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Bill Klaproth (Host): This is a special podcast produced for the 26th Annual Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategy Summit, HMPS as we speak with session presenters and keynote speakers. With me is Josh Cameron, Vice President of Client Services at Marketware and Nancy Vanselow, Referral Development Manager at Children's Wisconsin Hospital. At HMPS 21, they did a session on Seven Proven Tactics for Practice Growth.

Nancy and Josh, thank you so much for your time. It is great to talk with you. So, if you ever have helped launch a physical practice, you know that no two launches are the same. There's a lot to consider when planning your outreach. So, let's go over your Seven Tactics for Practice Growth. Josh, you're going to give us the tactic and then Nancy will fill it in with an example. So here we go. Let's start with number seven.

Josh Cameron (Guest): Yeah, absolutely. The first one that we'll actually start with is Physician Liaison Teams. In my role at Marketware, we have seen physician liaison teams, really impacted in a unique way over the last 18 months, due to COVID-19 and the pandemic. You know, traditionally the physician liaison role, is a role in which you're meeting with providers face to face, but due to COVID-19 and understandable safety precautions that have been put in place, it's been difficult for a lot of physician liaison teams to do the role the same that they were even just two years ago. We did a survey with clients, earlier this year that found about 58% of our clients, at some point during the pandemic, either had to furlough their liaison, reduce their liaison times, their liaison size, maybe reduced hours. A lot of people are affected and a lot of people ask the question of, hey, can the physician liaison role, still be an effective strategy for practice growth and in my mind, it can.

It's changed a lot in the ways that the role is being done. You have more virtual visits, in-person visits, email, and a couple of other things, and people have started resuming the in-person visits as well. But I think Nancy and her organization, really were able to use their role effectively, over the last two years, despite some of the challenges and while a lot of our teams chose to maybe furlough or reduce their teams, Nancy was actually able to keep her team intact.

So, Nancy kind of turn it over to you to maybe talk about, how you were able to justify keeping your physician liaison teams, maybe how their role was a little bit unique over the last two years?

Nancy Vanselow (Guest): Sure. Thanks, Josh. I have three liaisons and they were kept on throughout the entire last year and a half, not without some effort and some creative thinking and project planning on my piece as a leader. Some of the things that we did, we had some field research that we were planning to outsource and it was a really great opportunity for us to shift the work a little bit for the liaison.

They have relationships with physicians out in the field. And so they actually were able to do some of this field research for us. So they were still making connections, still maintaining relationships with those physicians, while gathering some really great information, intelligence from the field that they traditionally would not be getting.

We are thankfully starting to see the liaisons getting back in person visits. They still are doing some virtual visits. We're seeing a little shrink with that right now. Just because of the current state of pediatric cases in our community. But they're happy to be back doing what they're doing.

But it was really us getting creative, showing data to our leadership. Our leadership values, our referral development team, our physician liaisons, and the impact that they make, in maintaining great relationships, out in the community.

Host: Yeah, that sounds good. So number seven, obviously pay attention to your physician liaison teams. Okay. Josh, let's go to number six.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. An Nancy already started to allude to a little bit, which is really ensuring that your organization, specifically on the physician related side and business development marketing, having a data-driven approach. A lot of these different podcasts and different sessions happened at HMPS, you're going to hear about data quite a bit. And at Marketware, we try and help our clients track a couple of different types of data. The first is going to be field intelligence, which is just really is your physician liaison during the field? What are they learning? What are they talking about? And maybe what's the ROI on that.

The second piece is going to be, to have market where it's external claims data so that you can not only know what's happening in your organization, but you can grow an understanding of what's happening outside of your organization. When providers, aren't sending patients to you, where are they going?

And then the third piece would be internal data, looking at data in your EMR and EHR. And being able to see when a referral pattern shifts, drop off, increase or decrease. And then lastly, we help our clients look at data for provider recruitment and provider onboarding. Now the two parts that I think Nancy and her team have done a really successful job at is on the field intelligence side and then the claims data side as well.

So on the field intelligence side, something that a lot of people have been trying to track is what percent of our visits this quarter were in-person versus virtual or, emails or phone calls. And then there's a variety of other things people might track. They might track service lines or topics or different CMEs.

So Nancy, I'll kind of turn it over to you again to maybe share. When you're asking your physician liaison team to go in and put data in our PRM, what are the different things that you're looking to track and then maybe even report to your leadership?

Nancy: Tracking of our activities is one of my priorities with my liaisons and they, they sometimes, groan a little bit, but one of the most important things with tracking activities, is consistency. Like I mentioned, I have three liaisons in three very different territories with three very different styles of doing their job, but it is so important for us to be consistent with how they are logging their activities. We have a very limited number of topics that are tied to an activity. So that way, when we are reporting out to our leadership and it's consistent, so I can share a report with our Metro Milwaukee and our Kenosha region and the data is going to tell the same story. How we track emails versus in-person visits, are tracked consistently across, because it is again that consistency and being able to report that to the leadership and tell that right, that consistent same story is very important to us. We track nearly everything.

Because, that's a way also for us to show some value of what the liaisons are doing. I've been in this role for quite some time. And because I have such great data, I have been able to get leadership to appreciate the value of our liaisons because of this activity data, showing what they're talking about, who they're talking to, what specialties that they have been talking about. And were able to paint a really clear picture of the effort and the work that the liaisons are doing out in the field.

Host: Yeah, that's really good. So if I heard you correctly, make sure that you ensure your organization has a data-driven approach and be consistent with your physician liaisons' logging and tracking activities. That is number six.

Okay, let's move on to number five.

Josh: The next piece would be the interdepartmental alignment. Something that's interesting for me to see on my side of things, working with a variety of different clients; is oftentimes we're working with the marketing team, the business development teams, strategic planning teams, physician liaison teams.

We target a lot of different departments when it comes to the growth part of an organization. But something that we often find is those particular departments and teams aren't that aligned. I've been on implementation calls in which the marketing folks and the physician liaison folks and the business development folks; they're all introducing themselves, not only to me and my organizations, but really introducing themselves to each other. Obviously each of these teams have different metrics that they're looking at, but they're all working towards driving the growth of the organization. Marketing might be focused more on a patient centric message.

A position liaisons is going to have a more physician focused message and then business development, strategic planning might have more of a data driven kind of approach. But really all of them are looking at different measures that are important to growing the organization. And so I think one of the biggest things you can simply do from a growth opportunity is try and make sure that all of those different departments are aligned and meeting with each other and sharing insights with each other on a regular basis. The marketing team can say, hey, this is what we're seeing on the patient data side of things. Physician liaisons, strategic planning can all share their insights. And I must say, I think Nancy and Children's Wisonsin, one of the very few organizations that we've seen that I feel like do this really, really well.

Nancy, how would you say that your organization has been able to do that so well? Are you meeting with each other on a regular basis? Do you have a set cadence? What is it that kind of allows you to have that alignment that we don't always see in other organizations?

Nancy: I'll tell you this, it did not happen overnight. This has been a journey that we've been on for several years and, to be completely honest, it came down to, top down leadership. Our leader, our chief marketing officer wanted to see alignment. And so we made it happen. One of the most important pieces was having a relationship and communicating and talking. So my peer I'm the manager for referral development my peer the manager for marketing services. We needed to be lock and step. And the shadow that we cast to our team of partnership, collaboration, integration, was essential in order for them to function as a team instead of living in these siloes.

So as, marketing plans are developed and created each year, it is led by the marketing specialist, but, key contributors are our physician liaisons, our referral development team. And it truly is a partnership. And so we're not just, communicating just to consumers inone silo and referring physicians in another silo, we are, have shared goals, shared messages, so that we're also layering those messages. So if we're out in, in the community, talking about a specific topic. I'll just say ear tubes, as a topic, we're making sure our message is getting there with the consumers and as our physician liaisons are out there doing visits, they're doing that as well. We're hitting those same topics, same messages. We are meeting frequently. We do participate in each other's staff meetings frequently. So we can keep those relationships going. We have a monthly content tracker meeting that we have with of the players on this team.

And as we present data back to those specialties, we present it as a united front. So it is marketing and referral development going together as a single team, sharing our data goals results with that medical leadership.

Host: Right. So number five deals with inter departmental alignment. Thank you for that. Okay, Josh, how about number four?

Josh: Nmber four would be looking at the initiative oriented outreach. I think in the past, even before COVID, a lot of physician liason teams, when it came to the providers they were meeting with a lot of it was ad hoc. A lot of it was almost like cold calling, just dropping into a doctor's office unannounced, seeing if you can get some face time with the physician, maybe even an office manager. And a lot of organizations focused on the quantity of visits that their physician liaison teams were doing. Something that we've tried to do at Marketware and in our PRM, is hope, is help our clients really focus more on quality visits, over quantity visits.

And a lot of that is being able to have a somewhat of a preset of list of, hey, here's the list of providers I know I want to target and I maybe need to schedule meetings with, whether it's in person, virtual or whatever type of other communication type you have. And then this is going to be some of the messaging that I'm going to be communicating to that provider. I think Nancy and her team have really done a good job, shifting to this quality over quantity mentality when it comes to the providers that they're visiting with and having conversations. And so, Nancy how is it that your organization really helps segment and target? Like how do you help your team go hey, these are the providers we know we want to be targeting and meeting with. And then something that you've talked to me a lot about is moving away from a service line messaging approach to more of a retention and acquisition approach. So if you just want to share a little bit of insight to that, I think that'd be helpful.

Nancy: Traditionally I think marketing teams are set up to really focus on those service lines. You're hitting the big players. You're hitting the hearts and the cancers and the orthos. What we have at Children's Wisconsin, we have shifted our marketing efforts to patient acquisition and retention. So we're really looking at those services where we have capacity. We work with our operational partners, where do we have capacity to increase the volume? What maybe stumbling, a section that might be stumbling at the moment where we need to work on retaining the patients we have, preserving the referral relationships we have because there may be an access issue.

And so, with the data, again, the data has been so important. So between using our own referral data, being able to begin to look at the claims data, which is a new tool for us, we have been able to make recommendations to our Vice-President leadership team to say, these are the specialties where we should be putting our marketing focus. And we have again, aligned goals with both the marketing team and the referral development team to measure against. We're in the process of it. It is something new that we shifted to this year. We are learning. It is so far, I believe it's been successful. What has been really great, and again, going back to that inter departmental alignment; the liason team, we've sort of functioned that way as a liaison team anyway. We can't just go up there with a heart message or an ortho message because we have to meet the need of the community physicians. And so we needed to be prepared to talk about everything.

Now we're much more aligned with our marketing team and preparing messages and crafting messages and the toolkit for the liaisons out in the field has grown exponentially because they have the resources and the support of the marketing team to have the great information to share when they're out in the field.

Host: So when it comes to outreach, focus on quality over quantity, and you said also focus on patient retention and acquisition. Okay. Josh, how about number 3.

Josh: Yes. would be the pre-visit planning that goes into before you meet with the provider. Being able to use the PRM to look at, hey what are all the past conversations and messages that we've already given this provider, who met with them, how often, what did we talk about? The other piece could be looking at what are their current referral patterns, from your internal data. Our PRM allows you to pull up internal data reports in which you can see, hey, how many referrals that they send me, last month versus the previous month, and what were the different service lines they did it? And then lastly, in our PRM, you can pull up a provider's claims data. And then you can say, okay, I want to see how often this doctor sends to maybe orthopedics. And what percent of the time are they sending to my orthopedic surgeons versus maybe my competitors, orthopedic surgeons? The question for Nancy is so let's say you run into one of those situations. You're getting ready to meet with a provider. You open up the provider's profile in Marketware's PRM, and then you see, okay, this doctor is actually only sending me 30% of their orthopedic patients. They're actually sending the other 60%, maybe in your case, since you guys are pediatrics to an adult orthopedic surgeon. Once you have that insight of, oh wow, this doctor is not as loyal to us as a we thought, obviously your physician liaison, probably isn't walking in that office and just putting the data in the doctor's face saying why aren't you more loyal to me. But like, how do you coach your team? Like once you've noticed, okay, we have a splitter here. How do we go and have a conversation with the doctor about that?

Nancy: So there's a couple of things that they can look at and again, that pre-visit planning is so important. So if they're seeing this cap of someone who's not loyal to us for a certain specialty, we encourage them to look at the other partners in that practice. So if there's other physicians in that practice and look up their referral patterns, and if there's someone, on that team or in that office, that if the numbers vary between them, then tells us maybe it's more of a personal preference, with that physician. If it ends up being an office wide issue with some of the referrals the approach would be a little different. But the data that the liaisons have access to, they have their previous activities that they're going in and looking at that. They're looking at our own referral data. They're armed with that claims data so they can see where the competitors that they may be sending these patients to. So at a start they're coming in ahead of the game. They also have very strong relationships with these physicians. And there's an opportunity then for them to have not so frank have a conversation, but they can go back into their toolkit.

So I mentioned that earlier. Because of that partnership with our marketing team, depth of the toolkit available to the liaisons is deep. We have medical care guidelines. We have education. We have referral guides. We have things in place that can make that referral process potentially easier for that physician.

So they're not sending us for us particular specialty. The liaison then can look to see how can I make that referral process easier? Presenting that to them and kind of digging in and getting out. Is it a relationship thing? Was it a quality care issue, patient satisfaction issue to try to pull that information out of that physician?

Host: Right. So pre-visit planning very important before going in, and then you both talked about claims data, which is very interesting and is becoming very important when you talk about data gathering. Okay. Josh, how about number 2?

Josh: So being able to just prepare for the risk with any strategy or approach that you're taking, you know, oftentimes I've seen in healthcare, someone gets an idea and says, well, let's just run with it. I don't think there's always that pause to maybe think, okay how might my competitor respond to this? What type of referral barriers might I face?

What is it that I should be looking at to know if this was success or failure? Nancy, I think is in a very interesting organizatin compared to most, in that being the primary pediatric provider, really for the whole state of Wisconsin, maybe there's not as many Nancy, competitor questions, when you're trying to do a particular strategy or approach, but anytime you guys start an initiative or a campaign or a particular strategy, are there certain things that you and your organization try and consider is, okay, this is something we want to be able to track as we do this?

Nancy: Yeah, as a team, someone, again, not necessarily that we're at a risk of going out into the community with something. And, we do have risk of something fail, potentially failing. We bring in a service to the community. There is, potential for it to fail. so what we do again, is our relationships with our internal key stakeholders, our operational leaders, our marketing colleagues.

What we try to do is as if the new initiative is brought to us, we gather as much information as possible to see where there might be roadblocks or stumbling blocks that we could come across, out in the field. Patient satisfaction scores. Are the patient's happy with this particular service physicians group? Referring physician satisfaction scores.

Is there available access? Is there time, the next appointment within an appropriate time? Are they geographically accessible to people within the region for patients to be able to be seen? Are there any things in the forecast that we may need to worry about a potential retirement or staff shortages or those types of things.

So that's sort of how we prepare. We prepare with operational information. So that way, if we're out on the field, we can go out with that message or if we need to revisit, pause, redirect. That's how we have within our control of being able to prepare for that risk.

Host: Right. Here we go. Number one, Josh. Give it to us.

Josh: Milestone reviews. Any time, you know, we talked about preparing for the risks, but also being able to make sure that you are setting the right cadence to review and celebrate, hey, this is what worked for us. This is what not worked for us. Maybe this is where we need to pivot. A big push in healthcare for the last couple of years, then the five-year plan.

What is the five-year plan for your organization? And then COVID-19 the pandemic come along and I think everybody's five-year plan got turned upside down. So I definitely think everyone should have that five-year plan. you're obviously not waiting until year five to go to have that conversation of what worked, what didn't work, what do we need to pivot?

And so Nancy in your organization, as you're working through your larger, more long-term strategic plans, like how often is you and your team and your stakeholders getting together and going all right, let's take a step back and let's review

Nancy: We're focused on that patient acquisition and retention model. That is very different than our five-year plan. And so this is something where we have, two times a year, we're checking in with our VP and leadership team and then sharing our metrics, sharing our goals, our success, revisiting are these the right areas of focus for us.

Should we be shifting those? And so we have a good check-in there and then quarterly we're checking in with our medical leadership, making sure we're up to speed on information intelligence from them, operationally. Sharing our data with them of the success that we're seeing. And so really having some good structured quarterly and those twice a year, check-ins with our leadership team is essential.

Host: Well, Nancy and Josh, thank you so much for your time. This has really been informative and insightful. So thank you so much for talking to us about your session today. We appreciate it. Thanks again.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Host: And once again, that's Josh Cameron and Nancy Vanselow. And for more information, visit healthcarestrategy.com/summit. Thanks for listening.