Starting A Physician Liaison Program To Market Your Practice

Many hospitals and health systems have Physician Liaison and/or Physician Relations Representatives that have the responsibility of visiting physician practices to promote the service lines of the hospital. Similarly many physician practices, in particular specialty practices, have initiated or have considered initiating such a program as a vehicle to carry their message(s) to the field and ultimately grow their referrals. Some consulting organizations provide the option of outsourcing this role to them while others will provide a Physician Liaison training program for your new hire.

If you decide that you want to start a Physician Liaison program on your own, where do you start? Let’s examine some of the areas you need to consider:

      Job Description for a Physician Liaison

Many practices are at a loss regarding defining a job description because this is a new, unexplored role for them. The following is a general example of the role and responsibilities of a Physician Liaison:

The Physician Liaison will support the practice by representing and promoting our clinical services, physicians and programs in order to increase referrals from existing providers and secure new business from current low volume and non-referring physicians.

 

ESSENTIAL JOB DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Functions as the primary sales and marketing contact for referring physician offices
• Interfaces with both physicians and their staffs to improve communication and understanding of the needs and wants of the referring practices
• Develops a sales plan for physician practices with measurable goals and objectives
• Conducts personal visits to referral sources on a daily basis 
• Identify issues and concerns from referring offices and communicates them back to the practice 
• Facilitates meetings for our physicians with referral sources and coordinates “lunch and learns” to discuss new clinical offerings
• Documents daily contact with referring physician offices
• Develops referral trend reports
• Facilitates community outreach, speaking and education opportunities for the practice

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

Education:  BA in marketing or business.

Experience:  Three to five years in healthcare sales, preferably in a physician services environment.

      Finding the Right Candidate

Practices need to understand that if you are going to have a successful Physician Liaison it takes more than finding someone with an outgoing personality. That is certainly an important trait but there needs to be more. Your Physician Liaison needs to have the ability to listen and understand what the client is truly saying. They should have great attention to detail and excellent organization and follow up skills. They need to be problem-solvers and be able to facilitate solutions, calling upon resources within your practice. And they need to have “conceptual” selling skills so they can be your communication eyes and ears.

Can you get this from an entry-level hire? Perhaps, but it is going to take time, training and personal management, which in many cases practices cannot devote. Ideally you should be looking for someone that has been in a sales capacity in a physician services environment and has already been through a variety of sales training programs. To hire a “Marketing” versus a “Sales” person or move a clinical person into a Physician Liaison role is often a difficult transition for them due to their lack of experience making sales calls and “cold call fear”.

Potential sources to identify candidates can be online job posting websites along with recommendations from your vendors and hospital Physician Relations Department.

Finding the right, experienced person will put you further ahead on their road to productivity.

      Setting Objectives for Your Physician Liaison

One of the challenges for a Physician Liaison role, particularly if it is new to a practice, is staying focused on the job responsibilities. Inevitably what happens is that if something even has the slightest orientation to a sales and/or marketing responsibility, most people in the practice will direct it to the Physician Liaison. As this continues over time, the Physician Liaison becomes engulfed in day-to-day “stuff” and is not able to get into the field, fulfilling what they were hired to do i.e. calling on referral sources. To avoid this all too common situation, it is important to set clear, measurable and quantifiable objectives for your Physician Liaison so that they know, and your practice knows, what is expected of them. The following are some of the many measurable goals that can be established for a Physician Liaison:

·         # of visits per week to referring physician offices

·         # of meetings facilitated for practice MDs with referring physicians

·         # of lunch and learns coordinated with referring practices

·         # of social events scheduled with your practice and referring practices

·         # of referral coordinator lunches scheduled

·         # of meetings with ER physicians and Hospitalists

·         # of speaking engagements coordinated

·         Development of quarterly sales plan and rotational call schedule

·         Submission of weekly sales activity report

 Mentoring Your Physician Liaison

A challenge for many practices is what do you do with this person? For practices that have no experience with a Physician Liaison, the short answer is that you need to mentor them, provide them with an opportunity to succeed, give them clear direction, and monitor their activities not only through their reports but also by spending time with them in the field making calls on your referral sources. Giving them a list of your referring physicians and telling them to make calls and deliver referral pads is potentially a recipe for disappointment.

