Had a chance to talk with Roger May, Senior Marketing Director for Siemens Medical Solutions, who shared some insight on yearly marketing planning. Marketing planning, by the way, is the planned topic of discussion in the October posts on the Health B2B Marketing blog.
Had a chance to interview Bob Turk, chief marketing officer of Precyse Solutions, at the 2010 AHIMA Convention in Orlando. He had an interesting booth—the brand wasn’t front and center. He discusses his reasoning behind diminishing the brand name in the Precyse booth. He also shares some of his thoughts on marketing planning (the October topic on Health B2B Marketing).
In preparation for the 2010 AHIMA Convention in Orlando, I spoke to Diann Brown, HIM Director of Fort Worth hospital, and posted five articles with highlights from our conversation. Here's what I learned...
HIM directors are in airports in all corners of the country today, ready to converge on Orlando and the 82nd AHIMA Convention and Exhibit. Marketers, sales reps and executives from hundreds of health care B2B companies will be doing the same over the next few days. Perhaps you’re among them. Since you’ll be rubbing shoulders with HIM directors next week, now’s a good time to summarize my interview with an HIM director.
I spoke to Diann Brown, HIM Director of Texas Health Harris Methodist Fort Worth hospital last week, and posted five articles (links to articles #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5) with highlights from our conversation. Here’s what I learned:
HIM directors are concerned about revenue cycle. I mentioned in my second post that I had personally heard HIM directors say they didn’t care about revenue cycle management. I realize now that they either didn’t understand the breadth of the revenue cycle, or that they were just turning their noses up at “revenue cycle” as a buzzword. But they do care about revenue. They do care about their involvement in the process and they do care how they manage their involvement. They understand that the insurance reimbursement aspect of the revenue cycle is something they impact positively or negatively–and that their impact on reimbursement is measured by their leaders. They think every day about coding accuracy, coding speed and coding compliance. My advice to health care B2B marketers: Link your revenue cycle message to familiar HIM terms: coding, compliance, reimbursement, backlog (often called “discharged, not final billed” or DNFB).
HIM departments are not an island in the hospital environment. What happens in the hospital, especially on the administrative side, affects HIM. If IT installs an Electronic Medical Record, HIM’s coding, documentation and release of information processes will be affected. If radiology installs a new PACS (picture archiving and communications system), that impacts their documentation workflow. I could mention countless other examples. My advice to health care B2B marketers: Identify trends in the hospital industry and think about ways those trends affect HIM. Then you’ll be able to see how your organization’s products, services and value proposition can help HIM solve a problem.
HIM leaders want the same thing from sales and marketing as any other health B2B audience. HIM people aren’t typical finance people. They’re certainly a breed apart from IT people. There is definitely a different vibe at an AHIMA conference than there is at an HFMA conference or a HIMSS conference. But HIM leaders want the same thing out of sales and marketing as any other B2B audience: they want partners. They want relevant information. They gravitate to organizations that can make their work easier. My advice to health care B2B marketers: avoid one-shot marketing. Buying a list and blasting a “buy now” message to every person on that list may work for some low ticket items. But the better strategy for products and services that require a higher monetary commitments is to nurture your leads. Cultivate your own mailing list. Grow trust with relevant content and timely offers. Provide just-in-time information. Build a relationship so that when HIM leaders need what you can provide, they’ll know and trust and seek out what you offer.
My thanks to Diann Brown for taking time out of her busy schedule to talk with me. And my thanks to you for reading. I’ll see you in Orlando.
HIM directors are in airports
HIM directors want to keep up with all the changes and challenges in their field, and advertising in HIM publications is a good idea.
In my last post, HIM Director Diann Brown shared a good sales experience she had with vendors, as well as talked about the times she pays attention to marketing. Today, we discuss how marketers can help HIM directors like her keep up with the recent changes in health information management.
Diann mentioned the challenges of changes such as ICD-10 and RAC audits. So I also asked Diann, with all the changes she’s seeing in HIM, how does she stay on top of them?
“I read a lot,” she said. “It’s very difficult to keep up. I will admit that. And sometimes I just feel like I know a little about a lot; enough to ask the right questions.”
Although we didn’t talk about the publications she reads, I’m fairly certain, because of her membership on the AHIMA board of directors, that she reads the Journal of AHIMA. In fact, in the years that I’ve been working with HIM directors, I’ve found that the Journal is the most widely-read professional publication among HIM directors. The next most-trusted publication is For the Record, and the third most-trusted publication, even before they went online only, was Advance for Health Information Professionals.
Those HIM directors like Diann who want to keep up with all the changes and challenges in their field will read one of the above-mentioned publications, and, in my opinion, advertising in these publications’ print and online property is a good idea. They may also appreciate vendor-created content that gives her a view into issues that matter to her and that do it clearly and succinctly.
Sales and marketing professionals should develop relationships with HIM directors, so that when there's a problem to be solved, they'll turn to companies they know and trust.
In yesterday’s post, Diann Brown shared her thoughts on the biggest challenges facing Health Information Management. In today’s post, I’ll share a few impressions that this HIM director and AHIMA board member has about vendor sales and marketing.
