The 5P's of patient communication

The 4P's of marketing are product, price, promotion and place (distribution channel). The fifth one is that the customer service experience pisses off a lot of people...and patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Recently, due in large part to COVID, medtech, retail medicine, digital health and biopharma companies have had to rethink their healthcare professional digital marketing strategy. HCP's now have to do the same thing communicating with their patients.

Consumer expectations around digital patient access can influence how they choose a new provider. Here's what digital access looks like at the top 20 hospitals?ranked?by?US News & World Report, according to a report by?Kyruus.

For the report, Kyruus compared?US News'?top 20 hospitals against 12 criteria in providing a modern and patient-centric digital experience.

Independent and employed HCPs need a digical marketing strategy that integrates bricks and clicks. Medtech leaders have indicated that their funding is mainly being allocated to four key areas: product launches, lead generation, “next-best-action” analytics, and omnichannel campaigns.

Here are some things to consider about your patient communications plan:

1. The challenge is how to create a plan that optimizes HCP and patient experience and satisfaction, minimizes workflow disruption and burnout, increases productivity and revenue and minimizes costs and maintains quality of care without dropped handoffs or handoff leaks. We need to PISS on burnout.
2. There are many products-patient portals, texting, robocalling, bots and other AI informed solutions. Some doctors give their cell phone numbers to patients. In fact, most patients are respectful of your time when you do. Doctors know that when there are lots of proposed treatments for a given problem, then most of them don't solve the problem. Consequently, there are lots of technoskeptics.
3. An omnichannel marketing and communications strategy is costly, requires special knowledge and skills, and is labor intensive, something many smaller practices cannot afford.
4. Getting paid for electronic communications with patients is still a challenge or non-existent. We need a new pricing model for electronic communication services. Charging patients for the 24/7 access comes with its own problems.
5. Promoting your services and engaging patients is a challenge. For example, despite the widespread availability of online patient portals, only?15 to 30 percent of patients?use them, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. For a study published in Health Affairs, researchers sought to learn more about who is and isn't using portals.
6. The digital divide means that some of your patients will be unable or unwilling to use your solution. Consequently, you will need redundant systems.
7. Staff training and development needs are ongoing and another expense. So is cybersecurity.
8. There are many pitfalls to deploying and scaling a patient communications platform
9. A careful cost/benefit analysis should inform your make or buy decision. Of course, you can just ignore the whole thing and suffer while your practice shrinks. Then it's time to consider non-clinical career opportunities.
10. Retail medicine is a significant threat to your practice and they have the resources to out-market you. Patients are demanding real-time, online communications capabilities. Adapt, adopt or die. Meet your newest competitor around the block

The good news for you is that they don't have free parking either, so by the time you find a space on the street and feed the meter (assuming you don't get a $25 ticket) or find a pricey space in the nearby garages, you might spend more for parking than you do for the visit.

1. The key elements of your sickcare digital transformation strategy are culture, processes and technology. Most of the rest is experience theater.
2. You need outcome metrics, not an input highlight reel.

The burnout impact factor of managing increasing patient communications demands of the already stressed HCP workforce is substantial. We need a whole product solution for not just the multibillion dollar healthcare corporate enterprises, but smaller independent practices as well. It needs to do the jobs HCPs want it to do using a VAST business model.

Until then, many patients will be stuck in patient/customer disservice hell and more HCPs will be joining the Cooked But Not Done Club. Digipreneurs need to stop frying doctors.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs