"Intentionally Put Yourself in A Place Where
Medical Professional Opportunities Come
Automatically and Frequently. "
Paul Harasim, the medical reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in January 2012 likely never realized that his article “True Angels” had much more significance than the single issue of
helping each other.
Although Mr. Harasim's intent was to nobilitate the achievements of a group of medical doctors, his impact also reveals a profound marketing "positioning" strategy. The incredible aspect of “positioning,” no matter how physicians go about perfecting their medical practice marketing strategies, is that it encompasses several other marketing strategies and benefits at the same time.
These physicians are offering free medical and surgical care to a filtered group of patients who can’t afford the care they desperately need. This mixed specialty group of physician volunteers at “Helping Hands Surgical Care,” a nonprofit foundation, the brainchild of Dr. Kevin Petersen, offers primarily free surgical care.
Their patients are those without healthcare insurance, are self-employed, have no available credit or other sources of money, yet have severe surgically correctible disabilities that no other doctors will accept as patients. Most physicians recognize the plight of such miserable patients.
Without knowing it at the time in the 1970s, I discovered that I was the only physician at my primary hospital (Mount Diablo Hospital) that had been accepting and treating (surgically) patients who were Jehovah Witnesses.
They do not accept blood transfusions. In my specialty of OBG I felt confident that the risk to me of operating on these patients was about 2500 times lower than getting killed driving home each day. I never had a problem with such patients in my medical career.
With the support of organizations, medical facilities, paramedical volunteers, and donations from many sources, this group is able to move patients from pure misery to life productivity.
The physician's services, skills, talents, time, and efforts are free to this lineup of patients. Orthopedics, urology, ObGyn, ophthalmology, plastic surgery, and cardiology are represented by those courageous medical doctors who are willing to step out of the box in their comfort zone.
These unique physicians mimic the heartfelt core aspirations of a majority of physicians and other professional medical providers. This sense of responsibility felt by physicians is often clouded by media coverage smeared with medical mistakes, medical malpractice cases, and the common belief that doctors “don’t care” anymore. Rubbish, mixed with malice.
Are there similar physician groups around the country doing the same thing to help those patients without money or health insurance coverage that fall through the healthcare cracks? Probably many!
Most physicians and other professional healthcare providers have a desire to do such things to help the underserved healthcare patients. In most cases, however, the gap between intention and taking action is so wide that nothing happens. Then, once in a rare while, a serious and passionate doctor steps up to the task to bring it to fruition, thank the Lord for that favor.
Unwillingness to sacrifice time spent with paying patients and family responsibilities along with the increasing restrictions on medical fees with dropping practice incomes, overworked physicians lose their motivation to volunteer to provide free medical services. It's a good example of the metaphor associated with, "When your up to your ass in alligators, you don't think about draining the swamp."
However, there’s a rather obscure and undeniable marketing advantage for physicians or any other professional medical provider who are willing to go beyond the self-protective reasoning that holds most physicians back from doing the same thing.
In most circumstances these free marketing advantages go unrecognized, nevertheless these significant marketing effects do happen anyway, automatically. In essence, these physicians reap rewards in return for what they have sacrificed in terms of time that last for years. The rewards are not all about building reputations and self-esteem, although for many onlookers it is only a form of self-aggrandizement and appearing superior.
These hidden rewards come in terms of monetary gain, practice growth, practice income, and personal fulfillment that can’t be attained in any other way… at least not for free! The following may incite you to develop a new mindset about healthcare volunteerism.
Positioning as used here is a marketing term that can be defined simply as a conscious effort to intentionally take the action necessary for placing yourself in a position where you expect to attract the things you desire most. When you volunteer to do something that benefits others, especially involving medical care, that very few will ever choose to do, you place yourself in a position to reap all the other marketing benefits, free of charge, as a bonus.
What happens, in marketing terms, with “positioning” yourself?
