mommyjenlin

An interesting discussion started on LinkedIn in the American College of Healthcare Executives Group regarding my original blog on the Re-Emergence of Centers of Excellence. The questions as asked by Howard Gershon, Principal, New Heights Group, LLC., was how would I define a Center of Excellence? A fair question since I had not done that in the original post. My thanks also to L. Elizabeth Mullikin, FACHE, Executive Director, Neurosciences Institute at John Muir Health, Leon Harris, Administrative Resident, Providence Hospital and Roy Orr, FACHE, Consultant, Firethorne Interim Hospital Consulting for their contributions to the discussion. I have seen healthcare organizations all over the board on the topic of Centers of Excellence. Here are the attributes that I consider to make up a Center of Excellence for any disease-state. The ones added by Elizabeth, Leon and Roy are an asterisk. These attributes are not necessarily in order of importance. Board certified specialist and subspecia

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn't really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel. With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped? Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with

The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well. However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles. The Need for Alignment The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule:

Are you ready? Ready for the re-emergence of Centers of Excellence under healthcare reform? Centers of Excellence for the longest time were really nothing more than someone in a hospital or a group of doctors telling everyone that they were a Center of Excellence (CoE) for Cardiology, or Oncology, or Neuroscience, or Women's Health to name a few of the more "popular" CoEs. With little objective data- outcomes in areas such as financial, quality, satisfaction etc, many healthcare institution simply said they were a CoE for a particular service line. A little paint here, new wallpaper there, designate an unused hospital floor or wing the area, maybe even generate some fundraising and donation opportunities to name it after someone of community note and presto, a Center of Excellence. Okay, that was probably a little overboard for some organizations took CoEs seriously and did have objective financial and quality measures which they communicated the benefits of to Board, pay

Okay it is quiz time. What is the fastest way to build brand awareness, drive patient volumes and revenues, reconnect with patients that haven't used your hospital in several years, build your physician practices and can be analyzed in financial terms to prove Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)? Hint- the answer is in the title. That's right, physician referral brand building marketing activities via an RN-based call center. Here's the premise and it's something that I have used successfully over the years to drive volume and revenue for all products lines. At the end-of-the-day, nothing happens in any way, shape or form in your healthcare organization without a physicians order. In the case of an ER utilization, the docs there already will be your surrogate for admissions, tests and follow-ups and for referral to physicians in the event an ER patient does not have one. It is a classic push pull strategy. Push the patients to your physicians, pull the physicians to y

Don't forget about direct mail The other day I was going thru the mail and received a direct mail piece from a hospital system. Then the "news flash - film at 11" type of realization hit. It had been some time since I received any direct mail materials from any of the local healthcare providers. Truth be told, it has probably been a couple of years or more now that I remember receiving any healthcare related direct mail. And that is a mistake in my opinion . If you have been in healthcare long enough, you can remember a time when besides newspaper ads, Sunday newspaper stuffer, billboard and radio campaigns, TV ads etc., that the majority of healthcare marketing was direct mail- health and wellness magazines, magnets, newsletters, postcards etc. Replaced today no doubt by facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, web sites, banner ads, emails and all other types of social media. Like lemmings rushing over the cliff, healthcare organizations fast abandon messaging distribution