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 audience is and what they're most interested in, and craft different messages accordingly.

For example, managed care organizations will be particularly interested in your rates on rehospitalizations and other items that obviously will cut or increase costs, so you would stress those numbers in their materials. Marketing for patients and their families probably will be less clinical than that for physicians and discharge planners.

But no matter who your audience is, don't fall into the trap of using industry-specific "lingo and acronyms" that only other HHA experts would understand, Rooney warns. "That's an opportunity for misunderstandings."

5. Draw direct comparisons. The beauty of using outcomes from Home Health Compare versus other outcome data you may have collected is that you can draw direct comparisons between yourself and competitors. If your outcomes compare favorably to your competitors' and/or the national and state averages furnished on the site, be sure to clearly point that out in your marketing materials with easy-to-understand charts and graphs, Bishop recommends.

6. Frame your numbers - simply. Charts, graphs and hard numbers can be effective marketing tools, but not if they're left to do the work on their own, Rooney cautions. Be sure to explain why your numbers are important and how they make your HHA the best choice for referrals, she stresses.

But don't go overboard explaining the complicated background of the outcomes, which is likely to confuse your target audience, Rooney adds. "Keep it simple."

7. Use case studies. A sure-fire way to catch docs' interest is to use case studies to illustrate your numbers, Cherney offers. "Physicians learn from specific cases," she observes. Of course, you must adhere to HIPAA rules when using patient information in marketing materials.

8. Target desirable referrals. If you charge ahead with a half-baked marketing strategy based on outcomes, you may find yourself reaping referrals that put your agency into the red. Think carefully about what referrals are most beneficial to your agency's bottom line, and aim your marketing efforts toward those, Rooney advises.

9. Look professional. Some numbers scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin are unlikely to impress. Make sure the marketing materials you distribute to referral sources and presentation materials your marketing staff use are professional-looking, Bishop reminds agencies.

10. Don't limit yourself to 11 outcomes. Although the outcomes on the Home Health Compare Web site are particularly useful for comparison, don't rule out using other outcome data in your marketing plan, Cherney counsels. Other, more specific outcomes you have may be useful in supporting niche marketing. For example, numbers on wound healing would support a campaign for more wound care patients.

HHAs whose patient outcomes data aren't stellar may be reluctant to focus on outcomes in their marketing efforts. But agencies can emphasize that they are working hard on quality improvement and are on top of any potential problems, experts say.

Providers also may want to point out, when asked, that they have a certain population that the risk-adjusted factors didn't compensate for, Cherney suggests. OASIS collection problems rather than quality of care are another common culprit when it comes to low outcomes, experts note.