What’s Working in the Home Care and Hospice Industry
Posted by Mike Ferris on Friday, May 23, 2008 and posted in Home Health Care SalesThis week’s post is a follow-up to last week’s article on emerging trends in home care and hospice sales and marketing. This week, we’ll address some current trends that will help your agency meet the competitive challenges in our industry.
Integration with physician practices through the creation of specialty programs continues to work well. The deeper the integration of the home care agency with the referral source’s practice, the harder it is for the competition to siphon off any business. Find out how the agency can best serve the referral source by enhancing their ability to provide excellent care and outcomes for their patients.
On the subject of outcomes, there is a continued focus on quality measures and they are being used aggressively to market an agency’s services. Home Care Compare and other datasets are being used to generate graphical representations that show the benefits and advantages of working with a specific agency. As the prospect of pay for performance becomes more visible across the entire Medicare continuum of care, there will be more interest in working with agencies that can improve the other provider’s outcomes.
Agencies are having good success using telehealth along with specialty programs as points of differentiation. The key to these agencies success lies in their ability to communicate the benefits to the referral sources of these programs. This is accomplished by training their sales people how to sell the benefits and creating collateral materials to support the sales effort. Specific needs must be uncovered for the referral source and a telehealth solution presented. Due to the barriers to entry in the home telehealth field, this continues to be an important differentiating factor.
Sales and customer service training for the intake department is paying big dividends. Since the bulk of referrals are handled by these staff members, it only makes sense to train them to listen for needs, suggest solutions and arrange to have a representative of the agency come to the home to aid the transition to the home. In any other industry the internal sales department would be provided with ongoing training to increase the number and quality of sales. Home care agencies totally overlook this element and as a result they make it more difficult to refer patients to the agency. Making it as easy to refer to the agency has been proven to increase referrals dramatically.
There is an evolving trend in Medicare home health and hospice of using referral representatives to facilitate the admission of patient referrals. These referral representatives are trained to be good at customer service and selling to the patients and their families. Agencies are finding that their conversion ratio is rising dramatically and it is removing much of the admission paperwork and time from the nurses. These representatives can be trained to install telehealth systems and train the patient and or caregivers to use them properly. This allows more telehealth units to be placed in more patients’ homes with less stress on the nursing staff.
Private Duty agencies are having success offering “Peace of Mind” packages that provide the client’s family members a feeling of security. These packages include some standard services such as home makers and medication tray set-up. By adding either daily phone calls or telehealth or both, the agency provides a higher level of security. This is an emerging market for telehealth. Private duty agencies can set up their own programs or in most cases will partner with a local agency that offers telehealth services. Additionally, since so many family members live in another area of the country the agencies have set up e-mail and or phone updates to keep them apprised of their family member’s current status. The secret to success is to package the services and then market the benefits not the features.