Talking Up Your Facility: Successful Marketing Strategies for ASCs
Forget direct mail, billboards and television spots. Your
strongest marketing tool is word of mouth
By John Roark
“We truthfully believe that word-ofmouth referral is what drives the ambulatory surgery center business,” says Rusty Shelton, MBA, CMPE, partner, president and CEO of ReSurge Hospitals. “You can do all the marketing you want, but (members of) the general community don’t make the selection on the choice of the ASC. You have to distinguish how people really get in that ASC. It’s going to come through a number of different fronts: there are going to be surgical specialists who are going to say ‘I want to do it here,’ or ‘Here are the facilities I use,’ through insurance plans that may have limited access points, or the patient says, ‘I want to go to that surgery center because my friend went there and he loved it.’ That’s how people get there, and being a past patient, I can tell you what I like.”
“We try to take an outside and inside perspective on things,” says Shelton. “We start our marketing at an organizational development level. In order to do that, you have to have an independent party come in and interview your key stakeholders and physicians. You’ve got to do some focus groups with your patients. You’ve got to talk to employees, and a number of different constituents out there to get a real feel as to what the issues are within that surgery center and within the healthcare market. Identify the issues, and then identify what needs to be changed.”
“Maybe you have things you’re doing wrong and you’ve got to effect change,” continues Shelton. “We go into a lot of places, we see a lot of things being done wrong. Everybody does something wrong — how do they do it better? Based on that you can say, what do we need to do to put ourselves in a position where we want to be known as the surgery center of choice? Whether it be the physicians, the employees, the patient, the businessmen, the thirdparty payors, whoever these key stakeholders are.”
“The most effective marketing program you can have for an ambulatory surgery center is a successful practice among the physicians who provide services there,” says Fred Ortmann, president of Ortmann Healthcare Consultants, LLC. “If the physicians are doing well, then the surgery center will likely do well because they will bring their cases. My view is that if you can get a physician to bring in 500 cases a year to your center, that’s a very effective means of marketing.”
Shelton agrees. “One of your main customers is your physician, because he’s going to determine where he wants to have that surgery done,” he says. “Regardless of where he’s got ownership, he’s going to say, ‘What is most efficient for me?’ Where is the best quality of care?’ And the physician can determine quality, by the way. ‘Do I have the anesthesiologist that I want? Am I able to block schedules correctly? Do my cases start on time? When a physician gets out of line, do I have peer discipline, or is it just lip service?”
“Once the center is open, I recommend that it run for a minimum of six months before they bring in other partners who are non-owners,” says Ortmann. “Go through the accreditation process and be sure you’ve got all the kinks worked out. Because what you don’t want is another physician coming over to your center, having a bad experience, and then telling his or her colleagues that the center was not run well.”
“Wait and make sure everything is taken care of, that it’s the kind of center that you want, and then when those physicians finish their initial cases, catch them coming out of their ORs, interview them, and more or less debrief them,” says Ortmann. “Find out what works well, what you could have done better, and how you can better meet their needs.”
Shelton points out that as a general rule, patients cannot assess the quality of care that they receive. “They can say, ‘Here’s the patient experience that I had,’” he says. “They get a feel. There’s a lot of things that are going to bring that into play, the foremost being the staff.”
The first step in successfully marketing your facility, says Shelton, is properly selecting your staff. He stresses the importance of “establishing the culture from the top down, which includes the physicians, the physician ownership, the administrative team and the way that you write your job descriptions and put out your mission statement.”
“The foundation, or the culture that you establish at the top level will ultimately determine the patient’s experience,” says Shelton. “It’s interesting. There’s an internationally known orthopod that I know. He will sit and talk with the patient and the family, and he will just put his hand on the patient’s arm or knee, kind of touch them gently as he’s talking to them. As he’s talking to the family, you can just see them melt. The way he interacts with the patient just puts them at ease. From the top on down, you’ve got to establish that culture. Part of that is the selection of staff, the way that you orient them, the way that you do performance evaluations, the way you do reporting back on customer satisfaction, profit sharing programs ... all of those things go into a bundle of how your staff perceives themselves within the organization. It’s not just the staff who will interact with the public, it’s the systems that you put around that.”
“There are some interesting customer service studies on why patients select what they do,” says Shelton. “For example, they found that if a physician goes into a clinical practice, sits down in the exam room with the patient, touches them, holds their hand for a second, looks them in the eye ... he maybe spends three minutes with them, and it’s as valuable as if he spent 15. You’ve to use those types of things in order to go about doing what you need to do. When the patient walks in, and the registration person is on the phone, does she put the call on hold for a second, greet the patient and say, ‘I’ll be right with you,’ or does she ignore them? It starts at that level.”