On a weekly basis you should meet with your Physician Liaison and review the planned activities for the week. Questions that you and the Physician Liaison should discuss include: What are the objectives of your calls? Who are you going to call on in the practices? Who in the practices determine where referrals are sent? What do you want to accomplish with the calls? What have been their referral trends? Have there been any problems expressed by these practices? In other words, you need to strategize with the Physician Liaison on their calls. Leaving them on their own to do this will likely not yield the results that you are looking for.

 Tracking Physician Liaison Sales Activities

On a weekly basis the Physician Liaison should submit an activity report to the Practice Administrator. The Physician Liaison should document what practices they visited, who they spoke to, what information they left with the practice, and any issues that were identified and follow up that may be required.

             Targeting the Referral Influencer

While private practices are physician owned and controlled, the bottom line is that the physicians don’t necessarily always influence where the patient is sent for additional testing or consults. More often than not a referral coordinator, check out person or mid-level will play a key role in where the patient is referred. As part of the Physician Liaison’s role, they need to determine who coordinates referrals within these practices and then target them from a relationship building standpoint.

In meeting with the referral influencer your Physician Liaison should try to integrate   questions such as the following into their discussion to get valuable feedback for your practice:

• What's the most important factor in determining where to send your patients for ________________ care?
• How’s your experience been with scheduling and with reports at our practice?
• Have your referrals to our practice changed over the last year? (If they're down, why?)
• Have you been satisfied with our care of your patients and service to your office?
• What feedback do you receive from your patients regarding our practice?
• Can I answer any questions about the services we offer?
• How can we improve our service to your practice?
• Are there any issues or problems we should be aware of?

Involving Your Physicians in the “Sales” Process

One of the most effective marketing initiatives is getting your physicians face-to-face, developing relationships with your referring physicians. Your Physician Liaison should be a conduit to facilitate these encounters. Primary Care physicians are often overloaded with patients so it is difficult to bring your physicians into their office for a “lunch and learn” or breakfast or lunch meeting. What can be very effective however is to bring your physicians to the PCP office for a “check in” with the physicians and staff regarding how your practice is performing on behalf of their patients. It does not need to be a formal, sit-down meeting but the fact that you are showing them that you value your relationship will end up paying dividends.

 Report Generation

As part of your Physician Liaison’s responsibilities, they should be the “go-to” person for collecting, analyzing and disseminating reports related to referral activity. Some examples of tracking reports include:

• Monthly referrals by referring physician
• Monthly new consults by referring physician
• Monthly referrals, new consults and total visits per office location
• Referring physician monthly ancillary services referrals
• Monthly ancillary services volumes by office location
• Source of self-referred patients by month (e.g. friend, television commercial, etc.)
• New patients generated as a result of community screening programs
• Referrals by your practice physicians to internal programs (e.g. exercise, nutrition, etc.) 

Considerations

Implementing a Physicians Liaison program is a very viable initiative to enhance relationships, increase visibility and grow referrals for your practice. However, to have a successful Physician Liaison program and an overall effective marketing strategy, you first need to have a plan to serve as a roadmap for your internal and external strategies and tactics. As a reference to guide you through the marketing plan development process, visit http://www.mdpracticemarketing.com/ for You Need To Have A Plan Before You Can "Work The Plan", a simple, practical guide to develop a comprehensive medical marketing plan.

Marketing is a process rather than an event. To position yourself to “market”, you need to develop a plan, looking both internally to evaluate the current state of your practice and externally to analyze your market and define specific goals, tactics and action plans.

This article was published in the November, 2011 issue of the Efficiency in Practice newsletter.

For Effective Marketing, Define Your Target Customers and Markets

Target Customers and Markets

Before developing specific marketing initiatives, it is important to define your customer segments because each has their own needs and wants. It is more than just “patients” or “referring physicians”. It could be existing patients, new patients, referring physicians, referral coordinators, referring physician practice front office staffs, the hospital system, Emergency Room physicians, Hospitalists, etc.

