​Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that can be mastered. A decade ago, many of the wealthier companies paid to ensure their sites came out on top. Today, search engines favor more organic approaches. Brands that do not understand the importance of SEO lose out on valuable business and relationships.

As a medical marketing professional, how does SEO help us in the healthcare realm? Implementing the right SEO tactics, or following guidelines to ensure a site is found, can help healthcare professionals acquire skill sets, attract leads, guide consumer research, and come out on top.

Increased usage of smartphones and health apps in the United States has allowed healthcare facilities and providers easier access to communications and up-to-the-minute access to treatment plans. At the same time, American consumers are experiencing greater healthcare data breaches than ever before. In fact, according to the HIPPA Journal, more than twice the number of healthcare records were exposed during 2018 than in the previous year. That’s over thirteen million healthcare records!

There has been a growing concern from consumers in the United States about the current standing of healthcare privacy and security. Last year, Aetna evaluated the responses of 1,000 consumers and 400 physicians to several questions regarding preferences toward healthcare. The company presented the data in its Inaugural Health Ambitions Study, which concluded that patient privacy and security were more concerning to consumers than the cost of healthcare.

Technology continues to embed itself further into our everyday lives. If anything the healthcare industry has been slower to adopt and fully integrate all the technology touchpoints we have in the rest of our lives. However, the healthcare industry continues to invest in technology to place orders, document encounters, write prescriptions, submit claims, and communicate among care team.

​You have a steady stream of business flowing, but in the dynamic world of MedTech products, you know that business can change at a moment’s notice. Knowing how to increase demand for one’s product and earn new business is extremely important.

​The bases are loaded. The batter steps up to the plate. Does he just wildly swing at every pitch? Of course not! He has been in the dugout, discussing the pitching stats with his coach — running the numbers to determine the type of pitch that will send all his teammates home. He eyes the ball approaching him. It abruptly curves toward the center of the plate. He swings and …

We evaluated the organic approach to territory alignment in Representing Your Sales Territory: Part One, Alignment. In this article, we will discuss the fundamentals of healthcare data analytics, why it matters, and how it applies to a sales and marketing process. 

Healthcare sales is similar to baseball. With the right team in place, and the right skill sets, your business can come out on top. Whether you are setting up a distributorship, working on your own, or managing a group of sales representatives within a large organization, it is important to establish representation that covers the desired physician population, in the most efficient and cost-effective ways.

There are two methods that effectively address the sales territory map. In this first blog, we are going to pitch the organic approach. In the second blog, we will discuss running Carevoyance data analytics and territory alignment software. Combined, these two methods are a grand slam when deciding how to best represent your given territory.

When using the organic approach to develop a sales territory map there are many factors to consider. These can include the size of the territory, the number of sales representatives within the organization, the number of physicians within a territory, current established rep relationships, the value of products in a bag, and the dynamic of change. The list is as specific or as vast as needed to achieve optimal territory alignment — and it is not exclusive to these factors alone. Use these as a starting point (or reorganizational point) of consideration. Incorporate territory alignment software. Then continue to re-evaluate as change occurs within your sales representation, physician population, product portfolio, and sales territory map. 

The role of the medical device sales professional is shifting and changing, mostly due to innovative technology. Instead of simply being reactive, you have the ability to be more proactive in a controlled manner that doesn’t eat up your time. The key to increasing touchpoints and segmenting leads? Sales automation software.

​If you aren’t sure what you should automate, start here. This article will take you on a tour of what’s possible and help you decide what’s best for your business need. Ultimately, you want to automate medical device sales in an approach that ensures your prospects get relevant information, and the breadth and depth of your sales conversions increase.

​A trend has been emerging in the healthcare marketplace where C-level executives are resigning or simply leaving without notice. There are a number of reasons why mid-level managers and below leave jobs without notice, including hostile work environments, unsafe work conditions, illegal corporate activity, and finding other employment during company layoffs. However, most of these don’t make logical sense for upper-level executives. 

Becker’s Hospital Review published a list of 57 hospital or health systems’ CEOs that resigned by the first half of 2018. This list does not include planned CEO resignations or retirements.

By the end of the first quarter of 2018, 56 healthcare executives had either left or had announced pending resignation. Becker’s indicates that one of the reasons why could be a simple mentality shift of executive tenure. Whereas baby-boomers generally stayed with organizations for decades, later generations of executives offer four to five year tenures before moving on.

There are several other reasons why top healthcare executives may be resigning in record numbers, including an increase in mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare market space, a growing number of alternative opportunities that offer career growth, reported tensions between organizational boards and their healthcare affiliated staff, and exposures of financial and quality-control issues.

