By Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc, Guest Contributor, Board of Directors, Urgent Care Association of America, Practice Management Editor, The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, Vice President, Concentra Urgent Care
Regardless of whether a center’s roots are in urgent care occupational medicine, for mixed model clinic operators, the opportunity lies in cross-selling or “converting” workers’ compensation, physical and drug screen patients to urgent care patients.
THE OPPORTUNITY FOR PATIENT CONVERSION
Successful urgent care centers appeal directly to the general public through paid advertising, grassroots, and Internet Marketing that together build top-of-mind awareness. This Awareness is the kind that brings your center to mind first when a prospective patient has an illness or injury. Once patients are comfortable with a facility and its providers, loyalty is likely to develop. And that leads to repeat visits and positive word of mouth. By contrast, when a patient is sent by their employer to a medical facility for work-related purposes, they often presume (incorrectly) that the center provides only employer services. Many patients will never realize there is a doctor present who can address their personal healthcare needs.
The purpose of “conversion” is to educate occupational medicine patients on all of the services offered in the facility. As a marketing tactic, conversion is likely to be more impactful than external advertising because it addresses an audience that has already found the center.
THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING YOUR CUSTOMER
The conversion process starts with understanding the demographics and consumer behavior of the occupational medicine patient. Workers’ compensation claims occur less frequently in office-based professions than in fields like construction, warehousing, and healthcare. In addition, public safety and transportation jobs including aviation, rail, and trucking are all more likely than service industries to require physicals. As a result, occupational medicine patients tend to be blue-collar and skew male and middle-income with fiscally and socially conservative values that emphasize family and homeownership. In blue-collar households, it is often the wife and mother who make healthcare decisions for the family. The typical blue-collar family has employer-paid health insurance and ages into Medicare; they have a relationship with a primary care physician but often take preventive over-the-counter medications at the first sign of symptoms.
When an unexpected illness or injury strikes, they are likely to head to the emergency room. Not all occupational medicine patients fit this profile, but it is clear that occupational medicine demographics do not mirror the population at large. Rather, they reflect the demographics of those industries that incur workplace injuries or require compliance physicals. It is important to understand the demographics of occupational medicine patients in your center so you can take their perspective when developing your conversion messaging and tactics. Patient communication needs to be straightforward, in the correct language (i.e., English or Spanish), and delivered in a way that will make it home to the decision-makers.
START WITH LITERATURE IN THE CENTER
Visit any sports arena that seats 20,000 people and odds are you’ll find advertising by the likes of Budweiser, Southwest Airlines, andFord––all of them paying big money to reach a captive audience. Similarly, a clinic that averages 55 patients per day (i.e., 20,000 patients per year)
should leverage the marketing space on its walls, starting with collateral like posters and brochures in exam rooms, waiting rooms, and registration and check-out counters.A flier with photos and clear descriptions of the services that “we also offer” can be used by staff members to personally introduce the center’s entire scope of services to each patient and invite them back for their non-work related healthcare needs. Because it usually takes four or five exposures for an advertising message to stick, the more often the patient sees and hears about your urgent care services, the more likely it is for your center to gain top of mind awareness.
The design and messaging of incenter marketing collateral differs from the collateral used for selling to employers. To begin with, many patients don’t know what urgent care is. Some believe it refers to the speed of service or perhaps since they came to a facility called urgent care for a physical or drug test, they assume it’s only for employers. Effective collateral will clearly define urgent care, outline the circumstances in which the patient would use it, and highlight the benefits over waiting for a doctor’s appointment or paying a high co-pay at the emergency room. Blue-collar patients tend to not be readers, collateral should favor photographs and bullet points over large blocks of text.
ENGAGING PROVIDERS AND STAFF IN CONVERSION ACTIVITIES
When providers and staff verbally introduce patients to their center’s services, reinforcing the message with a flier and branded novelties like candy, pens, or magnets, patients are far more likely to remember the message if they just see a poster. Some centers go so far as to record on a patient chart how many times the message was communicated.
