from the clinic every time you have an appointment. If you want to come early, why there’s a lovely community room where you can take an exercise class or do an art class or some other group project, along with other people the visits are much longer and much more intimate.  

It’s not your standard seven minutes of the provider looking down at their screen the whole time and then they’re out the door under their next appointment. They really take a lot of time to try to get to know the patient and members of the patient’s family a lot more intimacy; it’s just another example of competition, it’s not just a new provider setting up shop in town. It’s new models and other forms of care that give patients choices that they didn’t have years ago.  

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Absolutely and speaking of giving patients choices, right? This gives a lot of flexibility and autonomy in navigating a very complex healthcare system increasingly so to some extent.  

And you had mentioned before that shifting patient demographic and their preferences, this really gives them room to make choices in a way that works for the individual. That’s it’s an older generation with new access to care and really unique ways and a younger generation that’s exposed to TikTok doctors, right? And everything in between.  

So can you share your thoughts a little bit on, you know, what are those shifts in the demographic and the preferences and, you know, really what are we seeing day to day in the field?  

Bill Riley: Sure.  

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thank you.  

Bill Riley: This is not so much using digital channels to communicate with current patients, most of the practices that we support are doing a great job of leveraging patient portal capabilities and that’s fantastic. So, you know, I’m a patient. I can communicate directly with my provider. I can ask questions. I can get responses. I can confirm my next appointment. I see my test results, my lab results. All of that is seamless. It’s easy for the patient. It’s less headache and much, much lower costs than for the practice, then to handle those kinds of inquiries with a human on the phone. So, all that is wonderful. I’m really talking about the acquisition of new patients. 

This is where, when we look at the different generations, maybe it’s the tail end of the millennials or the older end of the Gen Z crowd, those in their mid to late twenties. These are all folks that are born of, out of the internet age or the smartphone era and like you say, with TikTok docs, it’s very much a digital first kind of user. So if we think of someone who’ just graduated from college and they’re starting their career and they’ve, confirmed employment and now they got insurance and now they’re going to confirm their primary care physician.  

They’re very accustomed to ordering a pizza, buying movie tickets, whatever it is from their smartphone. And this, this will be their tendency, right? It’s just to pick up the phone or do a Google search and see what they can find when, searching for, for a new provider. So you know, I think this is another area where. Historically, patients came to the doctor, right? I don’t need to market or target patients because this is the practice, the patients come to me. But I think that as we go forward here, you know, different versions are different alternatives for people to receive care. Different highly specialized providers moving into different geographies depending on where you may live. Then you’ve got a younger demographic of patient that, you know, might search for and select and engage with a certain practice, you know, based on a digital first kind of approach. These are all the things that we’re seeing with the practices that we support today. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Absolutely. And that’s this all lends back to sort of meeting people where they are. Right? There’s much more ways to approach the individual and their specific interests and their specific needs, which also brings us into sort of our third bucket here. That is new business models. How do you adapt a business to, you know, suit your style of care to the needs of the unique patient? And I’m guessing this has something to do with telehealth and some of the growth that we saw starting last year in the onset of COVID is that right, Bill?  

Bill Riley: Yeah, exactly right. Many, I would say the majority of the providers that we support now have some level of telehealth capability up and running at their practice. 

The level of virtual visits kind of varies depending on the provider themselves, depending on their specialty, but this was a great thing that we saw really take off last year during the pandemic. So now here we are a year later. And for the most part, I think people have been very positive about telehealth what once you get through those initial growing pains, both on the patient side as well as the provider side. 

But I think in general, everyone’s pretty happy with this, right? The patients appreciate the convenience and just the time savings if for nothing else and after doing it a lot and working out the kinks in terms of, how to effectively host these visits, how to document them, how to properly code and bill for virtual visits. There was some drama around that in the early part of last year, but as we’re through all that, this has really been, I think, a win-win all the way around. So now what, what we see are more progressive practices looking to do is use telehealth as a business growth or a revenue growth opportunity. 

I’m a practice, I’m currently maybe utilizing the technology to host virtual visits with my patients and then maybe they’re all living in a 10, 20, 25-mile radius of my building. Well, now with telehealth, if I’m serving these patients virtually. Why can’t I serve other patients in my same state where I’m licensed? 

You know, there’s nothing really that stops me or, ultimately maybe I’m going to look to grow and expand into go across state lines and start to engage with patients in nearby states or neighboring states. We are helping, early clients with this right now immediately, we’ve seen it mostly with specialties your nose and throat specialists, asthma, orthopedics to name a few but, the whole idea is, I’m no longer limited to just that radius around my building in terms of the patients I can treat. 

