FIVE QUESTIONS WITH JEAN HITCHCOCK –Effective Physician Relationship Management (PRM)

We had the opportunity to sit down recently with Jean Hitchcock, President of Hitchcock Marketing and Communications and a nationally recognized Physician Relationship Management leader, to talk about current challenges in the healthcare industry. For our full podcasts, please visit https://shows.acast.com/actionable-insights.

DH – Thanks, Jean, for talking with us today about effective Physician Relationship Management.

JH – We have a challenge in healthcare in that doctors are employed, some hospital-based and some community-based, and there are also independent doctors. And so, for an organization to retain business from doctors, it must be engaged with them. A good PRM allows the organization to track those relationships for growth opportunities and retention opportunities. And that’s something we’ve never had in the past because we didn’t have the data and we didn’t have the software to analyze the data, which then told the story. Getting and nurturing that relationship with the people who are the decision-makers and wherever referrals go is critical. And that’s what PRM is all about.

DH – Please share with us some of the PRM successes you’ve experienced.

JH – One of the big highlights for me is the fact that the physician liaisons are considered confidants of the doctors. I had a physician liaison who mentioned to our leadership that a large physician group was being courted by two of our competitors – and if we wanted them back, we had better be there. And we did. Another time we had physicians talking about how difficult it was from an access perspective to get people into a certain program of ours. When we started to do some resolution work around that, we found there was a requirement for some testing before patients could be scheduled, and this was slowing everything down. Being able to make it easy for doctors to refer to you is an important way that the liaisons help with operations, which then helps with growth and retention.

And then the most impactful thing, I thought, when I was in California, a physician would tell our liaison that he or she was retiring and didn’t want his or her patients to go anywhere else. So, we would recruit either a new physician or move one of our other physicians into that practice. That provided great continuity for us.

DH – It appears that the physician liaisons are at the center of successful Physician Relationship Management. Please talk about the liaisons and what they bring to the table.

JH – I look at the liaisons as a concierge for the doctors in the field and the doctors in-house. They are the ones who uncover the issues and then run them up the flagpole until they get a resolution and go back to the doctor or office manager who raised it. They bring back competitive intelligence. This is what’s going on. We thought you might want to know. That sort of thing. They have to be smart about clinical programs so that when they are talking to a referring doctor who is bringing up a case, they can speak intelligently about it. They are out there, and they are communicating what we do, and it is what holds the organization and the doctors together.

DH – There is a quote of yours on the Doctivity website that touches on assuring that providers are seeing the right types of cases for ongoing success. What do you mean by this?

JH – Depending on how the practice is set up and believe it or not some of them are still set up in antiquated ways, for example, there are still orthopedic practices that everyone who calls gets an appointment with a surgeon, whether they a surgical case or not, which wastes the surgeon’s time and fills his or her schedule inappropriately and the patients don’t get what they need. When we talk about bringing in the right kind of business and we want the right kind of patients, we want surgically qualified patients to see surgeons. It is doing triage so the sub-specialists see whom they should see. I’m at Phoenix Children’s, which has 75 sub-specialist areas. When you get to that level of specificity, you need to make sure that those doctors are seeing the most acute kids.

DH – You’ve spoken about the importance of Doctivity’s PRM being built by healthcare people. Why is that important for referrals, provider retention, and recruitment?

JH – Only someone who’s been in healthcare and knows how it works understands that patients and physicians are different…the patients are directed by the doctors. Providers always ask their marketing teams the same questions. What are you going to do to help me get busy? How are you going to drive patients to me? And with solid healthcare backgrounds, we can tell them in real concrete terms, these are the tactics we are going to take. This is the time commitment you’ve got to give me. This is the relationship we need to have. So, when doctors are being recruited and told they’ve got a whole physician relations team out there who is going to support them, that is a big recruitment pull. And when there are issues that need to be resolved that the doctors were not aware of but were brought to their attention by physician relations, they get the value in that because it affects their patient load.

I have seen the Doctivity PRM from day one. It’s a great PRM, and there aren’t many good ones out there. Doctivity really gets it from a physician relations perspective because that’s what they are trying to do – drive business to make the doctors more productive. I didn’t see anyone else doing anything like what Doctivity is doing. Doctivity takes the whole thing as a personal relationship and treats it the way you would with your own relationships, how you would like to be treated. You can’t be afraid to go into a doctor’s office and ask what you can do to earn their trust. And by trust, I mean their business.

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.