Keeping rural patients 'home' needs broad physician-hospital marketing plan

Physician Compensation Report, August, 2003

St. Ann's administrators and board members formed a strategy committee with doctors and Percy. The doctors on the committee kept the rest of the community's doctors informed of the plans. The committee decided on--and found a way to finance--a basic three-pronged plan to turn around its loss of market share, he adds:

(1) Building improvements, including a new emergency room, facade and entrance area, and improvements to the obstetrics ward and cath and dialysis labs.

(2) Three-to-five year objectives and plans to strengthen the hospital in seven core lines of service. Even if there are service lines a hospital cannot develop--suppose it has no oncologists on staff--it must find enough service lines to generate enough revenue to support its overhead, he notes. In addition to the core service lines, St. Ann's, in conjunction with a smaller hospital deeper in the marshlands, added service lines like urology, neurology and nephrology on a part-time consulting basis with physicians in New Orleans. With each service line developed, there were physicians allied with St. Ann's whose practices benefited.

(3) Promoting physician practices and expanding the advertising and public relations programs.

St. Ann's is now doing well, says Percy, which is "an anomaly" in light of the many other Louisiana hospital closings. It must adhere closely to this "core strategy," he adds, to maintain its positive momentum.

Several other hospitals among Percy's clients perform this kind of marketing strategy review every year.

The alternative would have been withering service lines and patient rolls, he contends. If due to cost concerns and lack of a demand, a hospital no longer keeps its ER open around the clock or cancels several service lines, he explains, it not only loses revenue streams but also comes to be viewed by consumers as "not a hospital, but a satellite clinic."

Physician practices connected to a declining hospital will inevitably decline, Percy adds. They will lose revenue and eventually physicians.

Contact Percy at (225) 346-0115 or percy@intersurf.com.