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 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.

Photo credit: eflon

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.

Photo credit: Benben

In order to perform your best at ANI, you've got to play to the finance crowd. To help you get your mind in tune, here are some previously published tips...

Three more days until HFMA’s ANI: The Healthcare Finance Conference. For companies that specialize in revenue cycle products and services, this is THE show of the year. If you’re exhibiting or networking at the show, you’ve likely been preparing for months. It’s like you’ve been preparing for a staged production: You’ve got the script, the stage, the set and the lighting all ready: now you’re preparing for the curtain to go up.

In order to perform at your best, you’ve got to play to your crowd. So, to help you get your mind in tune for the type of audience you’ll be seeing, here are some links to some previous Health B2B Marketing blog posts that deal with CFOs:

Get into a CFO’s head: Want to know what a CFO worries about? It’s really very simple: cash position, cash flow and revenue.

Remember, a CFO is much more than a pencil pusher: Think of a CFO as an entrepreneur on salary. Focus on how your organization help them create value for their organization.

Make sure your CFO pitch is on key: Like every executive, a health care CFO has limited time. Click for three principles on how not to waste his or her time.

Use solid marketing strategy to influence CFOs: CFOs will tell you that they don’t pay attention to marketing. But they do pay attention to a compelling value story, evangelizing influencers, and respected brands.

Prove that a CFO will get maximum bang for their buck: In this economy, it’s crucial to have a value story that includes ROI and cost savings.

If you’re planning on being at ANI, please share in the comments. I’d love to introduce myself. Enjoy the show!

Original photo credit: Algemeen

With some physicians unhappy about HITECH's meaningful use requirements (not sure how this one feels), it's time for health IT marketers to ease up on the stimulus message.

It’s been a year since ARRA and HITECH were passed into law. In many ways, HITECH has revitalized health IT. At the end of 2008, our industry was in a funk. But today, we’ve experienced a 180-degree turn. The excitement around the industry was palpable at HIMSS10.

But I’m also noticing some wariness among the very markets that health care IT is banking on: health care providers.

Physicians especially seem to be expressing reservations. Last month, 96 organizations representing hundreds of thousands of physicians complained that proposed “meaningful use” requirements that sprang from HITECH are onerous and should be scaled back. When the proposed requirements were released in January, some commenters objected vehemently:

Why would health care professionals be willing to deploy complex user unfriendly time consuming devices that disrupt medical care and cause new errors which put patients at risk while being paid less for their work? … My best advice: do not purchase or accept to be gifted this equipment. (Suzie, RN, from HIStalk blog comments)

The clinical practices will experience lower efficiency and more errors from these poorly designed devices. (Noah Praetor, MD, from HIStalk blog comments)

The latest journal of Health Affairs is mostly focused on health IT and meaningful use. One of the articles was headlined: The gold rush is on. That’s certainly the message we’ve been sending. And a year after ARRA, it’s the wrong message.

A recent analysis (PDF) performed by Ingenix Consulting suggests that providers aren’t likely to see the financial benefits of EMRs until five-to-seven years after they implement. Stimulus money may not be enough to get docs to buy.

But many health IT vendors are still mostly focused on monetary benefits to providers. They’re guaranteeing meaningful use and offering no-interest financing. Those are all good ideas, but they should no longer be our main message.

Our messages should be attacking the pain that physicians are feeling: uncertainties about EMR benefits, worries about down time, concerns about clinical disruption.

Their concerns are valid, and they can only be assuaged by one of their own. I recommend finding a satisfied client who can tell a story about your ease of use, about your smooth installation process, about your comprehensive training, or about another key satisfier.

Better yet, show that you truly understand providers’ concerns by partnering with insurance companies and large employers—organizations who stand to greatly benefit from ubiquitous EMRs—to offer doctors even more monetary incentives for using your EMR. That may be a pipe dream, I know, but the vendor that could pull it off would get the attention of every doctor and hospital in America.

