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Physician Marketing Planning PlayBook

Overview

Healthcare systems and providers are placing greater emphasis on developing and implementing new strategies for reaching out to and communicating with community physicians.  These physicians can include employed, affiliated as well as non-affiliated referrers.  All have different, but constant needs to keep up with the rapidly changing array of specialized treatments, procedures, technologies and protocols that make up today’s complex healthcare environment.

Hospital marketers are typically called upon to find innovative ways to directly connect with physicians. This white paper is written for them – those trying to complement their traditional outreach methods and are stymied by finding too many marketing methods with physicians.

Meeting Needs

Best practice organizations are astute at obtaining insight regarding the types of information and education that physicians need in their practice.  To optimize physician marketing strategy, it is imperative to align marketing tactics with the priority needs of the physician community. The marketing team plays a critical role in delivering and providing access to the content that helps physicians in their practice, supports them in improving the care they provide to their patients, and in making optimal referral decisions when specialty services are medically necessary.

Understanding individual physician needs and preferences can serve as guidance for the marketing team for identifying and aligning those tactics in a manner that advances physician knowledge about the healthcare facility, optimizes their referral decision making abilities, and results in a continuous flow of patients to the system.

We will next review essential and best practice tactics that should be included in a physician marketing plan.  These tactics come from a combination of work with national leaders in healthcare, thousands of physician interviews, and being in the trenches in physician relations leadership positions.

 Getting Started

The physician marketing plan should consider two strategic areas of focus:

  • Relationship Management – focus is to identify educational and informational needs to optimize referral decision-making, balance customer service and problem resolution to retain current referrers
  • Referral Development – focus is on creating new physician referral relationships, minimizing leakage and splitters and expanding market reach geographically and by physician specialty.

Initial steps require:

 

 

Fill out the contact form below to download the full PDF, which includes a comprehensive list of components that should be included in your plan.

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