You’ll have all these marketing factors working for you in an undercurrent of what David Ogilvy's brother and a marketing legend, might have applied here as, “the slippery surface of irrelevant brilliance.”
- Publicity: Such unique free services offered by medical doctors attract media coverage, press releases about who is doing what to help the underserved patients.
- Differentiation: If you want more patients, you have to stand out above the rest of your competition. You find ways to do what no one else is doing, or willing to do. For example, you differentiate yourself from others by doing surgeries that no one else is doing.
- Building Referrals: Such special humanitarian efforts sends a message to patients who find out what you are doing that you are the kind of person who cares for your patients. It increases referrals from everyone connected with your “extra” efforts program as well as from other physicians in the area who want to send their patients to a physician who will go overboard to treat patients in the best possible way.
- Shared Promotions: By working with multiple organizations and people who support your efforts, you share in all their promotions to the public. They like what you are doing, so they tell everyone they come into contact with about you and what you do so well.
- Viral Marketing: Every patient that receives this unexpected free surgical benefit will gladly tell dozens, if not hundreds, of others about what you did for them and how they were treated. Your abilities, reputation, and credibility spread like wildfire.
There are times, however, when the chips are stacked against physicians. I happened to be on OBG call for our Emergency Room at the hospital one night. A 23 year old married lady came into the ER for severe vaginal hemorrhage, barely conscious. She had had a C-section delivery at another hospital without a problem.
A week or two later the vaginal bleeding began, more than expected, so she went to the ER of the other hospital where she had been operated on. The doctor examined her and told her that the bleeding was from the sutures in the uterus and would slowly stop on its own. Over the next week the vaginal bleeding increased. She was upset about how she was treated at the other hospital so a few days after that she came to our hospital ER.
She was barely responsive, had an extremely low blood pressure. I took her directly to the operating room, opened her previous incision and found a gapping open uterine incision that had dehisced. An emergency hysterectomy was the only choice to save her life. She had bled out and the ability to close the macerated uterus walls was an impossible task. The bleeding had to be stopped immediately.
She received several blood transfusions and recovered without problems. Her husband was upset as well as the patient about losing the uterus and no more children.
Her husband was in the military so my billing for the surgery went through the military system. At that time, the military check covering the surgery is always sent to the patient, standard procedure. The patient never returned to my office post op, and I never got paid.
- Branding: Attached to your persona is a recognizable special attribute that people remember instantly when your name is spoken, mentioned, read, heard, or seen for the rest of their lives. Like—“He’s the only doctor that I know who did all those wonderful things for free and never expected to be paid.” You are branded with that reputation.
- Building Relationships: Current marketing strategies become more effective as a result of building friendships with those you expect to become your patients, or those you want to refer patients, promote your expertise by word-of-mouth, and become your patients eventually.
Relationships increase trust, dependability, and credibility… later more patients and more income. It avoids prospecting for patients by asking them to join your practice. The relationship creates their need to approach you first—so you get much better and loyal patients this way.
- Likeability: People buy from people they like. Patients migrate to physicians they like. It’s how you treat people when you deal with them. Physicians that aren’t likable rarely survive in private practices. Physicians who volunteer their medical services almost always demonstrate this attribute. The wider you spread your likeability outside medical professional circles, the more patients you gain that you wouldn't have otherwise.
- Social Proof: Whenever a physician demonstrates their expertise, knowledge, and skills to potential patients outside of their own medical practice, it greatly increases favorable testimonials about you and your dedication to healthcare patients without doing any advertising or promoting of yourself by yourself. Your actions market you better than anything else.
- Transparency: This factor is especially important in promoting trust in patient’s minds. While working in an environment where you don’t feel compelled to maintain your “practice” persona, you are much more likely to open yourself up to others (become more transparent
to others).
People love to find out that you are exactly like them (not aloof), have the same life problems and stress, look for the same solutions, and have the same hopes that they do. And that is a person who is admired... well above the stuffy "white coat" model.