Blockchain is best known by its association with bitcoin and other digital currencies. There are actually many more uses for blockchain, as it has unique attributes that make it different than a standard database. Simply put, blockchain is a ledger of transactions that cannot be altered or changed. A blockchain ledger is shared by all the entities who use it rather than one central owner.

​Healthcare organizations are beginning to formulate use cases for blockchain, leveraging its distinct, valuable attributes. Blockchain has the potential to address some of the healthcare industry’s biggest challenges, like interoperability, fraud, and verification of data. Let’s look at how this technology is evolving. 

If you’re brainstorming for content ideas before writing your next sales email to a prospective doctor or hospital executive, consider focusing on a current healthcare issue. Using current healthcare issues as the focus of an email is a great way to capture attention — after all, your potential clinical customers and administrative prospects are hungry for information. They need to stay on top of the latest regulatory announcements, research breakthroughs, population health trends, insurance and managed care news, and other healthcare issues that help them stay compliant and on the cutting-edge.

The challenge for healthcare professionals in the digital age is that it’s hard to keep up. Medical technologies are advancing quickly with regulations in the healthcare industry constantly evolving. Keeping current with all the news healthcare professionals need takes time — something most of them can’t afford to spare. Moreover, with all of the information that bombards them on a daily basis, it’s difficult to sort through it all to find what’s worth spending time to read. 

​Serving up relevant healthcare news in an email can have real value to your customers. If successful, writing a sales email focused on a current hot topic from the healthcare industry may further benefit your marketing and sales department — with a better email open rate.

According to the AMA’s Physician Practice Benchmark Surveys, over 47 percent of physicians were recorded as practicing medicine in a private medical group in 2016. While physicians have been increasingly abandoning private practice in favor of employment by hospitals and health systems, doctors in private practice still make up a significant portion of the medical population and can provide sales reps with a sizable amount of business.

Typically, hospital deals require long sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders and many touchpoints over months (or even years). The rewards can be huge — long-term purchasing agreements, commitments to purchase expensive capital equipment, strategic buying contracts — but these sales take a lot of time and resource. Selling into medical groups or private practices can often be more straightforward and less complex, leading to quicker buying cycles.

Charge capture is critical for success for every healthcare organization that seeks reimbursement for their services from insurance companies. If the services are captured on the reimbursement form, then the clinician or facility simply won’t get paid for those services, which results in lost revenue. If the services are captured in a way that doesn’t fully codify the variety or complexity then the reimbursement may result in an underpayment for services delivered. Finally, if the medical coder overstates the types of services delivered, the organization could be at a risk for overpayment which can cause significant issues downstream if and when the insurance company requests an audit.

Charge capture often feels like a never-ending exercise of whack-a-mole given how hard it is to do it consistently. However, its importance seems to be downgraded when it comes to improving or evolving it. A new study from Ingenious Med found that 78 percent of healthcare leaders identify charge capture as essential to success but that 40 percent of organizations were found to talk about the process once a month or less. This suggests that communication within healthcare organizations is lacking in regards to charge capture, with the result that hospital charge capture best practices may not be regularly employed.

​Medical technology companies should pay attention to the challenges and opportunities that their hospital clients face related to charge capture. After all, if the hospital’s medical billers and coders can’t appropriately capture charges related to the service or procedure you are selling, then the realization of your technologies Return on Investment (ROI) is at risk.

MedTech sales is usually a long, involved process. To add even more complexity, one of your prospect’s key employees could resign mid-negotiation. Becker’s Hospital Review reports that healthcare organizations experience a higher-than-average executive turnover rate — 18 percent in 2017 — and tracks about 100 healthcare executive moves per month. Additionally, although healthcare executives usually give more than the two week notice that’s standard in many other industries, a significant increase in “effective immediately” healthcare executive resignations occurred in 2018.

​If not prepared for this situation, your MedTech sales team could be left wondering what to do when a point of contact resigns and how to salvage the time and effort invested in their client relationships.

The days of the community hospital seem to be numbered, as more and more healthcare organizations continue to merge into mega health systems. The decline of the local independent hospital has been driven by a number of factors including evolving reimbursement models, requiring greater operational efficiency, and changing demographics leading to volume pressures on community hospitals.

​With greater competition from larger facilities, financial problems have plagued community hospitals, further fueling the trend toward consolidation. But is bigger better? And, what does the new mega health system mean for medical sales representatives that sell their products and services into these larger, more complex entities?

