social media

Are terrorists smarter than us?

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Sri Lanka has been in a twenty-six year civil war with the Tamil Tigers. NPR reported the leader of the Tigers was killed. Within a day, the Tamil Tigers’ web site posted a blurb stating that the leader was not killed—a la Monty Python—“I’m not dead yet.”

I’ll be brief. The bad guys. These bad guys live in the jungles, others live in the Afghan mountains. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, they don’t use Cisco servers, they don’t have a call center. There’s no marketing department, no financial analysts, no freshly minted MBAs walking the hallways telling them what to do.  They have established virtual nations.

Yet as primitive as these groups are, they know the value of rapidly employing social networking to their advantage. What amazes me is not that they do it, but that most people reading this don’t have a proactive policy and the resources required to effectively manage their social media.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

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Hospital marketing strategies–my non sequiter

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I had piloted the Piper Cub for seven hours across endless miles of ocean.  The crash of my small plane left me alone on the uninhabited treeless atoll somewhere in the south Pacific.  I would have been sunburned badly if not for the shade cast by the thirty-foot tall New Jersey hospital’s billboard heralding its urology practice.  The billboard reminded me of the one I saw while solo kayaking the lower regions of Antarctica.  That billboard was from a hospital in Minot, North Dakota advertising its OB/GYN services.  Did you know there has never been a birth in Antarctica?

Hospital marketing has doubled in the last decade.  To whom are they marketing?  Appendectomies; twenty-percent off.  Maybe I’ll get two.  Perhaps I’ll buy some Plavix while I’m at it.

Ninety percent of hospital revenues result from a physician’s signature.  From where does the other ten percent originate, marketing?  Doubtful.  Do the billboards yield more physician signatures?

Hospital television advertising seems to focus its shotgun message in one of two areas; unsubstantiated claims of being the best or having the most, or having the latest and greatest machine that goes “Ping.”  You’ve seen the commercials broadcast to a television coverage area of a few million, advertising newly acquired technology for a non-elective procedure—that cost more than a few million—that less than a fraction of a single percentage of the population will need.  By the way, it is the same piece of technology that three other areas hospitals offer.

I am not sure I understand the logic behind hospital marketing.  Does it merely stem from the fact that other businesses do it?  I have personal knowledge of one hospital’s chief marketing officer whose annual salary exceeds more than four hundred thousand dollars.  She had no prior experience in healthcare.

Would revenues drop precipitously if hospitals did not market themselves?

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

Abnormal

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I remember the first time I entered their home I was taken aback by the clutter. Spent and wet leaves and small branches were strewn across the floors and furniture. Black Hefty trash bags stood against the walls filled with last year’s leaves. Dozens of bright orange buckets from Home Depot sat beneath the windows. The house always felt cold, very cold. After a while I learned to act normally around the clutter.

There came a time however when I simply had to ask, “Why all the buckets? What’s the deal with the leaves?”

“We try hard to keep the place neat,” she replied.

“Where does it all come from?” I asked.

“The windows.”

I looked at her somewhat askance. “I’m not sure I follow,” I replied as I began to feel uneasy.

“It’s not like we like living this way; the water, the cold, the mess. It costs a fortune to heat this place.

And, the constant bother of emptying the buckets, and the sweeping of the leaves.”

“Why don’t you shut your windows? It seems like that would solve a lot of your problems.”

She looked like I had just tossed her cat in a blender.

When you see something abnormal often enough it becomes normal. Sort of like in the movie The Stepford Wives.  Sort of like Patient Relationship Management (PRM). The normal has been subsumed by the abnormal, and in doing so is slowing devouring the resources of the hospital.

Are you kidding me? I wish. It’s much easier to see this as a consultant than it is if you are drinking the Kool Aid daily. When I talk to people about a statistic that indicates that 500 people called yesterday about their bill, and everyone looks calm and collected, it makes me feel like I must be the only one in the room who doesn’t get it—again with The Stepford Wives.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

If I ask about it they always have an answer.  “Billing calls are usually around 500 a day.”  They say that with a straight face as though they are waiting to see if I will drink the Kool Aid. It’s gotten to the point where no matter how bad things get, as long as they are consistently bad, there not bad at all.

This is the mindset that enables the PRM manager (I know you don’t have one—I am being facetious) to be fooled by their own metrics. When is someone going to understand that repeatedly having thousands of people calling to tell your organization you have a problem, means you have a problem?

It would probably take less than a week to pop something on your web site, and post a YouTube video explaining how to read the bill.  Next week, do the same thing and help patients understand how to file claims and disputes—granted, you may need more than a week for this one.

PRM Roadkill

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(AP) New York. CNN reported that PRM died. Services will be held next Monday at Dunkin Donuts. Patients are asked not to attend, but instead to forward their complaints to Rosie O’Donnell.

A fellow, David Phillips, wrote, “Relationships should be considered part of the intrinsic value of the corporation”—he is an auditor. I read a paper co-authored by a slew of PhDs who concluded that the six components for measuring relationships include; mutuality, trust, commitment, satisfaction, exchange relationship, and communal relationship. I feel better just knowing that.