So, you know, we’re, we’re working with early providers right now to basically help them work out their business case leveraging a lot of data analytics along the way, you know, looking at census data by major Metro area in a given state, just for patient populations. We can look at CPT codes that have been submitted just to get an idea of the level of services being provided for the ortho specialty, let’s say. And then we can also look at other competitive providers in that same geography. Kind of looking for that sweet spot of got a critical mass of patients with a substantial volume of procedures taking place, maybe not a lot of other providers, so maybe it’s an underserved area that would make a great opportunity to target and it would start with marketing. 

So, this one can be an opportunity or a threat depending on how you look at it. But, I guess my point here is if, I’m a provider here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I know I’m the only specialist or one of the few specialists in this general area, because of telehealth and the opportunity for virtual visits, it doesn’t mean that other providers from different parts of the state can, begin to target my same patients. 

So, as if our traditional medical practices don’t need yet another thing to be worrying about. I’m afraid that all the things we’ve talked about here, you know other alternatives for patients and increasing competition really drives towards the need for practices to begin to market themselves. 

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That’s fantastic. Thank you, Bill. And of course, this is a lot of pressure. There are, you know, of course, always many changes coming and happening, and this is just another one. But this is really important for practices to consider not only reaching their patients, but also upping their patient volumes in such a difficult time. 

But the most daunting part of it is where to start. This all comes down to culture and messaging and what type of patients you’re attracting all of that. So what are your thoughts on things that practices should really be considering when they’re sort of embarking on this new adventure?  

Bill Riley: So Medical Advantage will be making some announcements in the practice marketing space shortly and I think we’ll be doing more and more sessions like this you know, getting into more detail as we go. As we start to wrap up here, my main point for today for us, Celina, I think was really just to plant the seed, you know, for those who haven’t really thought about practice marketing or haven’t really prioritized it. 

I wanted really just to create some awareness around what’s happening in our space and some of the things that we see. And you know, more to come on that as we go. My short answer would be to consider looking at the website, the practices website as something tangible to start thinking about and again, this is not so much for your current patients and that presumably you’re serving and serving well through your patient portal. 

This is really for the new prospective patients that you wish to attract, you really should think of your website as your front door as your storefront and what is it that people are going to see as they arrive. Like I said earlier, it should be very crisp and to the point around here’s who we are, here’s who we serve, here’s exactly the services that we provide and whether directly or in a subtle way answer the question around what, why would someone choose you, right?  

Lots of practices around, lots of primary care or family, but you know, why would I choose your practice? So, you know, maybe it’s about the experience that you have or the experience of your staff. Maybe you’ve got an unfair advantage in a particular specialty or medical procedure based on equipment that that you may have, whatever it is. These are the kinds of things that I think you need to be thinking about, the danger with websites, you know, websites, I think are both an art and a science, and it’s very easy to get lost, hopelessly lost in the science. 

You know, I see many people, many companies, not just practices, but companies in general that will engage with a vendor and they’ll start digging into Google Analytics and just so much data provided around website activity, which pages were visited and how often, when, what time of day and average number of pages per visit and how long before people left the site and what devices are they using? 

Is it a laptop? Is it a desktop? Is it a smartphone? Is it an iPhone versus an android? All this stuff is, important, but I think can be too much early on. So I think it’s just about thinking through those fundamental questions. Who am I, who do I serve? What are the services I provide? And why would you want to get them from me if you can start there, then I think the rest can start to work itself out. 

So as we wrap up here, I think lots to cover in this general area. And like I said, Celina, I look forward to doing more sessions on this general topic as we go forward.  

Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thank you, Bill. This has been incredibly informative and insightful. I think it’s incredibly relevant to many of the practices that we work with today, as well as many of the practices that are out there that we don’t work with today. 

And I definitely foresee us digging into this in a little bit more detail. There’s many changes and things to consider as we’re getting moving with the new year here and I fully foresee us digging into this a little bit more, but for anybody that has any questions or would like more information as we post some additional content on this topic and many others, I’d like to invite you to find us on LinkedIn or Facebook or even our website, medicaladvantage.com for blogs, white papers, additional podcasts and webinars that come out on a weekly basis. Should you have any questions, you can also reach out to us directly at info@medicaladvantage.com and thank you Bill again for your time today and thank you always to our audience for listening and we will 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 podcasts so you never miss a show.