Lessons from the Field: Marketing to Physicians- Learning from Pharma, the Untapped Potential of Using EHRs

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Marketing to physicians is hard. It is tough to reach physicians trying your mightiest to get that elusive appointment for face-to-face selling. Then came the pandemic, and it became nearly impossible. One segment of the vendor healthcare market hit particularly hard was revenue cycle management (RCM) vendors. These companies battle among the thousands of local mom-and-pop billing and coding shops and the national behemoths. Competition in the healthcare vendor segment is primarily price-driven and can be considered in many ways that billing and coding are commodities.

So how can an RCM break through this loggerhead?

You need to get the physician's attention in the right marketing channel, with the right message, the first time.

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Getting the attention of physicians and practice leaders can seem like a nearly impossible task for business development executives. At the same time, cold calling sometimes works and requires a significant amount of luck; it's mostly an activity that is a waste of time and effort but makes senior leadership happy because they continually confuse activity with the outcome.

Marketing does what it can, pulling data from the sales CRM and using the marketing MAP, creating content, emails, social media, webinars, co-sponsorships with associations, trade shows, thought leadership, etc. But even those efforts need a refresh.

I have always believed that some of the greatest and successful marketing comes from learning from other industries, adapting and applying those lessons to your current effort. It's akin to a blue ocean strategy. Sometimes, you must get past the egos and "I know all the answers" senior leadership to go forth in a new direction.

Luckily for you, another healthcare industry heavily vested in direct-to-physician marketing has made significant progress and success in getting in front of the physician and opening doors.

We need to learn from pharmaceutical marketing to get in front of docs to get those elusive face-to-face business development meetings.

You need to learn, adapt, adjust your marketing budget, create new marketing plans, and focus on executing in the new age of direct to physician marketing.

The new age is not your traditional channels of email, social media, LinkedIn, trade shows, webinars, content, and other traditional marketing activities; you will still need many of those marketing activities but on a lesser scale.

The marketing channel you're missing is utilizing the physician's Electronic Medical Record to get your relevant messages and generate the high-value Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for business development. What you are doing is shifting a significant portion of your RCM marketing budget (if you're lucky enough to have one) to digital.

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You will reach the physicians at the point of care with your messages within their telemedicine applications and EHRs.

Many of these EHRs and telemedicine systems that physicians use allow text messaging and banner ads direct to physicians at the point of care.

A word of caution.

If you think you can add this into your marketing mix as part of a broader campaign, you will be doomed to fail. Using point-of-care technology is not about general messaging as you would on LinkedIn or a banner ad, or even a print advertisement where physicians gather. Using point-of-care technology is about precision campaign messaging. Business rules are created and applied to each campaign that enables ads to appear within the context of care.

The messaging is not about what you do for them, but how you can free the physician from the administrative burden of billing, coding, collection, deductibles, etc.  Your messages must have relevance and contextual perspective. You are releasing the physician or group practice to spend more time doing what they were trained to do, and that is practice medicine, not be an administrator.

Point of care RCM messaging is not easy by any means. The effort will require new partnerships and marketing tools to create and execute. It's not as simple as just using Salesforce or HubSpot to manage. It will take expertise and capability that may not exist within the RCM. It will take a budget too.

What you must decide I between the choice of whether you want the same-old-same-oh approach to reaching physicians or acknowledge that the pandemic has changed everything and new ways to break through are needed.

And that means taking risks, breaking from the past, and leveraging new digital marketing channels and opportunities to grow the RCM using EHRs and telemedicine applications to reach the physician at the point of care.

Your choice. The market waits for no one.

Thank you for reading, and please consider sharing.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing, communications strategist, and thought leader. As an internationally followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters, is read in 52 countries and is listed on the 100 Top Healthcare Marketing Blogs & Websites ranked at No. 3 on Feedspot.com. Michael is a Life Fellow American College of Healthcare Executives. An influencer in healthcare marketing strategy, communications, digital marketing, and social media, Michael is in the top 10 percent of social media experts nationwide. For inquiries regarding strategic consulting engagements, you can email me at michael@themichaeljgroup.com. 

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The opinions expressed are my own.