Avoid the newsletter pitfall the wastebasket
How to make sure doctors read what you send them
Communicating with doctors in your hospital via an agency newsletter has its pitfalls, and the biggest one stands right next to the physicians’ mail slots. It’s the wastebasket. And all your hard work will end up in it if you don’t give doctors pertinent information in a format they can read quickly.
Physicians, like most people today (or perhaps more than most), suffer from information overload. Wherever they turn, it seems, there’s something else to read, or to throw away, and a wastebasket is just too tempting. The goal here is to ensure your newsletter falls, pardon the pun, into the former category.
So, how do you do that? Moreover, why would you do that? Hospital Home Health asked two hospital-affiliated home health agencies about their newsletters. Queen of the Valley Hospital Home Care Services of Napa, CA, and Contin-U-Care Home Health, an agency owned by Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, TN, offer two very different ideas about newsletter format, but both agencies have the same goal communicating with doctors and marketing their agency’s services.
At Contin-U-Care, the newsletter is written in-house by staff who volunteer their time; Queen of the Valley uses a consultant to produce its news letter. Both publications are printed monthly, but Contin-U-Care’s is eight pages, while Queen of the Valley’s is two pages.
Although physician referrals are important to both agencies, neither provider has collected hard data to show that referrals have increased as a result of their newsletters. However, their efforts have been no less valuable.
Increasing awareness, maintaining referrals
"I can’t say yes or no, but when we talk to doctors, they more aware of what we are doing," says Nancy Woods, RN, specialty services director at Contin-U-Care, whose nurses make about 80,000 visits annually.
Pat Parker, MSN, former director of Queen of the Valley home care, whose staff makes 48,000-50,000 visits a year, responds to the referral question, "No, we don’t have any figures on increased referrals, but I know we didn’t have any decreases either. It helps maintain our referral base."
Parker says a recent physician survey she did showed that 28% of MDs indicate the newsletter is their main source of information on home care.
Parker, who now serves as director of healthy communities at Queen of the Valley Hospital, hired local public relations consultant Yvonne Baginski about a year ago to write and desktop-publish their newsletter, Physician Update. About 300 are printed commercially each month, and nearly 200 of them get mailed to doctors.
"We’re a small county [Napa County], about 120,000 people," Parker says, "although we do get a fair number of referrals of [San Francisco] Bay area hospitals."
While having Baginski produce the two-page (front and back) letter-size monthly publication saves the home care staff a lot of extra work, the process has other advantages as well. "Home health agencies don’t always have the time to put these things together, or they think a secretary can do it."
What’s more, she warns against going to the hospital’s marketing and public relations office for help. "Most hospital marketing departments don’t have a clue what home health is. They don’t see it as a grass-roots organization that can help their business. They see it just as a unit of the hospital, like cardiology or radiology."
Not only that, she says, the newsletter content has to go "through two or three layers of approval, and with all the changes, it ends up promoting the hospital."
Before its final format and frequency were decided, Queen of the Valley’s newsletter went through an identity crisis, Parker says. "We did the newsletter off and on for about three years. It was quarterly at first, but we decided that was too costly, so we went with the monthly two-sided format. It has larger print so the doctors can read it quickly. Four or six pages of data are not easy to read. A single page is easy to read."
Parker says newsletter topics have included Medicare reimbursement for case management of home care patients, adding that Queen of the Valley faces "stiff competition from freestanding providers who offer doctors a single case manager to manage all their patients."
"We’ve done things about our adjunct, support programs that take the burden off the doctor; stories about caregiver support; our outreach programs, like blood pressure clinics; and our peer counseling program. We put the information in about that, hoping the doctors could use our ancillary programs to fill in gaps left by managed care."
Woods follows much the same editorial recipe for her eight-page monthly newsletter, Contin-U-Care Up Close, but she has added a few other ingredients of her own. Although doctors are a target audience, so are patients, staff, and managed care organizations. Boasting a press run of between 500 and 600 copies per issue, the newsletter, which has been published now for eight months, is mailed and hand-delivered to readers.
"We designate a feature article and three secondary articles, and certainly regular monthly features, like a calendar, a QI corner, an administrator’s corner, low-fat recipe, humor, a cartoon or something off the Internet, plus a section we call Warm Fuzzies,’ in which we list patients’ compliments. We also list employee anniversaries each month and their birthdays."
Yet home health care trends still make the front page. A recent issue’s cover story dealt with changes in home health care delivery, managed care, and reimbursement issues, topics almost any doctor would find interesting.
Newsletter runs photos, too
Woods and a team of eight staff members volunteer their own time to produce Up Close. A self-described computer hobbyist, Woods designed the newsletter and serves as its editor and chief writer. Staffing coordinator Karen Jenkins enters the stories and assembles everything with the desktop publishing application Microsoft Publisher. Up Close is also letter-sized, but unlike Physician’s Update, it runs photographs. "We bought a 35 mm camera," Woods says, "and we took pictures of everybody. We run about four or five photos in each edition."
The turnaround time, which includes the monthly editorial planning meeting with all department heads, takes about two weeks, Woods says: a week to get it ready to go to the printer, and another five to seven days for printing.
Since Woods and her editorial volunteers work on their own time, the only real cost is the printing. Woods says that amounts to about $450 a month, plus mailing costs. She says it averages out to around $500 per issue.
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