Once you have defined your customer segments, it is important to create a value proposition for each entity. In other words, how will your customers benefit by doing business with you? For example, patients may benefit because experience translates into results and your practice has done more lung cancer surgeries than any other practice in the state. Referring physicians might benefit because they know your practice provides quality care with exceptional service so they feel confident that they are not going to hear any complaints from their patients. The referral coordinator may benefit because you simplify the scheduling process through a back office hotline. In other words, every “customer” has different needs and understanding them will allow you to tailor your key messages to satisfy their needs.

In addition to defining your customers, to be efficient with your marketing dollars it is also important to define your target markets in terms of geographic location and patient demographics such as age, marital status and household income. As an example as to where this would be useful, many practices have introduced cash-based screening services as a way to grow ancillary volumes and to capture new patients. Because these screening services are not covered by insurance, it is important to determine the relative affluence of the market because those markets with higher household incomes will most likely have more discretionary dollars. For example:

The ________ market has the largest population within ten miles of the office of any of our locations (706K) and the largest number of households within ten miles of the office of any of our locations (306K). Additionally it has the highest average household income of any of our markets ($102K) with 33% of the households having an average annual income greater than $100K. The size of the market provides the greatest upside opportunity for the practice to secure new patients and the affluence of the market would indicate the likely viability for cash-based screening initiatives.

Demographic information by zip code can be found online, through your local Chamber of Commerce or can be purchased if the specifications of your search requires more detail.

The more clearly you define your customer segments and target markets, the better able you will be to customize your marketing strategies and tactics.

Conducting A Marketing Assessment Of Your Physician Practice

In beginning the marketing planning process, you first need to take an inventory of your current situation by conducting an internal marketing assessment. The assessment will provide the foundation from which you will be able to develop a systematic and comprehensive marketing plan. Ultimately that plan will include a historical perspective of the practice, the competitive landscape, key messages and strategies, unique differentiators, collateral needs, referral targets, PR and marketing activities, a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and specific goals going forward.


 Identify Key Differentiators, Referral Targets and Competitive Activity

As a first step in the marketing assessment, it will be beneficial to “interview” each of your physician providers, mid-levels and management team members to gain their perspective of your practice. The interviews will allow you to get their view on unique differentiators, SWOT, key messages, the competitive environment, marketing opportunities, relationships with referring physicians and referring physician targets and any barriers to referrals that might exist.

The information they provide will not only be useful to you but it will also give them a feeling of ownership in shaping the future message and initiatives of the practice. It is recommended that you send them in advance a questionnaire to consider and then conduct individual face-to-face meetings to get their input.

• What do you consider to be the unique differentiators of our practice?
• What do you see as the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) for our practice?
• What are the key messages / core values of the practice which should be communicated?
• Who do you consider to be our major competitor(s)?
• What marketing strategies and programs are our competitors using to promote their practice?
• Who do you think are key referral sources and referral targets that we should be visiting?
• Are there any previously good referral sources where a relationship no longer exists with our practice? What happened to the relationship? 
•  What positive and less than positive “perceptions” of our practice exist in the market

Evaluate Past Marketing Initiatives

In addition to gathering the previous information which will be integrated into the marketing plan, it is also important to honestly evaluate past marketing initiatives and determine specific needs going forward. Questions to consider in your evaluation: Have the activities been effective? What has been the return on investment? Have they generated new referrals? Have they created increased exposure and visibility in the community? Has it been an integrated process or solitary, non-cohesive events? Some areas to look at include:

Evaluating Past Marketing Initiatives

Program	Implemented (X)	Perceived Effectiveness	Continue / Discontinue
Print ads
TV commercials
Direct mail
Billboards
Speaking Engagements
Website enhancements
SEO
Internet marketing
Google AdWords
Sponsorships
Community outreach
CME programs
Thank you letters to referring MDs
Patient and physician satisfaction surveys
Yellow page ads
Patient email newsletters

