FIVE QUESTIONS WITH CATHRYN CONNOLLEY–Doctivity Actionable Data Drives Referrals and Revenue

We had the opportunity to sit down recently with Cathryn Connolley, President and Chief Operating Officer at Doctivity Health and a well-known expert on physician marketing, increasing referrals, and driving revenue, to talk about Doctivity Health and handling today’s healthcare business challenges. For our full podcasts, please visit https://shows.acast.com/actionable-insights.

DH – What brought you to your position of leading Doctivity Health?

CC – I had been working in healthcare for nearly 25 years, including working at Geisinger Health System back in 2000. We saw enormous growth at Geisinger while working under the leadership of Dr. Glenn Steele, and my career progressed as well. I was responsible for business growth and strategic marketing, and one of our business advancement strategies was to improve the time it took new providers to hit their break-even point. At that time, it was taking close to 24 months for new physicians to break even and begin paying for themselves. So, if you think about that in terms of the impact it has on the organization, it’s two years where they are not covering their costs and they are potentially not seeing the right types of cases, which affects quality scores, causes lower patient satisfaction scores, and leads to retention challenges. I was charged with putting together a program to accelerate the time to break even. My team and I went to work, and we were able to decrease that time from 24 months to nine months in the first year of the program. Once we saw its effectiveness, we rolled out the program to include currently employed but underperforming doctors. We were able to focus on the right referral sources, and with the physicians attaining productivity markers, their quality metrics and patient satisfaction scores also increased. We were able to save the organization $8 million in the first year and ultimately went down to four months’ average time to break even. When I left Geisinger in 2014, I started a boots-on-the-ground company basically doing this same type of work. That ultimately led to the development of Doctivity Health and our innovative software to provide actionable insights for our clients to improve operational performance. We are all about increasing referrals and driving revenue.

DH – What do you mean by the importance of having doctors doing the right kinds of cases? How does Doctivity help?

CC – Here’s a good example. If you are hiring an orthopedic foot and ankle specialist, you don’t want that provider seeing patients that aren’t specific to their area of specialty and expertise. A foot and ankle surgeon doesn’t want to see patients with shoulder issues, yet that is often typical. So, what Doctivity does is it allows organizations to see those case types per provider, market, and schedule appropriately and effectively. As we moved along with our consulting, we realized the data piece was becoming bigger and bigger and we eventually pivoted to a 100 percent software platform.

Doctivity delivers the right type of data that organizations need to be able to make the right business decisions. Actionable data is the term we use, and we believe that understanding actionable data leads to growth and increased revenue generation. Organizations need to have the right data and analysis for strategic growth and ongoing effective planning.

DH – Please explain the Doctivity Difference.

CC – A true differentiator for us is the way we use the data, the kinds of data that we’re using, and the fact that the analysis is done for you. Our software as a solution – or SaaS – enables you, with just a couple of keystrokes, to see immediately where you need to pivot related to services and markets to grow your business. What really rang our bell was when we did approximately 100 interviews with executive leaders, middle management, and front-line staff and asked what is missing in their day-to-day work and what would make things easier and more effective for them in terms of growth, increasing new revenue, and leading toward higher patient satisfaction. We heard repeatedly that they needed access to the right kinds of data. We make sure they not only have that data but also the analysis to take proper actions. We focus their efforts, and we save them time in doing so.

DH – Did you obtain feedback from physician liaisons?

CC – Yes. We talked with numerous physician relations directors, chief strategy officers, and physician liaisons. And what we heard was the ability to capture the market intelligence the physician liaisons are out gathering in their work and be able to log it into a system that can be used for reporting and also defining and measuring new business growth by service line and individual providers.

DH – What is Doctivity doing with Physician Relationship Management (PRM)?

CC – Not only are we a business intelligence platform, but we’re also an advanced PRM system. Organizations want to be able to look at the physicians they are working with to grow their business, the details of the market, what the competition is doing, and where the business is going that they are not capturing. All of this is captured within our system. Not only can a physician liaison capture the work he or she is doing by logging into Doctivity, but the chief strategy officer, who is focused on a particular market, service, or specialists in that service, can – quickly with just a few keystrokes – obtain a report to see what is being done by each provider. This is instead of having to call or email for the information and often waiting two to three weeks for a response.

It doesn’t matter if you focus on one physician who is mission critical to your organization or if you’re focused on multiple service lines or an entire organization to understand exactly what is happening there in terms of business advancement, business development, competitive analysis, where the business is going, and who are the right referral targets. Doctivity captures all that information and analysis.

Watch for more of our FIVE QUESTIONS with our Actionable Insights podcast guests. For more information on Doctivity and to listen to our library of podcasts, please visit https://shows.acast.com/actionable-insights.