Patient Relationship Management—PRM. I hate being the one to break the news but, PRM is dead. I didn’t kill it. It’s dead because it never existed.  Relationship Management.  Who is actually measuring a relationship? What unit of measure do you use? Inches, foot-pounds, torque? PRM Carcasses are strewn about. You can’t manage what you can’t or don’t measure.

“What are you talking about?” She hollered. “We measure. We measure everything. If it’s got an acronym, we’ve got a measure for it. KPIs. CSFs. ACD. IVR. ATT. AHT. Hold time. Abandonments. Churn.”

Just because something is being measured, it doesn’t mean that the measure has anything to do with the desired outcome. I’d wager my son’s allowance that nobody uses a single quantifiable metric that precisely points to the health of an individual patient relationship. Seems silly? No sillier than really believing you have an ability to manage something as ephemeral and esoteric as relationships.

Just how good are those relationships everyone thinks they’ve been managing? Five percent higher than last month?  Down three percent over plan?  Permit me a brief awkward segue. Joseph Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths are a statistic.” The point is that scale matters—a great deal.  One death versus a million.  One patient interaction versus millions.  It makes a difference. The things we do that impact patients impact them individually, one at a time.

Technology metrics apply to patients—plural. Technology metrics are averages—patients aren’t.  You are measuring against the masses.  The mass does not churn, does not leave your hospital, does not ask to speak to a supervisor.  If I am the patient, not a single metric, not a single measure in your hospital accurately depicts the success or failure of our interaction.

So, what’s a mother to do? Stop pretending you are managing your business by managing relationships—since it’s not possible to do the latter, it follows logically that you can’t possibly be doing the former.

Here’s what you can do, manage your hospital using things you can measure. You can start by defining metrics for the following;

Patient Referral Management—how many patients came via referral?

Patient Resolution Management—how many patient problems were fixed?

Patient Recovery Management—how many patients did you win back?

Patient Retention Management—how many patients did you prevent from going elsewhere?

Show these to the VP of Operations and all of a sudden you have something to talk about. Show the VP how much you reduced some global metric—so what?

The doctors’ thoughts on social media are probably correct

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Some more thoughts on the post on KevinMD’s site stemming from Dr. Gwenn’s blog.

Justifiable on-line road rage.  I run a consulting firm.  You know what?  I hate it—running the firm, that is.  The consulting is great fun.  I am guessing that being a physician is a lot like that.  Very few of you became doctors to run a business, let alone one that is front and center on the evening news, Twitter, and every other blog on the planet.  Add to that a government who is changing the business model without any thought to how it impacts your business.  They want a nationalized healthcare system whereby each patient can be accessed by any doctor—that has nothing to do with your effort to treat actual people.

Interesting discussion, and the comments are spot on, especially the, “Where’s the beef” comments.  It is silly to expect that overlaying a few technologies makes things better.  This reminds me a little of Dorothy running around in ruby slippers, and the magic answer was clicking her heels three times.  Unless K-mart had a big sale on ruby slippers, there is no quick win technology for doctors lining the shelves of Office Max.

To rub salt in the wound, the government is forcing more technology on physicians, namely EHR.  If the technology was as great as the prognosticators write, doctors would be scrambling to be first in line.  Has that happened?  Of course not.  Instead, the government is taking a Tony Soprano approach, offering rebates for doctors who take a course they don’t want to take, alternatively, burying bodies off the New Jersey Turnpike.

So, some tactical thoughts starting with EHR.  Don’t do anything yet.  You have at least a year.  Yeah, you won’t get the ARRA money—that’s according to what’s written.  Guess what?  Nobody else will get it either.  The ONC will have to change either the timing of Meaningful Use, or the rules, or both.  I think they will push it back.  Twelve to eighteen months from now, someone will offer a robust, shrink-wrapped solution that makes sense.  If you’re interested, here’s a link to an audio interview I did for doctors about an EHR strategy—it’s just ideas, I’m not pushing anything.  Go to EMRFIX.com and search for the link.

Other practical thoughts.  There are a few hundred thousand doctors, none of whose Hippocratic Oath said anything about healthcare 2.0, or offered any training on how to get there, or whether you should even try to get there.  Most of my physician friends set up their business model on a whim and a prayer, like all entrepreneurs do—like I did.  There are probably as many business models for doctors as there are doctors.  The good news is that some have done better figuring out the business side of healthcare than others.  It’s not an ego thing.  It’s not about being intellectually gifted and not being smart enough to figure out something as simple as running a business.  Why?  Smart has nothing to do with it.  There are things to be learned from the efforts of others, and there are ways that some of the technologies can help.

Those things?  Blocking and tackling.  Business processes.  Social media.  Eliminate the rework.  Eliminate whatever tasks that don’t add value to your business.  Are there activities you can outsource?  Payroll?  Can you have someone design a website that will answer questions for your patients so they don’t have to call you?  Can you collaborate with other doctors?

Just some ideas.  You are justified in your angst.

