How to Make Your Program More Market-Driven
How do you find out what your market wants? Here are some tips from Janell Moerer, administrator of marketing and development at HealthSouth Mid-American Rehabilitation Hospital in Overland Park, KS.
o Read trade journals and consumer magazines to see what the latest trends are in health care.
o Stay in close contact with health care reporters in your area. What stories are they are pursuing? Moerer has seen a lot of articles on alternative medicine and is researching the topic to see where it would fit in the Mid-America product line. "We may not go into it in the next 18 months, but we are working on way to fit it with our product line."
o Make sure that payers, referring physicians, and patients have an incentive to use your service. Maybe the physicians are capitated and the rehab hospital is a more appropriate place to manage after care with oversight from the physicians. Or maybe physicians will use your post-acute services because of the quality incentive, since a therapist can spend more time treating the patient than the physician can.
o Listen carefully for comments on your proposed service. Some program areas may look like competition to physicians. Providers should read between the lines to determine what might be perceived as threats and try to over come them.
o Don’t think that because you are the rehab professional you know best what the market needs. Instead, let the market demands shape your product. "We don’t design programs from the inside out. It’s from the outside in. The end product very seldom looks like what we thought it would be like when we first approached it," Moerer says.
o Be ready to change your program if the market demands changes. One example all providers can identify with is the fact that some services that traditionally have been strictly inpatient are moving to outpatient. "We are building a continuum that is quite different from what we thought it would be."
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