• Physician Relations Rx
• Critical Communication

Physician Relations Rx

(print article)

Doctors are an important component of your facility and your marketing plan. But how do you get them to buy in?

It's a classic Catch-22. To get doctors involved in your marketing program, you have to show them the bottom-line value of marketing. But to achieve a bottom-line impact, you first have to get the doctors involved in the program.

Sure, it's frustrating, but you can't give up. Including physicians in your marketing puts a face on the pitch and imbues the program with authority and integrity. But it's often an uphill battle to convince the docs to get on board.

Overcoming Skepticism

"One of the biggest challenges I've encountered with including physicians in our marketing efforts has been time constraints," says Kristen Lindenboom, director of physician relations at Westside Regional Medical Center in Plantation, Fla. "In today's healthcare environment, physicians are seeing more patients in a day, which doesn't leave much time for marketing."

So what's the answer? Understand that a doctor's time is valuable, and accommodate his or her schedule, Lindenboom says.

For example, when she recently approached a busy cardiologist to collaborate on a heart-healthy exercise article, the doctor initially resisted because he feared the process would be too time-consuming. But Lindenboom suggested they work on the article during lunch at the hospital cafeteria. "Because I took the time to understand his time constraints and work around them, we were successful," she says. "The article turned out great."

Another common roadblock is a misperception about marketing—what it is and what it can accomplish, says Kim Athmann-King, senior partner of The Strategy Group, a healthcare consulting firm and an author of Impact Marketing: Optimizing Value and Return on Investment (Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, 2004). "We're faced with the expectation that marketing is simply advertising or promotion," she says. "Doctors are either skeptical that marketing can produce results at all, or they have high expectations that those results should be generated in a very short period of time."

To address misperceptions, Athmann-King suggests that marketers host "Marketing 101" sessions for doctors. This can be done in formal group sessions, or one-on-one, informally. "Help them to associate marketing with—yes, promotion and advertising—but also give them the broader picture of what marketing is all about," she says. "One thing we know about physicians is that they like data and information. They like to be part of the process; they like to participate in the discussion."

So what topics should go into the "syllabus" for a marketing primer for doctors? Start with the basics:

• an organizational definition of marketing
• how a marketing plan drives business results
• evaluation and performance tracking (return on investment)
• definition of roles

Driven by Results

As for high expectations for immediate results, Athmann-King says marketers need to engage doctors in a discussion about the decision-making process. Before a person makes a decision to try a new doctor or treatment, she says, "there's a certain level of awareness-building that first has to occur. That awareness translates into knowledge, and that knowledge translates into a movement or action."

Here again, doctors are typically comfortable with hard data, so give them hard data. "Providing data that indicates what type of results might be generated is important," Athmann-King says. "Any kind of performance measurement system is good. There are different metrics out there to measure whether what you're doing is driving business results."

Doctors like success stories, so draw on your past successes. Show your doctors the exact dollar value of your marketing home runs. Help them see what's in it for them. Once doctors see good results for one program, it's easier to get them involved in the next one. "Success matters," Athmann-King says. "It's an infectious motivator that melts resistance."

She also suggests tapping your most marketing-savvy docs to serve on an advisory council to help inform and guide your strategies. "I like the idea of having an advisory council that truly involves the physicians in analyzing marketplace opportunities, devising strategies, championing execution and monitoring performance of activities," she says.

Success Breeds Success

In hospitals where marketing programs are working well, doctors are eager for more. Kristen Deshais, marketing coordinator for Baystate Medical Practices in Massachusetts, says the doctors in her health system are enthusiastic about it and continue to want more.

"We like to get the physicians involved in something more than just their photo in an ad or on a billboard," she says, adding that many of the Baystate doctors are willing to go above and beyond the call of duty—to participate in an early-morning media call or speak at an evening seminar for the local community. "We find that the one-on-one interaction at the seminars works really well. The seminars allow the public to meet the physician, and they're able to ask as many questions as they want."

These programs give doctors the opportunity to connect with people—potential patients—on a personal level. At Baystate, Deshais and her colleagues organize a series of "Mini Medical Schools" that teach members of the local community the basics of medical education.

"Our Mini Medical School is eight consecutive weeks, one day a week, where we provide the basic background of medicine to members of the public," Deshais says. "Our chairs and chiefs present on different topics such as psy-chiatry, cardiology, neurology, cancer, surgery and infectious disease. We give tours of the hospital and have a special graduation ceremony. We hold it twice a year, and we have about 65 to 70 people enrolled in each session."

Lindenboom agrees that connecting with the local community is essential. One of Westside's successful programs is "Communicating About Cancer," a free monthly lecture series on cancer-related topics held in conjunction with the American Cancer Society's Cancer Awareness Month and promoted in Westside's quarterly marketing publication, About Health. "This program has been well received, not only by the community, but by the medical staff and employees," Lindenboom says.

Neutralizing Egos

Rolling out a new high-profile marketing program can sometimes trigger a battle of egos among physicians—or at least some hurt feelings in those who aren't asked to participate. With so many doctors, how do you decide whom to showcase?

Athmann-King recommends the something-for-everyone approach. "A hospital should have a core set of marketing activities driven by the strategic goals of the hospital, and ideally it would be a set of activities that all doctors have the opportunity to participate in," she says. Every doctor can be included in a physician directory, for example, and many on the roster can rotate the responsibilities of speaking engagements.

Once all the doctors have the opportunity to take a role in this core set of activities, the marketing team also can come up with individual, targeted programs and hand-select the most appropriate doctors to make those programs work, based on the particular skills of the doctors and how media-savvy they are. Are some particularly good on camera or with newspaper reporters? Do you have a high-profile researcher or surgeon you want to promote in your custom publication? As long as you've given all your doctors access to the core set of activities, you can safely give extra attention to a few key docs. "This satisfies both needs," Athmann-King says. "The need to have good relationships with doctors and the need to be strategic."

She suggests finding a physician "champion"—one the other physicians respect—and work with this doctor to drive the involvement of other physicians. For example, Athmann-King recruited a highly regarded physician to work on a cancer service marketing initiative. Marketing presentations to physician committees were better received with the "champion" physician on board.

"It was remarkable how much this one physician became engaged in the process overall," Athmann-King says. "When a physician or clinician hears someone he or she respects champion a program, resistance is lowered, credibility is higher and willingness to align with that respected individual in support of the program grows."