Patient Referral Management –  Medical Treatment on your Terms 

Medical Minds intervenes when specialist medical businesses seek to grow, improve their patient offering, or aim to target specific patient segments through a focused marketing campaign.

This can occur as a result of adding additional medical specialists to your organization or by adding diagnostic or treatment technology screening or services.  The diagram below illustrates the role Medical Minds plays in the broad process of referral management and growth.

This process of practice growth can generate cost to the practice when the uptake of such services often has a lag time.  In the case of a new additional medical specialist with no previous referral base, it may take 12 – 18 months to build sufficient referrals to be cost effective under normal conditions.

• Medical Minds acts to minimize this lag time by accelerating the rate at which referrers use the benefit of such new services, technology or specialist medical options. 

Here is a case study which illustrates the benefit of such important business development activity and strategic planning during a specialist practice growth phase.

Case study –  New Interventional Cardiologist

Situation  Appraisal

One of Australia’s leading Cardiology practices with an interventional and diagnostic focus takes on an additional Cardiologist to add to its team of 14 specialist cardiologists.  The practice offers a range of diagnostic testing and screening services for patients and aims to be a one-stop-shop for heart health care.

Dr Smith (not his real name) is an interventional cardiologist and has a strong subspecialty in endo-vascular intervention.  Dr Smith will be located out of one of the practices busy consulting locations situated within the campus of a hospital.

Dr Smith has no pre-existing private practice referral base but expects some endo-vascular referrals to come from internal referrals by colleagues within the practice.

Our function is to accelerate the referral process and to minimize idol unproductive periods early in Dr Smiths commencement with this practice.  The intention of this campaign is to provide a focused and sustained period of marketing, public relations and referrer liaison that will provide a smooth, long term increase in referrals.

This focused campaign adherers to a well established evidence based set of principles that have demonstrated clear benefit to practice referrer development and seeks to avoid a spike in referrer activity.

A short list of value statements are prepared designed to convey the strengths of Dr. Smith’s surgical and clinical expertise, sub-specialty, and target patient demographic to GPs and key referrers.   This process aims to address the following pre-marketing questions:

• What surgical skills does the specialist possess ?
• What patient or disease demographic are these skills best able to treat ?
• What geographic location relative to the current practice is of highest target value ?
• What business plan and broader term practice strategy does this appointment address ?
• What additional marketable skills does the specialist possess that can be used in this campaign ?
• What existing alliances does this specialist have with the pharmaceutical or device industry that can assist to support our activity and education while maintaining the specialist’s clinical independence ?
• What clinical research or philanthropic programs has the specialist participated in ?

Client Agreed Objectives 

• Increase referrer awareness particularly in the surrounding suburbs of the practice.
• Promote Dr Smith via journals, local hospital directory, divisions of General Practice, local media.
• Dr Smith to present at dinners, clinical events, company sponsored dinners, General Practice lunches, hospital educational events and seminars, and Division of General Practice events.
• Website articles, practice newsletter and profile to show-case Dr. Smiths introduction.
• Develop referrer awareness of procedural options for their patients and the benefits of such procedures and access to specialized technology through practice referral to Dr Smith.

Measures of Success

Measures can be as simple or as complex as you care to design.  For the purposes of this case study the primary metric of “external General Practitioner referrals” was used with the following criteria:

• An arbitrary figure of 20 referrals per month for the first quarter was used as a benchmark forecast and adjusted upwards according to the periodic success of marketing activity.
• Cardiac Interventions per month were used a quality measure of these referrals.
• Endo-vascular Interventions per month were used as a quality measure for these referrals.
• Consultations sourced from all referrers.
• An objective of specific geographic growth is measured by using consultation bookings from referrers in the focal zone (by postcode) of marketing and liaison activity.

Value

• Increase in referrals.
• Improved practice efficiency.
• Optimized specialist consultations.
• Increased procedural revenue.
• Education accreditation for referrers clinical education needs.  As an accredited education provider for ACRRM (Australian College of Rural & Remote Medicine) and the RACGP (Royal Australian College of General Practice) we’re equipped to meet the referrers educational requirements.

With better informed referrers comes more efficient patient referral patterns which improves the efficiency of the practice.  This is particularly the case when :

• Referrers were aware of the specific sub-speciality and surgical / treatment skill of the specialist they were referring to.
• Referrers were confident of their understanding of the diagnostic testing and treatment options the practice provides.
• The referrer was aware of the waiting time and felt confident they could manage the patients expectation of the referral.
• Post referral communication between the practice and the referrer was timely and provided the referrer with better continuity of care for the patient and referrer.

Results 

Referrer awareness and referrals, typically slow in the early phase of Dr Smith’s campaign,  grew at a greater than anticipated rate.  By the end of the first quarter the referral rate was at 25 referrals per weeks.  Typically a lag in referrals is expected between when the development activity begins and when the referrals begin to grow.  This is why we use an initial period of 3 months to measure the results of the scheduled activity. After 3 months referrer numbers can be measured and compared on a monthly frequency and will begin to form more stable referral trends and patterns.

This assisted the procedural growth of Dr. Smith’s practice and the more rapid than expected referral growth.  In this example the implemented marketing plan successfully doubled the rate of normal referral growth and continued the sustained growth well after program completion.

On-going marketing and educational activity is essential to continue to reinforce the presence of Dr Smith and all other specialists and services at this practice.  It will provide for strong referrer relationships and ensure on-going referral growth success.

For more information on how to fast-track practice growth contact Medical Minds.

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