The parabolic parable

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The bad thing about being a former mathematician in my case is that the emphasis is on the word former. Sometimes I’m convinced I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned.—sort of like the concept of negative numbers. It’s funny how the mind works, or in my case goes on little vacations without telling me. This whole parabola thing came to me while I was running, and over the next few miles of my run I tried to reconstruct the formula for a parabola. No luck.

My mind shut that down and went off on something that at least sounded somewhat similar, parables. That got me to thinking, and all of a sudden I was focused on the parable of the lost sheep, the one where a sheep wanders off and the shepherd leaves his flock to go find the lost one, which brings us to where we are today.

Sheep and effort.  Let’s rewind for a second. Permit me to put the patient lifecycle into physics for librarian style language—get the patient, keep the patient, lose the patient.  These are the three basic boxes where providers focus resources. How well do we do in managing that lifecycle to our advantage? We have marketing and sales to get the patient, we have patients care to keep the patient.  Can anyone tell me the name of the group whose job it is to lose the patient?  Sorry, I should have said to not lose the patient. Freudian—actually, we probably have our pet names for the department who we fault for patients leaving.

Where do most providers spend the majority of their intellectual capital and investment dollars? Hint—watch their commercials. It’s to get the patient. Out comes the red carpet. They get escorted in with the white glove treatment. Once they’re in, the gloves come off, to everyone’s detriment. Nobody ever sees the red carpet again. A high percentage of a firm’s budget is to get the patients, and another large chuck for existing patients. Almost nothing is spent to retain exiting patients.

Existing versus exiting. Winning providers roll out the red carpet when patients exit. They do this for two reasons. One, it may cause a patient to return. Two, it changes the conversation. Which conversation? The one your ex-patient is about to have with the rest of the world. How does your firm want that conversation to go?

What’s the ROI from Social Media for a hospital?

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Did you know there’s a hospital in the US whose web site gets 2,000,000 hits a month?

Did you know that same hospital tracks how patients made the decision to use their services?

Did you know that more than $2,400,000 dollars in fees came about as a direct result of the web site?

I’d bet the ROI on that exceeds everything else in the hospital.

Have you lost the social media turf war to your patients?

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Remember as kids trying to see how many bumble bees you could catch in a jar before you panicked and they all got lose? You couldn’t get the top all the way on and all of a sudden dozens of bees exited the jar as you raced across the field of clover. That’s how patients are. You try and catch as many as you can, but once they get out it’s over. So, here we go again. Social networking. We’ll get there in a moment.

For those old enough to remember the seventies, what are you able to recall about high school? If you’re like me, much of it’s selective. The web seems to be changing some of that. Classmates.com. Facebook. Ever notice how there are no rules? Anyone can get to anyone else. Unhindered. Uninvited.

There are those who never grew up, and there are those who never grew older–there’s a difference. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Like for instance trading emails with the girl in the red velvet dress, the one with whom you first slow danced in the ninth grade.

Then there’s the other side to the social networking coin. A darker side. Unless you happened to be among the minutia of students who gambolled care freely down the crowded halls during those four years believing that the school year book should only contain your picture, graduating high school gave you your out, gave you permission to euphemistically bury the bourgeoisie who needed burying. People who, when you were eighteen wouldn’t put you out if you were on fire, the very people who probably set you ablaze, now knock digitally on your facebook door asking to befriend you. Did I miss something here? The part where my fabebook-buddy-wannabe says, “Now that we’re grownup, forget I was a jerk in high school, ignore the fact that I was dumber than a bowl of mice”—sounds like I may have missed one or two of my twelve-step meetings. Recovery is progressing well—really.

Just because a hospital is paranoid doesn’t mean their customers don’t hate them. Poltergeists. The undead. The kind of customers you’d hope you’d never hear from. And yet, those are the very ones who bother to write about their experience. They Twitter, and blog, and YouTube your organization. Don’t take my word for it.  Run a search and see what you find.  More is being said about you than you are saying about yourself.  That means you are losing the social media turf war, you don’t control the high ground or the conversation.

Patients come back and haunt deliberately. Their haunts are reflected in lower satidfaction, fewer repeat visits, and higher churn. Isn’t technology great?

can you apply social media to Patient Relationship Management (PRM)

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A consultant was on one side of the river; his client was on the other side. The client hollered, “How do I get to the other side?”  The consultant thought for a moment and hollered back, “You are on the other side.”—don’t try this at home kids, we’re professionals.

It goes without saying that rarely am I regarded as one with a high capacity of tolerance.   When things get tough or when meetings are exceedingly dull I like to go to my happy place. Sometimes I get to go to my happy place when I least expect it. Like the time my coffee machine started leaking all over the floor.

Having met such unheralded success repairing my mixer, naturally I took apart my Capresso coffee maker. Not many parts. I put it back together thinking the simple act of dismembering it might have caused it to self-heal. Fill it. Turn it on. Puddle. I called Capresso started to explain my problem. Before I had a chance to finish the rep told me what caused the problem, asked for my address, and said they would mail a new gasket overnight for free, as in F-R-E-E. No proof of purchase needed.

Talk about managing the customer experience and taking the lead on social networking.  What types of things could you be doing to improve Patient Relationship Management (PRM)?  How could social networking help you improve PRM?

Let’s talk.