You can certainly come up with several more elusive marketing factors which have a great deal to do with influencing those around you without it being intentional on your part. Most of us probably don’t pay much attention to how much we impact and influence other people during our daily lives.
By intentionally positioning yourself in the right place, job, situation, and environment where all the advantages come to you without asking, whatever your desires are, is an incredibly powerful marketing strategy. If you want to attract affluent patients, join their golf clubs and mix with them. If you want to become wealthy, find ways to mix with the millionaires.
One way or another the act of “positioning” yourself brings with it many other spontaneous marketing elements that weren’t mentioned in the article referred to above. These tag-along marketing factors do happen, although they vary in degree depending on the circumstances.
An astute physician can move the effectiveness of this automatic marketing strategy to an even higher level by intentionally adding to the process using other more obvious marketing tactics, which carry the results much higher and more effectively.
These other marketing tactics should include...
- Professionally designed medical practice marketing business cards for your practice… different from the usual business cards you hand out. Always use the back of your business cards to market you and your practice advantages.
- Medical practice business stationery designed for use as a "marketing" mail piece
- An 800 telephone number using an answering service to give out information, provide recorded information for patients, or gain the callers contact information for later medical practice marketing contacts
- A short 20 second “elevator speech” that can be spoken quickly and lucidly in response to anyone wondering what you do for others in your medical practice business. It's especially effective when meeting someone new at a social affair when you are asked, "What do you do?"
- A method to record a list of contacts and their contact information (called leads)
- A follow-up program organized to maintain contact with those potential patients on your list by giving them helpful information or advice by newsletters (by email best)
- Respond promptly to any contact messages sent to you (preferably same day or within 24 hours) because most messages left for others to respond to, either are never responded to or when eventually responded to, are irrelevant
- A powerful USP (universal selling proposition)—meaning a short one sentence of less than 15 words describing what makes your practice different from all the rest, what benefit patients get that they won’t get from any other doctors, and what it is that you provide that’s unique. Add these words to your business cards and all stationary just below your name and address.
Comment about the extent of a doctor’s professional responsibility...
Over 4 years after passage of the Obamacare legislation, there were various estimates of how many people in the USA have no healthcare insurance--the popular number was estimated to be about 25% of our population. Hence, the impetuous to pass ObamaCare legislation believing that approximately 25 million people get lousy medical care or none at all in the healthcare crisis, raised the ante.
It came to my mind that this serious problem of access to good healthcare could be resolved by the medical profession itself without the need for passing a national healthcare law. It jibes with the article above quite well.
By rough calculations obtained by dividing 25 million patients without healthcare (like in 2008) (other than hospital emergency rooms where quick temporary treatment is available), by the number of physicians practicing medicine in our population (approximately one million), it results in 25 healthcare patients per private medical doctor.
Using these figures, it would be theoretically possible to ask each physician to accept and take care of 25 medically uninsured patients each year… free of charge. When you compare this to the number of "no show" or "cancelled" appointments every physician sees often, a physician could very well see an uninsured patient during those appointment time gaps that are nonproductive of practice income anyway. Would they do it--hell no!
The process could amount to far more income than expected for any physician over time. Such free patients may refer paying patients that more than compensate a physician for his or her time. It also is reasonable to expect that when the uninsured patient finally gets a job, they would become your paying patient. Talk about bad judgment.
Of course, this figure would have to be adjusted for physicians in active full time medical practice businesses, for managed care physicians and hospital employee positions where those facilities would be expected to contribute to the process, and for even distribution of those patients to the appropriate kind of physician needed for that patient’s care.
It certainly would be a challenge to create and manage such a system, to say the least. But it has the distinct advantage of removing the insurmountable debt now placed on those of us who pay taxes, as well as the need for governmental intervention.