HIM directors seem to look favorably on companies that view her problems as their own. Diann told me about an experience she had where two of vendors worked together to help her solve an issue with her department’s workflow.
“Both vendors were very focused on the needs of our organization and how their product could best meet those needs,” Diann said. “They didn’t pull out a heavy sales pitch or anything, or promise this or that. But they asked questions like, ‘What is your business problem, and this is how we can address that.’ ”
I also asked her to share with me some example of a marketing piece–whether an ad, an email, a website or a mailer—that was particularly memorable. Not surprisingly, nothing came to mind. She said she doesn’t consciously pay attention to marketing. But she did say that when she’s interested in something, she’ll do her reading all at one time. To me, that means that marketers need to focus their attention on their websites, optimizing them for search engine traffic. We should also consider keyword advertising so we can strike while the iron is hot.
But perhaps most importantly, sales and marketing professionals should develop relationships with HIM directors, so that when there’s a problem to be solved, they’ll turn to companies they know and trust.
Photo credit: Vaguely Artistic, (cc)
The implementation of the EHRs has fundamentally altered coding workflow, and has made HIM directors look for new ways to be efficient.
In part two of my interview with Diann Brown, we discussed the priorities of an HIM director. In Diann’s case, she focused first and foremost on her employees and on her revenue cycle numbers.
In today’s installment, Diann talks about some of HIM’s greatest challenges.
When I asked Diann about the challenges facing HIM, I thought she’d say something about ICD-10 or the increasing number of government audits, but her answer surprised me: “The implementation of electronic health records,” she said.
Now, ICD-10 and government audits are definitely concerns, and Diann’s department is doing all they can to be prepared. But EHRs are fundamentally changing the way she and her staffers work.
“The biggest thing in HIM is workflow,” Diann said. “I always want to be efficient. We don’t have time or the staffing to do things two and three times.”
The implementation of the EHR in her hospital has made Diann and her management staff look for new ways to be efficient. For instance, getting rid of paper records also meant her employees no longer had visual cues. A tall stack of records on a coder’s desk, for instance, signaled to the coder that she needed to buckle down and get rid of her backlog. Without that stack of files, Diann’s team has developed tools such as daily reports to bring the coding backlog back into view.
Besides workflow, the move to electronic records is causing more and more organizations—Texas Health Resources included—to move towards centralization. Just this year, Texas Health centralized its transcription services. Using software from Nuance, transcriptionists do less traditional transcription and more transcript editing. And the results of their new transcription model were immediate.
“We saw a huge increase in productivity,” Diann said, “and we were able to decrease turnaround time, which was even more important.”
My takeaway from today’s article: New technology can make things better, but it can also have unintended or unanticipated consequences.
In tomorrow’s article, we’ll discuss an HIM director’s view on vendors.
Photo credit: Darwin Bell, (cc)
I asked an HIM director about her focus at the start of each day. Her answer: Revenue cycle and people.
This week, in the run-up to the AHIMA Convention in Orlando, I’ll be posting one article a week about HIM directors. In my last post, I introduced Diann Brown, an HIM Director and a member of the AHIMA board of directors. She offered a terrific overview of the responsibilities an HIM director has. As far as her day-to-day responsibilities, she starts by focusing on two things: revenue cycle and people.
As a leader, she knows that when she’s visible to her employees, it makes a difference in their morale. She spends about 20 minutes a day walking her department, talking to coders and clinical documentation specialists and HIS specialists, being personable and talking about work-related issues. “It’s very informal,” Diann said. “But when I don’t do it, (my employees) miss it.”
Her revenue cycle focus may come as a surprise for some marketers. I have personally spoken with HIM directors who say that revenue cycle doesn’t concern them. But as for Diann, who doesn’t even report to the CFO (she reports to a vice president of medical and information management), revenue cycle is top of mind.
“We’re a 700-bed hospital, and our HIM goal is to have our unbilled accounts at $2.5 million. Actually, we have been able to maintain below $1 million on a regular basis and have been below $600,000 ,” Diann said. “It takes a lot of coordinated effort to make that happen.”
It seems to me that it’s her determination to meet her goals that makes the difference.
“When I didn’t focus on it every day, it was like being on a roller coaster,” Diann said. “It was up and down every week. And we never knew if we would hit our goal every week. I would think we would and then we wouldn’t, but now that I look at it every single day, Monday through Friday, we always hit our goal.”
Diann looks at high level reports every morning, which categorize her “unbilled accounts,” or Discharged Not Final Billed (DNFB), into inpatient, outpatient, emergency, Medicare and non-Medicare. She looks at the aging of the accounts, and if there are any cases in those areas that age over seven days, they get flagged and are followed-up on. She looks for issues that her department manages that may be keeping the hospital from delivering claims: physician queries that aren’t being answered, cases that have been returned from billing for HIM review, accounts that have data integrity issues, and the like.
In tomorrow’s post, we’ll discuss the biggest challenges facing HIM.