Stimulus funding is still an important topic. The current rules use a carrot and a stick to encourage meaningful EMR use—physicians who aren’t using EMRs will eventually be penalized. But our messaging needs to position us more like partners and less like profiteers.

What are your thoughts about EMR messaging?

Photo credit: The Doctr

What is health care B2B's killer social app? I started with a question and what I thought was my answer...

I just had an experience that I often have as a writer, where I start with an article idea but end up writing something completely different.

I fully expected to finish this post concluding that Twitter is health care B2B’s killer social app. It’s not.

I love Twitter. I’m on it every day. I’ve made some valuable connections through Twitter. But it’s not the killer social app, the one site health care marketers need to focus on, exclusive of all others.

Here’s where I started: a health care B2B marketer’s ultimate goal is to help her organization develop loyal, satisfied customers. To achieve that goal, she positions her company as a trusted resource with health care decision makers and influencers, persuading them that her company’s product or service is the best solution (i.e., attraction marketing). But before she can persuade, she must have built and nurtured a relationship between her company and her prospect. I’m a believer that social media can help us build relationships, so what’s the one social site we marketers should use to build strong relationships?

Let’s start with Twitter. The best thing about Twitter is its low barrier to entry. It’s easy to get started and easy to learn. You can make quick connections with the people or organizations with whom you want to connect, since the culture on Twitter lends itself to inclusion, not exclusion.

But finding and making the right connections on Twitter is not easy. I’ve heard people compare Twitter to a gigantic cocktail party. You might be at the party, totally on your game and making great conversation, but the right people may be at the other end of the ballroom. Or they may not be there at all. Most of the health care B2B marketers I talk to are intrigued by Twitter, but not convinced that their audience is there.

What about Facebook? It’s the social app that seemingly everyone is on. In fact, in February, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that there were 400 million users on Facebook worldwide. Facebook has also posted some undated statistics that state roughly 70% of their users are outside of the United States. If that percentage holds true, that means that there are roughly 120 million U.S. Facebook users, which means that roughly one out of every three Americans is on Facebook—a staggering number. That also means there’s a good chance that your audience is on Facebook. Facebook has some decent tools for businesses, as well: fanpages, groups and Facebook’s unique ad formats give health care B2B companies some good options.

But let’s be honest: the main reason people are flocking to Facebook isn’t to make business relationships. It’s more for personal reasons: to connect with old school friends (and flames), to stay in touch with family, and, if you’re network is anything like mine, it’s to play those hideous browser games that clutter my Facebook news feed. Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong: health care B2B marketers need to have a Facebook strategy, but it’s not our killer social app.

So, maybe it’s LinkedIn. In terms of why people use it, it’s the polar opposite of Facebook. Professionals use LinkedIn to stay in touch with former colleagues, to make new connections through their current network, to find job leads, to ferret out new business opportunities. It’s a great source for business research, whether you’re looking to hire a new employee or find out more about a prospect or a competitor. Tools such as business profile pages, LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers can be great ways to promote your business and develop relationships. Honestly, it’s probably the closest thing we have to a killer B2B social app.

But it has its limitations. The culture of LinkedIn is exclusive, not inclusive. You’re limited by the network you have. Sure, your three-deep connections may give you access to 2 million or so professionals, but that’s only theoretical access. Your first level network is really the only group to which you have open access. I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2004, and I have about 350 connections. I like and value all the people that have connected with me, but they’re not all prospects. Answers and Groups are options to give you access to potential prospects, but so much of what I see on these areas is truly spam—sales hacks trying to make a quick buck, not develop real relationships. And there’s nothing that will poison a marketing well faster than opening up a few million cans of spam.

So, in conclusion, there is no one killer social app for health care B2B—no social site that we should use to the exclusion of all others. Rather, health care B2B marketers should develop a comprehensive strategy to utilize the strengths and manage the weaknesses of all these sites, plus others that are continuing to emerge.

And because I wrote this blog, I now know that the killer social app for developing relationships isn’t just one site. The killer relationship-building app for health care B2B is, simply, social media.