My experience in private medical practice management clearly showed me that any medical practice could accept at least one of these patients per week without suffering much (if any) financially for doing it. Most of the physicians I know, if asked to do so voluntarily, would have agreed to take on that chore for the sake of making healthcare available to everyone and avoiding government takeover of healthcare.
It’s no secret that a large majority of physicians probably have been treating a few uninsured patients in their practices without charge, voluntarily for whatever reason, over the years. And this excludes all those patients who were seen and treated who never paid their doctor bills... there's no shortage of free care given to those patients as well... even if it's an involuntary result.
What about the professional responsibility of all medical schools in our nation that receiver huge million dollar grants annually direct from the government?
All of that money from the government goes somewhere. The question is not that the money is being used for necessary productive ventures such as medical research. The question is, what about the money in that grant that goes to frivolous activities that is kept secret and well camouflaged within the university system.
Naturally, those who work in that arena would call that a conspiracy notion. But those who apply for grants understand that they must request more money than they need to cover what is truly necessary. I've often thought that skimming off the top of those grants would be enough to provide an academic business education for all medical students.
Part of that cost expectedly would be derived from medical student tuition.
When physicians have a formal business education (it includes marketing), they will normally have the business knowledge and tools to bypass the fee restrictions and dictates of our
government legally.
When physicians use the business tools, they can make any level of income that they desire at any time and for any reasons.
When physicians have a well deserved high income, they are far more likely to spend some of it to increase their skills and knowledge in medical practice and can afford to market their practices appropriately for even more income.
When physicians can afford improving their skills and therefore have the ability to reach their ultimate potential in medical practice and their careers, they are far better physicians than they would otherwise be.
Huge numbers of physicians today lose their medical practices for financial reasons. Large numbers of physicians can't afford to get the upgrades of knowledge and skills, and their potential is not only leveled off but also levels off their quality of medical practice and value to their patients.
When physicians are able to earn all the income they want, their quality of their medical knowledge increases dramatically as well as their value to their patients and healthcare in our nation.
This pyramid of professional advancement can only happen if all medical schools provide a business education for all medical students immediately. I say immediately because the 5 decade plans that the government has worked on very cleverly to gain complete control of our nations healthcare has almost reached that point.
What is presently very obvious, is that full control of healthcare by our government can only be accomplished by eliminating private medical practice by any means. However, it gets worse. The next step in the government plan is to control the medical profession itself.
When that happens, all physicians can expect to become indentured servants to the government, live under dictated practice restrictions based on making money for the bureaucrats, be fired and ejected at any time from medical practice, be moved anywhere in the USA at any time to areas where medical care needs improving, and very likely physicians salaries will be lowered to socialized medicine levels, as they are across Europe.
So, I ask you---if you were a premed in college today, would you apply to medical schools knowing all this is coming at you?
You might realize that this issue is already going on today across our nation in medical schools. American males are no longer applying to medical schools, and the medical school classes have been filling up classes with women and foreign students.
----Professional Probe----
"Those physicians who find marketing unnecessary, will
find themselves hanging on the fragile wall of business
ignorance about 2000 feet above the ground."
Have you been dragged down a rabbit hole and are still shaking from your white knuckle ride? You certainly are sophisticated enough to envision the end results of practicing medicine without the business tools always found in the desks of successful business owners.
No one is forcing you to do anything you refuse to do for your own reasons. But you do have the intelligence to remain open minded and in sync with your talents and skills. The only thing at keeps lingering in your mind that you will continue to be saddled with may be the thought that some physicians deserve their financial misery.
If you're not one of those individuals and haven't taken steps in marketing your medical practice you likely have found yourself in the phase of the "build-up" stress factor or the "tipping point" factor headed for the "burnout" factor. My mind is loaded with the evidence of these things that I went through many years ago in my own medical practice, and are there today.
On this website I believe there is enough practical and credible business and marketing information to enable all physicians to drag themselves out of the rabbit hole and make a profound difference in the world of healthcare by using the tools that are known to make it happen.
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #29 3-16-22
