As the medical field becomes ripe with an ever-increasing amount of treatments, therapies, products, and medications, healthcare companies have learned that their marketing needs to take a different approach. Enter patient centricity. However, that is just one piece of an ever-expanding marketing plan to ensure that patients are getting the best care possible. The newest step in this plan? Targeting referral physicians. But first, let’s go back to the basics.

What Is Patient Centricity?

Patient centricity is directly marketing and educating the patient about the healthcare solution, instead of focusing exclusively on the healthcare provider. This allows the patient to be an active participant in their own care, creating positive results for all parties involved.

This is a very high-level overview of patient centricity, to learn more about this strategy and how our teams implement it to bridge the gaps in traditional healthcare marketing, click here!

How Did Healthcare Marketing Get Here?

As the patient centric space has evolved within healthcare, marketing methods have continued to progress with it. It used to be traditional to focus exclusively on the physicians who were doing the procedure, and have them be aware of your solution so they can implement it at a base level. Over time, marketers realized that targeting patients, educating them so they can bring ideas to the provider and be involved in their own care, was another crucial piece of the puzzle.  

That leads us to where we are today, the final piece of the healthcare marketing puzzle, referring physicians.

So Why Target Referral Physicians?

When someone first begins their patient journey, after doing some research on their own, often their first step is to go to a doctor. Most of the time this is a traditional broad-focus doctor, such as a primary care doctor, family physician, etc. These physicians often then refer the patient to someone more specialized in whatever problem they may be facing.

For example, if the patient was having heart problems they may be referred from their primary care doctor to a cardiologist, who would then refer them to an interventionalist who might refer them to an Electrophysiologist.

Within a patient journey, there’s the opportunity for multiple referrals until they finally get to a treatment. With broad-focus doctors, new treatment options and standards of care change so frequently, it’s impossible for them to be up to date on every new option. As the patient goes throughout the referral journey each step provides a chance to either lose or gain their business. Which is why it’s so vital to educate referral physicians.

If the patient goes through several physicians all recommending, or even just able to have a competent and engaging conversation about a treatment, it drastically improves the chances of the patient finding the right solution for them. Easy to say, but difficult to do.

The Problem With Referral Physicians

The biggest problem when it comes to referral physicians is the manpower it would take to connect with them all.

According to the American Hospital Organization there are 6,120 hospitals in the U.S., a large but not unobtainable number. However, if we branch out to include all the clinics in the United States, that number balloons up to 31,748 (according to Xmap). 

When we asked one of our patient centric experts, Sr. Director Zach Champeau, about this problem, he responded

“No healthcare company is ever going to have the resources to send a field rep to every doctor's office and clinic in the world, it just isn’t going to happen”

Which creates a major knowledge gap, and a serious problem for healthcare marketers.

There are journals, publications, and conferences where referring physicians may come into contact and be educated on certain treatments, but now with the evolution of patient centricity, a patient may walk in with a treatment in mind which could be something the doctor has never heard of.

If that patient is trying to have a meaningful conversation with them, it puts the doctor in a rough spot. How are you supposed to have a conversation on if a treatment is the right choice for a patient if you’ve never heard of it in your life?

The Solution

Where we’re seeing companies adapt is knowing that they can’t get into every facility, they instead focus on getting into the right ones at the right time.

To figure out where and when the right time and place is, they focus on a few factors. They look at the meaningful geographies of where they have centers of excellence or field personnel in place to support that patient and that physician population. From there they can reach out to those offices with either a field sales team or an inside sales force, and educate them before that patient walks through the door.

You’re able to get the branded message and the treatment into the clinic, so when the patient walks in the solution (and the company it’s from) isn’t a foreign idea to the physician. This means they may be able to more comfortably and competently engage with the patient, leading to a more productive conversation on both sides.

It all comes down to the idea that you can’t service the whole population, so it’s about educating the right physicians at the right time, based on what you know about where those patients in that disease state are, and where they’re moving toward therapy.

How We Help Clients

We’re educating patients across numerous disease states for multiple clients, and for a select number of our clients, this is the strategy we use.

We look at where our patients are geographically, then we work with the client to identify where their centers of excellence are, and where their field personnel are that could support an in-person detailing (or if they don’t have that, a remote detailing).

This allows us to get into these offices at the right time with an intentional touch.

We don't subscribe to a “we want every office to know about our brand once a month or once a quarter” type strategy. This is highly targeted to best increase our chances of success. We know there are a couple of patients in this area who are moving towards treatment, and we want to make sure when they go into the doctor's office in the next few weeks or months, the referring physicians know enough about our company, product, treatment, etc. to have an informed conversation with the patient.

All of this is facilitated by our top-of-the-line client dedicated inside sales teams, and tenured leadership group.

Conclusion

To summarize, healthcare marketing is a complex puzzle. You need to market to the physician providing the treatment, the patient who is getting the treatment, and the missing piece of the puzzle, the physicians who are going to refer the patient toward that treatment.

If you're looking to add refferal physians to your matketing strategy, schedule a call with us today! Or click here to learn more about our patient centric solutions!