I interviewed Diann Brown, an HIM Director with more than 30 years of HIM experience. Here's the first installment of our interview.
Health Information Management is a complex field. To excel in HIM, you need the understanding of a lawyer, the knowledge of a medical researcher and the problem solving skills of a physician. If you’re an HIM director, you also need the motivation skills of a professional coach and the ability of an executive to see the “big picture.”
And if you’re marketing or selling to HIM directors, you should know what their work lives are all about.
I had a chance to speak to Diann Brown, HIM Director for Texas Health Harris Methodist Fort Worth and member of the American Health Information Management Association board of directors. I asked her to describe her job:
“I describe my department as the wheel in the middle of the wheel,” Diann said. “All these spokes are coming off of it where we actually have some type of interaction with all the ancillary and clinical departments. Everything that people do to take care of our patients, somehow HIM is impacted.”
She says she’s responsible for the operations of the department, which consist of coding, physician completion (or documentation) and data integrity. She’s responsible for compliance with regulatory agencies, release of information (ROI) and keeping up with of all the latest regulatory requirements and changes. She works with all the ancillary and clinical departments that touch a medical record, helping them resolve any issues they may have with documentation. She has a clinical documentation improvement program that reports to her. She also works with case management, with nursing services, with pharmacy, respiratory therapy and rehab.
“You know,” she said, “we run the gamut.”
In my next post, I’ll discuss an HIM director’s priorities.
Photo credit: AHIMA
September's topic on the Health B2B Marketing blog is HIM. I'll focus on the leaders of these departments and share insights into how you can make your products and services invaluable to them.
Health Information Management. Use those three words together in a sentence, and most peoples’ eyes glaze over. It’s not a sexy topic, but it’s certainly an important one.
Health Information Management, or HIM, is responsible for so much. The various HIM departments at hospitals and other health care providers ensure our medical records are accurate, safe and private. They collect and maintain patient and care data that is used for clinical, financial and epidemiological purposes. In a time when information technology, security and privacy are hot-button issues, it’s no wonder that HIM is receiving so much more attention.
If you’re a marketer for one of the thousands of health care vendors in the U.S., chances are that Health Information Management, or HIM, is part of your market. And if that’s the case, you may also be preparing for one of the largest health care B2B trade shows in the country: the 2010 American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Convention in Orlando, September 24-30.
September’s topic on healthB2Bmarketing.com is HIM. We’ll focus on the leaders of these departments—typically director-level employees—and share insights into how you can make your products and services invaluable to them.
Sales and marketing coordination meetings can improve both marketing and sales efforts. Read on for tips on making your meetings successful.
We’ve been talking all month about the need for health care B2B sales and marketing professionals to combine their efforts for greater success. I appreciate all the people who have commented on LinkedIn and via email. I want to cap off the month by offering some tips for marketing folks as they conduct regular meetings with their sales colleagues.
In my last post, I mentioned that a key component of working with my sales reps was a bi-weekly meeting. Depending on your situation, a bi-weekly meeting may seem like too often, or it may not seem often enough. Whatever timing works well for you and your sales peer, make sure that the meetings are scheduled and that they happen.
Talk about marketing activities: Your lead generation campaigns should be the first item on the agenda. Share every point in the planning process. If you’re in the strategy phase, share your messaging with sales and get their feedback. They talk with your audience everyday and often have insight into messaging that you may not have considered.
If you’re in the development phase, share your timelines, warts and all. Let them know when to expect the campaign to run. If you’re in the launch/flight phase, share successes, talk about hot leads, ask for progress reports on leads that you’ve sent over. That final point—progress reports on leads—is critical. Just as we need to be accountable to sales for developing leads, sales needs to be accountable to marketing for working the leads. It’s not enough to run reports from your sales automation tool; be consistent about asking sales to account for your leads.
Lead generation is likely not the only sort of campaign your working on, so be sure to give your sales lead a full update on your lead nurturing programs, your social media activities, your advertising campaigns, your traditional media outreach and your sales support efforts. All this will help sales to understand how you’re influencing the marketplace.
Talk about sales activities: Some of this will automatically happen as you discuss marketing generated leads. But you should also talk about the “big fish” that the sales team is trying to land. Talk about wins (how to replicate them) and losses (what went wrong). Talk about how individual sales territories are performing, about how marketing may be able to help in under-performing areas. Talk about prospect feedback and concerns. You can use all this information as you develop strategy and messaging.
Talk about issues: Sales and marketing, as we’ve discussed previously, often share an underlying animosity. To make sure that animosity doesn’t simmer into full-blown hatred, discuss any and all concerns during this regular meeting. Take on the role of a problem solver, but be sure to listen, and make sure your colleague knows she’s being heard.
When marketing is supporting sales efforts—by providing leads, nurturing contacts, influencing the marketplace—sales works better. The converse is true: when sales supports marketing—by providing feedback, first-hand market intelligence, and customer insight—marketing works better. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle: it’s a successful cycle. And you can help keep this cycle moving by holding regular sales and marketing coordination meetings.