But the best introduction is always personal…such as when a medical assistant, upon learning that a patient has a child who plays sports, says, “Well you can always bring Lil Johnny here for his school physicals.”One challenge in fostering conversion is distance. When an employee commutes 30 minutes or more to work, the odds are that their employer’s preferred occupational medicine facility is nowhere near their home.
It’s also unlikely that a patient will drive past multiple competing urgent care centers to seek care in an industrial setting. Thus many occupational medicine centers are at a disadvantage due to the residential density nearby. You Can improve the effectiveness of your conversion efforts by flagging patients who reside in the zip codes close to your center for special conversion emphasis. For occupational medicine patients who live outside your center’s 3-5 mile catchment, you can provide a map showing all of your other locations. And for all patients, the message can be: “Take advantage of our services on your way home from work.”
EXTENDING THE CONVERSION MESSAGE TO EMPLOYERS
Rising expenses in group health plans tend to be a major concern for corporate executives. To be effective in urgent care, you need to accept each employer’s health insurance. The salesperson most occupational medicine centers employ to manage employer accounts should be tasked with selling employers on the benefits of urgent care in preventing minor illnesses from evolving into something more serious(and more costly) and in reducing emergency room utilization for nonemergent conditions.
The key to an employer realizing this value, however, is for this message to be communicated by them to their employees. Ideas for supporting employers in their communication with employees include posters for locker and break rooms; literature in new employee orientation packets; health and wellness fairs, benefits fairs, educational programs and display tables on-site.
In Addition, information can be included in annual benefits enrollment packages, paycheck stuffers, the employee newsletter, and/or on the employee Intranet. One goal of employer engagement should be the pre-registration of employees in your urgent care practice management system. This will streamline their future visits, reduce the hassle of your center versus your competitors, and speed up patient flow in the center. The more “fun” you can make your engagement with your client’s employees, the more likely you are to be invited to visit the workplace to deliver your message and return again to reinforce it.
MEASURING EFFECTIVENESS OF CONVERSION ACTIVITIES
Understanding how well your conversion tactics are working requires looking at a) the number and percentage of occupational medicine patients returning to your center for urgent care, and b) the number and percentage of your urgent care patients who were originally occupational medicine patients. Because many mixed-model centers utilize different practice management systems for occupational medicine and urgent care, this may entail “dumping” patient records into an external database and creating custom reports.
Patients who have top of mind awareness and fully intend to use a center for urgent care may not have an immediate medical need, so conversion is typically looked at in six, nine, and 12-month intervals. A “forward” look matches occupational medicine patients during a certain month to urgent care records with the same identifier (i.e., social security number or home address) over each of the subsequent six to 12 months. Using this approach, conversion rates for a particular month will increase over time as more patients return to the center. This approach generally requires a full year to attain an accurate conversion figure. The alternative approach starts with urgent care records during a certain month and looks backward to see if those patients had previously come in for occupational medicine. The advantage of the latter is a mature conversion figure at the outset.
A shortcoming is that both methods imply causation; the assumption is that the patient came back for urgent care due to conversion tactics as opposed to other reasons such as long-term loyalty. Conversion may be reported at the individual patient or household level (realizing the value of word of mouth in families and that a parent may return with a child) as well as for a single center or for all centers in a multi-site operation. Additional metrics include questions on patient satisfaction surveys such as: “Are you aware this center offers urgent care services,” or, “At any time during your visit, did our provider or staff explain our urgent care services to you?” These types of questions not only force accountability on the center’s team but also reinforce the message as the patient completes the survey.
CONCLUSION
As we witness the convergence of occupational medicine, urgent care, and clinic-based medical services, it should always be less expensive and easier to educate existing patients about additional services offered at your facility than to draw entirely new patients in from the street.
Conversion tactics are somewhat simple to execute, starting with posters and flyers in your center and expanding to messages communicated by providers, staff, and employer clients. Success entails understanding the levers that drive your patients’ healthcare decision-making, communicating your message in a way that sticks, and establishing reporting processes that will help you gauge your performance.
