Effectively Marketing The Hospital-Based Wound Care Center

  Chronic wounds affect millions of people, yet awareness of the epidemic is extremely limited. As wound care professionals, it is our responsibility to be stewards of the chronic wound epidemic by educating our physicians and communities to help get more patients the care they need and deserve. To effectively raise awareness, we must not only help potential referring physicians understand the advantages of advanced wound care, but teach them how to identify patients who would benefit from advanced treatment. This article will establish the fundamental processes, tools, and resources needed to successfully market the outpatient wound care center.

Roadmap to Success

  Development and implementation of a comprehensive marketing plan is pivotal to an effective marketing plan. The first step to develop that plan is to understand your market. Consider patient demographics in your primary and secondary service areas and determine from which ZIP codes your patients generally live. While it is imperative to understand the patient population, you must become intimately familiar with the pool of potential referring physicians in the community. You must understand whom your top referral sources are while keeping your finger on the pulse of one-time referring physicians or those who have not referred in more than 6 months. Visiting those inactive physicians and discovering why they stopped referring can give great insight into how you should adjust your strategies or messaging. Don’t forget to market to your internal hospital audience.   Next, develop strategies for marketing your service. Look at patient volumes by wound type to help determine on which etiologies you will focus. Focus on a particular wound type by quarter and assign tactics to support your strategies. Build your physician list based on the specialists who tend to see the types of wounds on which you are concentrating for the quarter and develop messages specific to those specialists.   Effective planning is only one piece of the marketing puzzle; next is developing and disseminating effective messages to appropriate audiences.

Staying on Track

  Once you have identified strategies and tactics to support your marketing plan, there are tools available to help you stay on track. It is important to identify tools from which you can glean measurements of effectiveness so you can monitor and adjust plans accordingly. One of the most effective tools available is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. CRM platforms enable you to proactively plan your physician visits, record visit information, and set follow-up reminders and alerts. Some CRMs have the capability to create dynamic groups that target physicians by specialty or wound type. These systems also offer comprehensive analytics to help measure the return on investment. There are a number of CRM platforms from which to choose; check with your hospital to see if they currently work with a CRM for other service lines.   A less-sophisticated yet effective tool for planning and monitoring activities is a simple spreadsheet to record visits to referring physicians, document the content and result of each visit, and indicate which marketing materials were left with them. A digital calendar can also be used to set reminders for follow-up appointments or phone calls. You should update the spreadsheet whenever a physician refers a patient so that you can measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

Getting the Message Out

  Your plan is in place, your strategies have been identified; now it is time to get the message out. Perhaps the most valuable way to communicate your message is through face-to-face conversation. Invest the time and energy necessary to build long-standing relationships with community physicians and serve as the community wound care expert. Communicate frequently about patient progress, educate physicians about trends in wound care, and share industry research that is relevant to their patients’ needs. Involve your medical director in conversations with referring physicians. Ask your medical director to call and personally thank physicians each time a patient is referred. Leverage the relationships of your panel physicians and ask them to introduce you to those in their circles so you may initiate those conversations.   Another important relationship to develop is with the hospital marketing department. Hospitals often buy bulk media contracts that allow them to frequently change messages. For instance, the hospital may purchase a year of radio spots at a bulk rate. As part of the package, the hospital can feature a physician on a monthly medical news show. The marketing department is usually in charge of sourcing the physicians and providing compelling content for the show. Find out from your hospital marketing department if any of these opportunities exist and work with your physicians to develop interesting topics to pitch. Your willingness to help carry some of the content development burden will nurture your relationship with hospital marketing and earmark the wound center as a valuable resource. Leverage your hospital marketing and public relations contacts’ media relationships; provide relevant, press-ready stories to further identify the wound center as a resource for valuable content. Words of caution: When considering articles, make sure they are newsworthy; include photos or video when appropriate and, in the case of patient testimonials, make sure you have all appropriate release forms signed. You’ve made your visits, paid for advertising, and distributed press releases; now it’s time to measure your results.

Evaluating Your Efforts

  You can market, advertise, and have conversations on end, but have you been effective? Are patients coming through the clinic doors? Do you have new referral sources? One of the most important yet overlooked aspects of a marketing plan is evaluation of efforts. There are a couple of metrics to consider: new patients and new referral sources. Look at your patient volumes and referral sources before and after your targeted marketing campaign and measure the lift in both. These numbers should tell a story about how effectively you are marketing your wound center. It is advisable to intermittently measure your efforts and make any necessary adjustments to message or delivery as appropriate.

Conclusion

  Marketing your wound center can be, at times, a daunting task. Putting a comprehensive plan in place saves you time and makes your visits more effective. You must know your audience and address its needs and the needs of the patients.   Remember, it is the wound care clinician’s responsibility to spread the word about the virtues of advanced wound care. Right now, we are only reaching a fraction of the patients who need our help. New wound centers can make a difference. Christopher Morrison is executive medical director for Healogics Specialty Physicians, Healogics Inc., Jacksonville, FL. Jessica Taft is director of marketing for Healogics Inc., Jacksonville, FL.