Look to alternative medicine for strategies
Patients pay out of pocket for those services
A few years ago, a rehab provider doing market research could look only at the hospital across town as a competitor. Now your competitor may be a physician doing acupuncture, a biofeedback specialist with a chronic pain management program, or a chiropractor who took marketing classes in chiropractic school, says Nancy Beckley, MS, MBA, president of the Bloom ingdale Consulting Group in Valrico, FL.
More and more people are spending cash - without getting reimbursed - for chiropractors, herbal medicine, and massage therapists. Consumers are spending their own money to heal themselves because they believe in the services they receive, adds Carol Stillman, MS, PT, president of Health Creations, a New York City-based consulting firm specializing in training health care professionals to promote their products.
Neither Beckley nor Stillman advocate that rehab hospitals put an herbalist or a massage therapist on staff. Instead, take a tip from alternative practitioners and let the public know about your services and how they can benefit.
Alternative medicine practitioners "have created a demand for their services by selling. People will pay for your services when they are aware of them, when you have credibility, and they have a perception it will heal them," Stillman says.
Many health plans are beginning to cover alternative medicine services because studies have shown their members are willing to pay out of pocket for these services, Beckley says. To keep members happy, health plans are covering treatments they wouldn't have considered a few years ago.
Like rehab providers, alternative practitioners look at where a person needs to be and what skills they have to bring the person to that level, Beckley points out.
"Physical therapists aren't the only people who can get these outcomes. There are other people out there, and they are claiming the alternative niche market for their own," she says.
A generation that will pay $50 for a weekly manicure, $75 for a trip to the hairdresser, and as much as $100 for a massage should be willing to pay for rehab therapy - if you can convince them it will make them feel better, she says.
"We work so hard to become clinicians and have so much to offer the community that is it our responsibility to get out there and sell who we are," Stillman adds.
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