Can your practice survive the aging of America?
Can your practice survive the aging of America?
When the market goes boom
There are millions of baby boomers out there. If your practice is entrepreneurial enough, you could reap the rewards of offering preventive care that not only keeps costs of caring for them down but could attract new business to your practice.
"You can’t avoid them. They are decision makers with discretionary income, and you won’t do well by writing them off," says Valerie Davis-Holloway, director of marketing at Health First, a Melbourne, FL-based health system.
Health First has opted to react aggressively. It is marketing preventive services to this segment of the population in the belief that if these patients are healthy, their aging won’t be as expensive as that of their parents, says Davis-Holloway.
Among the programs Health First is starting are a string of fitness centers, mobile mammography units, heart disease prevention programs, and cancer screenings. "It’s not that we are looking to attract baby boomers," she explains. "It’s just that the services we offer attract them, and since they are preventive, they help to keep costs down."
Sarah Holt, FACMPE, administrator of the Cape Girardeau (MO) Surgical Clinic, speaks nationally on practice marketing most recently at the October annual conference of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). She says practices need to take the kind of strategic approach to this market that Health First is taking.
"The bottom line is that as the population ages, physicians will make less money in the future," says Holt. "When boomers come into Medicare and there are a lot of them out there income will drop. The only way to ease that decline is to become very entrepreneurial in your strategy."
Most of the more creative programs such as fitness centers are too expensive for the typical practice, says Holt. But any practice can take some of the following steps that are less expensive:
Start a nurse line to answer patient questions about wellness.
The costs of such a line include only the cost of any additional nurses you hire. But, says Holt, you may be able to use existing staffing.
Play heart-healthy tips instead of music when patients are on hold.
Start a weight loss group for patients, to be held after hours in your office.
Davis-Holloway says the ideas don’t have to be expensive to market, either. "There are a lot of publications that target boomers," she says. "Use them to advertise."
Radio stations with adult music formats are another avenue. "It really becomes easy to reach them through ads," says Davis-Holloway. "As long as you don’t use the word senior,’ you can get their attention."
Health First also uses word of mouth through its various advisory councils to let the community know about its programs. For example, it has a 100-member women’s council which knows all about the mobile mammography program. "I’m sure they pass that information on to their friends and colleagues."
Lastly, she relies on the primary care provider network to let patients know what services Health First provides.
The best way to come up with ideas is to keep an open dialogue with patients, Davis-Holloway says. If you have a small practice and don’t conduct regular patient satisfaction surveys, then that dialogue can be informal. But if you do conduct such surveys, be sure you ask them what is important to them and what services they would like to see you offer.
Another place to get ideas is by reading publications which are geared toward the boomer market, and some of the many books on the graying of America, says Holt. "The more you read, the more ideas you have. It’s called the simmer factor."
Whenever possible, get patients to focus on wellness, says Davis-Holloway. "We do lifestyle management surveys when people come in for mammograms," she says. "It is a way to get people to focus on their risks and what they can do to minimize them."
Holt says this is a great opportunity for practices. "You have to try to think five years ahead of doing, and doing 18 months ahead of market. You can’t be precipitous if you are you end up taking a bath, like the people who brought out laser disks in the 1980s. But if you are careful and plan, you can be a market leader."
• Valerie Davis-Holloway, Director of Marketing, Health First, Melbourne, FL. Telephone: (407) 752-4333.
• Sarah Holt, FACMPE, Administrator, Cape Girardeau (MO) Surgical Clinic. Telephone: (573) 334-3074.
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