Generally speaking, says Shelton, a hospital’s challenge is teamwork. “When an ASC turns a case, the OR team turns the case. They do whatever needs to be done — they don’t have a set job description as such. They are a team, like a baseball or basketball team. You’ve got to establish that team mentality at all times, with the end product being customer service. And that customer service is really the physician and the patient at that time.”
In the ASC, the physicians are a part of that team. “The physicians as a group in the ASC need to be policing themselves. They need to understand that they are a team just like everyone else,” says Shelton. “There is no one island. They’re all a part of this large organization, and they need to make sure that it’s interdisciplinary within the physicians.”
Another crucial element that must not be overlooked, says Shelton, is the patient’s family. “That patient is in and out, they’re groggy, they don’t know what’s going on. The family is an integral part of your customer service in the marketing. Do you have a lounge for them? Do you have beverages? Do you have things that enable them to interact? We’ve actually got a couple of facilities where the patient’s family can sit in a viewing room with a monitor. When for example, the orthopod is doing a scope, he can be talking to the family and explain what he’s doing as he’s going through the procedure. What you’re trying to do is bring the family into the process, because part of healing is a family process, not an individual process. The family is an extension of the patient, in our opinion.”
Word of mouth works not only from patient to patient, but also from physician to physician. “If they have good experiences there, that’s great,” says Ortmann. “You follow that with patient satisfaction surveys to make sure the patients are being dealt with in an appropriate manner, that they liked the care. You track that over time and make sure that you follow up and respond personally to those patients.”
In some states a post-surgery follow-up is required. “A very impressive marketing technique is to have the physician call the day after surgery,” says Ortmann. “Patients are unbelievably impressed when a doctor calls them the day after surgery and asks, ‘How are you doing?’ What you can do is make a listing of the patients and their telephone numbers, and the doctors can sit down and call all of those patients in 10 or 15 minutes. Then the word in the community spreads like wildfire.”
“The better experience that the patient has, the more the family understands, the faster the recovery rate, the quicker they’re going to be back at work,” summarizes Shelton. “We like to use a lot of word-of-mouth testimonials. We also like to use testimonials in the media. It’s not about quality of care. It’s about the experience that they had. That’s all they know. What we try to do in a very subtle way is to distinguish that from the hospital environment. Hospitals are great, but they’re not oriented to ambulatory services the way a surgery center is. Quality is a given. You won’t be in business unless you’ve got the quality. So it’s going to be patient experience, cost, that environment you’re trying to cover.”
Ortmann is not a proponent of marketing through direct mail or television, etc. “My personal view is that if physicians within the community feel like it’s a great place providing high-quality care, they will bring their patients there. I find very few self-referrals to a surgery center. It’s just not something that happens routinely.”
Becoming Physician-Friendly
By John Roark
In addition to patients and staff, it is important not to overlook another one of your main customers — your physician, says Rusty Shelton, president and CEO of ReSurge Hospitals. “The physician is going to determine where he wants to have that surgery done.”
There are many services you can provide that will make things a lot easier not only for the physician, but also for the physicians on the staff. “People do not market to that office staff enough,” says Shelton. “They say that they do, but realistically, are they looking at such physician issues as:
Convenience — What are the impediments to scheduling of surgery?
Accessibility — If I have log time, can I look online and see what patients I’ve got scheduled, how much time I’ve got available? Can I do that with the scheduling system?
Prior authorizations — “There are a couple facilities where we’re actually working with the office staff to do the prior authorization for the surgical procedure,” says Shelton. “Maybe they don’t have all the expertise they need to do it. Maybe they need to get some additional information; what’s the cost going to be? We’ll help the office staff to do that.”
People Will Talk
Shelton advises providing patients with tangible reminders of their positive surgical experience. Going the distance with customer service will pay off with referrals and positive word of mouth. There are many ways to show patients your level of commitment:
- Follow-up: Is staff really following up and talking to the patient in a concerned manner, saying, “How’s this going; tell me about this and this?” asks Shelton. Giving the personal touch trumps Xeroxed handouts.
- Do you provide hot blankets? “When you put the patients into pre-op, and they’re all nervous and using a ton of energy, are you giving them a warm blanket?” asks Shelton.
That simple caring service is what patients will appreciate and remember.
- “When they leave, are you giving them things that remind them of the positive experience that they had? Slippers — people love slippers. Tote bags. Here at Logan Western Medical Surgery Center, you know what people wanted? T-shirts. They would come and say, ‘Where’s my t-shirt?’ They wanted people to know they had had their surgery done at Western, because it was the surgery center of choice for orthopedics at that time.”— John Roark