Zach Bauer

It was the 250th anniversary of the birthdate of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The Human Genome Project published the last chromosome sequence in the publication, Nature. Pluto was demoted from ‘planet’ to ‘dwarf planet’ by the International Astronomic Union. It was 2006, and since then imaging center volumes have been declining across the nation.

We’ve all heard the cost of health care is increasing. Employers are moving more of the costs to employees in their employee benefits packages to help mitigate those costs. And with unemployment reaching 9.2 percent in June, compared to the 4.5 percent rate of 2006, fewer patients are insured and subsequently covered for the same imaging studies they were covered for in 2006. Reimbursements are diving. There is also the now highly publicized risk of unnecessarily overexposing patients to radiation that has also slowed the referring physicians from ordering as many studies as they used to.

These changes in the market have more of the effect of 1,000 paper cuts on your imaging business, rather than one giant crashing anvil that is easy to see coming. However, without an effective plan of action, death by paper cuts or by anvil is inevitable.

So what will be your plan of action? Do you ever get into the imaging center in the morning and say to yourself, “Things just aren’t humming like they used to.”? Do you look at the schedule and see enough space or openings to make you uneasy?

All of these marketplace forces and mechanisms have exceedingly shifted imaging marketplace supply and demand. The supply and demand paradigm in imaging has consequently restructured and reorganized the imaging provider market in most locales across the nation. Hospitals are purchasing imaging centers or entering into joint ventures and turning those centers into their outpatient imaging centers. Stand-alone imaging centers are being purchased by conglomerates, closing their doors or selling to the hospitals in their communities. Physician groups and their members are referring only to the facilities that their groups are affiliated with or that they own.

In all of this, we find that many imaging center operators and owners (hospital-owned, privately owned and radiologist-owned) are continuing to run their businesses as they did in 2006. What’s hurting all of them is all of the recent paper cuts.

We work to help clients keep up with their always changing imaging center markets by offering them uncommon information that helps them quickly and effectively make decisions about their imaging businesses. It’s in these partnerships that we ask and help them answer the following questions:

When was the last time you assessed your marketplace, or your Imaging Service Area?
Has your patient demand changed? 
What does your current market capitalization look like? 
Have you addressed outdated and unnecessary patient pursuit costs? 
What are your competitors doing? 
How will what your competitors are doing (buying, selling, gaining capacity, etc.) affect what your center does? 
Will your specific volume growth strategy need to change based on the answers to the questions above?

Stop the paper cuts by designing a strategy around them. Obtaining knowledge on your ever-changing imaging market can help you effectively target the referring providers, patients and niche markets that you may otherwise be missing.

Then you can stop asking, “Where have all the patients gone?” and instead start asking, “Where have all the openings on the schedule gone?”

Zach Bauer is responsible for all management and operations within Medical Imaging Specialists. Zach also leads the MIS Client Delivery Strategy Team, which focuses on delivering the Volume Generation, RCM, Imaging Center, and Hospital Radiology Department Operations Management and Finance offerings for MIS.

Articles

Changes in the market have more of the effect of 1,000 paper cuts on your imaging business, rather than one giant crashing anvil that is easy to see coming. However, without an effective plan of action, death by paper cuts or by anvil is inevitable.

Imaging Centers: Where Have All the Patients Gone?

Too often when I help clients, I observe much of the same, no matter what part of the country I’m in: marketing directors with the best of intentions performing what I call “Random Acts of Marketing.”

Random Acts of Marketing looks like marketing directors scrambling to gather enough pens, pads, and clipboards to make their rounds for the day to the referring physicians’ offices. It looks like a frazzled marketing director running around organizing bagel, donut, or veggie plate drop-offs for the morning or lunchtime meetings held with the purpose of buying a referring provider’s staff a meal for the day. It’s meetings with local newspapers, publications, TV, and radio salespeople. It’s a marketing director tweeting or updating the center or department’s Facebook wall with random posts.

If represented on a graph of referring physician volumes by modality, it looks much the same as a flatline on an EKG, no matter what the Random Act of Marketing was for the previous week for that particular provider.

It’s not a mistake that marketing and sales are two different words, with two different meanings and two different purposes. Marketing is absolutely necessary if and when no market exists, or if the market that does exist is too small.

When an imaging center or hospital outpatient imaging department/center is starting up, it is imperative that they have a marketing strategy to first assess the market, their potential market capitalization, and their plan of action to garner as much volume as possible in their locale – actually, this is usually done as part of due diligence prior to building and opening the operation, but that’s a whole different article. But the mistake that most imaging center operators or hospital departments make is they continue trying to execute the marketing strategy long after it is necessary, and they fail to develop and competently execute a sales strategy.

If your imaging center or department has referring providers sending patients to it, you have a market. The question is what is the strategy for selling into that already existing market?

Most of the time, what I observe is that the marketing directors’ Random Acts of Marketing are actually robbing them of the opportunity to build effective relationships with the real decision makers in their loyal referring offices. Most people in the referring physicians’ offices are polite and cordial to the marketing directors. They accept the pens and other collateral, and it’s no mistake because that staff member’s intention is to ensure that the conversation is as short as possible so he/she can get back to his/her daily responsibilities. But most of the time when that person leaves, there is no assessment in the staff member that the marketing director has any real intention of helping him/her, and the opportunity to build a relationship has been lost.

To build effective relationships in the referring physicians’ offices, the marketing director - or as we call them, the referring physician relationship manager - has to have the space and ability to build a relationship with each office that is currently referring patients to the center or department. They have to know how much imaging volume to expect for each particular referring physician’s specialty if they were getting 100 percent of their imaging business.

They have to know that Sue at Dr. Smith’s office prefers to be communicated to by fax and she likes to place orders the same way. They have to know that April at Dr. Jones’ office does everything electronically and anything that the imaging center or department can do to make that scheduling, ordering, reporting, and image acquisition process work electronically, the more volume they can expect from Dr. Jones.

Until the referring physician relationship manager understands each market or office to this level of detail, he or she cannot successfully sell into it. Until they are willing to make commitments of help to the staff members of the referring offices, the referring offices won’t make commitments to them.

So, to generate volume, stop marketing and start selling!

Zach Bauer is responsible for all management and operations within Medical Imaging Specialists. Zach also leads the MIS Client Delivery Strategy Team, which focuses on delivering the Volume Generation, RCM, Imaging Center, and Hospital Radiology Department Operations Management and Finance offerings for MIS. He has proven experience in developing strategies with clients that help them increase their imaging center, hospital radiology department, and/or practice volumes on average by about 20 percent.

Author | Zach Bauer

Articles

Imaging Centers: Where Have All the Patients Gone?

To Generate Volume at Your Imaging Center, Stop Marketing