Home Health & Hospice Week

Knowing your audience is a crucial step.  If you're not using the newly unveiled patient outcomes as a key part of your marketing strategy, you're missing the boat bound for increased referrals and higher profitability. Your patient outcomes, as revealed in the launch of the Home Health Quality Initiative and the Home Health Compare Web site (see story, "READY OR NOT, YOUR OUTCOMES ARE HERE"), could be a marketing goldmine. "Home Health Compare can be a tremendous opportunity" for a home health agency's marketing program, says Adam Bishop with health care marketing firm The Adam Group in Franklin, TN. "Agencies should definitely use outcomes and quality measures in their marketing," advises consultant Mike Ferris with Access Health Education in Chapel Hill, NC. "It is an excellent reason to have the conversation about quality in home care." Outcome data give HHAs a chance to back up their marketing claims with cold, hard facts, says Heather Rooney with benchmarking firm Outcome Concept Systems Inc. in Seattle. The objective information can give your marketing message "that added punch," Rooney advises. Outcomes can be "a great tool" to assist in marketing efforts, adds marketing and sales consultant Alison Cherney with Cherney & Associates in Brentwood, TN. To push full steam ahead on the outcomes marketing journey, follow these 10 tips: 1. Understand your outcomes. You can't use your patient outcomes effectively if you don't understand them yourself. Make sure you know what you're talking about when you begin to incorporate your outcomes into your marketing strategy, Ferris counsels. 2. Train your marketers. Once you have a handle on what your outcomes mean, make sure the marketing staff who will be passing along the information understand them as well. "Train the sales team on how to use the outcomes positively with their referral sources," Cherney suggests. "This is a really good time for strong home care marketing and sales training," Ferris maintains. "Outcomes and what quality means in home care must be a part of that training." 3. Tell your story. Don't let the feds, your competitors or somebody else tell your agency's story for you through your outcomes data. Instead, take the data and craft your message about what it means for referral sources, Rooney says. Getting your message out proactively may head off potential negative attention to your outcomes. HHAs "are much better off initiating the conversation as opposed to answering defensively," Ferris contends. 4. Target your audience. The message you create in your marketing materials should depend on who you want the message to go to. To be effective, marketing materials must be interesting, relevant and appealing to the audience, Rooney explains. To achieve those goals, you have to decide who the [...]