Newspaper inserts
Referring MD  newsletter
Patient referral cards
Patient education seminars
Published articles
Physician bios
On hold messaging
Practice brochure
Patient info brochures
Services fact sheets
PR initiatives
Lunch and learns
Promo items
Social events
Direct marketing visits to referrers
Mystery patient
Radio ads
Association membership

Conduct A Referral Trend Analysis

In many cases, practices do not necessarily have a firm handle on referral trends. In general terms a practice might have a sense of who their top referral sources are but many do not consistently track referrals. So, unbeknown to the practice, a top referrer’s numbers might be significantly down from prior years because they are currently splitting referrals among different providers. Another key component of the marketing assessment is to conduct a referral trend analysis for the last two years in order to clearly see the referral picture. Some areas to quantify include:

• Total referrals by referring physician 2009 vs. 2010
• Total new consults by referring physician 2009 vs. 2010
• Total referrals and new consults by referring physician per location 2009 vs. 2010
• Total referrals and new consults by your MD providers 2009 vs. 2010
• Top referral sources by your MD providers 2009 vs. 2010
• Referring physician ancillary services referrals 2009 vs. 2010
• Ancillary services volumes 2009 vs. 2010
• Ancillary services volumes by location 2009 vs. 2010
• Total revenue performance vs. budget by location 2009 vs. 2010

The information you learn from this analysis will often be surprising yet will be critical in developing your marketing plan and strategy to target specific referral sources.

Implement Patient and Physician Satisfaction Surveys

In establishing a representative baseline for your practice, a useful initiative is to implement patient and referring physician satisfaction surveys. The information you obtain will identify ways to improve your practice which will result in better patient care, happier patients and enhanced loyalty from your referral sources. The survey design and tabulation can be developed internally or outsourced to a consulting organization. While developing the survey tool yourself might seem to be the easiest and more cost-effective alternative, an option for practices is to use a survey tool and process from an outside vendor. It will be less stressful and time consuming for the internal staff and often will provide the ability to benchmark results versus other similar group practices. The surveys should be brief, clear, easy to complete and consistent in the numeric grading system from question to question.

Patient Satisfaction Surveys

It is critically important for practices to hold onto what they have and protect their revenue base. Focusing on existing patients and seeking their input will show that you value them as a customer and that you are committed to continuous improvement. Patient surveys should focus on their clinical experience and interaction with their provider, the ease of scheduling and the referral process, their experience at their appointment and the customer service skills of the internal staff. If you decide to implement a survey process internally, the Medical Group Management Association (http://www.mgma.com/) has published Patient Satisfaction Questionnaires which provides samples of patient satisfaction questionnaires, examples of MGMA member questionnaires and ideas to measure and improve patient satisfaction. The booklet can be ordered by contacting the MGMA at 1-877-275-6462.

You should consider making patient surveys a part of your daily practice routine, asking patients to complete the survey prior to leaving your office and dropping it in a secure locked box. This gives them the opportunity to comment on their experience while it is fresh in their mind as opposed to receiving a survey six months after their appointment when the specifics of their visit might be difficult to recall.


Referring Physician Satisfaction Surveys

For specialty practices, referrals from physicians represent their primary source of new patients. As a result it is very important that you have a pulse on their feelings about your practice. Any difficulties in scheduling, reporting or complaints about your practice from their patients can quickly result in a change of their referral patterns to another provider. Physician surveys should seek feedback on the referral process, scheduling, staff customer service, clinical care, reports and patient feedback. They should also include questions related to their referral patterns to your practice and if they have changed as well as their overall satisfaction and preferred method of communication from your practice. So that they are comfortable that their comments are anonymous, it is recommended that you include a return address envelope with your address in the addressee and addressor locations. If you elect to implement a physician satisfaction survey internally versus outsourcing it to a third party, the MGMA also offers Satisfaction Surveys for Referring Physicians. The booklet includes sample physician satisfaction questionnaires, how satisfaction items are measured, methods of conducting surveys and key findings.

With patient and physician satisfaction surveys, it is imperative that you act on what you learn or your efforts will be wasted. Going forward, you should compare the metrics that you measure versus previous surveys in order to track your quality improvement progress.