It can be a real challenge to keep up with the fast-paced and ever-changing healthcare and MedTech industries. To help you stay current on new technologies, emerging trends, research, and other news that will impact your MedTech business in 2019, here’s a list of the best healthcare news sites.

If you run a sales team then you are all too familiar with the pressures of ensuring each sales executive is well-trained and equipped with the tools needed to their job.

Selling medical technology, healthcare service, or clinical equipment to doctors and hospitals requires a unique set of skills given the complex subject matter and the life-and-death situations many products and services can impact. As the healthcare industry faces pressures on cost and quality, clinical salespeople are in the line of fire. No longer can you hire based solely on a sales rep’s Rolodex and personal relationships with a network of physicians who have bought from him or her before. Today, healthcare sales processes involve a complex path involving clinical and business stakeholders carrying equal influence.

Given this reality, you may be looking for ways to build new skills within your sales team or up-level existing pockets of potential within the team. Medical sales training programs may be one avenue you are exploring. A quick Google search for “medical sales training” will bring up hundreds of programs, all promising to give you the secrets to identifying top prospects in your target market, executing a successful outreach, conducting persuasive follow-ups, and closing sales. In addition to sales basics, an effective medical sales training program should also be product or practice specific, equipping the sales rep with knowledge about the MedTech systems that they’re selling, how physicians use them, and the value they provide to the patient and clinician.

It’s vital that you do research and plan out the specific goals and outcomes you seek before investing your time and your team’s time into one of these programs, not to mention the direct financial expense to your budget. Carefully consider these options before you decide on a course of action.

The world of healthcare is always evolving and changing. Like any industry, healthcare sees its fair share of mergers and acquisitions every year. Consolidation of smaller hospitals and the growth of mega healthcare organizations has been a sustained trend in the last few years. Mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity is also the prime ingredient for growth in healthcare. Is the mega-hospital the future of healthcare? Or, will M&A cool off a bit in 2019? Let’s explore the opportunities for 2019 M&A.

Patient-centered care is more than a buzzword; it’s evolved from a theoretical strategy to an operational reality across medical practices, surgery centers and hospitals alike. For organizations to deliver on the promises of patient-centered care, there must be meaningful engagement. One tool to ensure this occurs is the Patient Engagement Framework, a model created as a guide for healthcare organizations. It allows them to develop and bolster patient engagement strategies by using e-health tools and resources.

The increasing focus on patient engagement is a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and related programs to ensure the US healthcare system is focused on quality, not just quantity, of care. The ACA aligns Medicare payments to improved productivity, efficiency, and quality metrics, including patient engagement and care experience.

As a MedTech professional, it’s wise to familiarize yourself with all five stages and how you can contribute to your prospects success at every step.

Integrated delivery networks (IDNs) have carved out a place for themselves in the healthcare industry. An IDN (in the recent past also called integrated health network [IHN] or multihospital system [MHS]) is a network of healthcare providers and facilities within a specific geographic region that offers a full range of healthcare services. An IDN is often designed to offer a full spectrum of care inclusive of primary care physicians, specialists, general acute care (i.e. inpatient services), and home health services.
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Like accountable care organizations (ACOs), IDNs exist to coordinate patient care, improve the quality of care, and control costs. Unlike ACOs, which may not work with group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and may not contract directly with local employer group plans, IDNs have negotiating power. Their negotiating power comes in two forms.

The world of healthcare technology evolves rapidly, with new trends on the horizon. As technology becomes more innovative, healthcare professionals can expect these trends to enhance the patient experience, improve care, and deliver better workflows. Earlier this year, we looked at the Top Medical Technology Advances From the Last 100 Years. Now, as 2018 draws to a close, let’s examine the healthcare technology trends that will be most impactful in 2019.

You may be baffled at why sales emails to physicians don’t get better click-through rates. Consider this possibility: You aren’t making it clear what the physician should click.
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The centerpiece of sales emails to physicians needs to be clear calls to action (CTA). Devising email CTAs that get results for your MedTech company, however, is a skill you need to develop — and novice email marketers are prone to making some common mistakes. 

Long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) work hard to differentiate themselves through the level of quality care they provide. Not sure what differentiates a LTCH from the more common general acute care hospital? While LTCHs are certified as general hospitals, these facilities focus on treating patients with more complicated conditions, requiring longer times to recovery.

Patients treated in LTCH typically no longer require the extensive diagnostic and intensive care delivered at general acute hospitals but require more care than can be delivered in a skilled nursing facility, assisted living facility or the home. Given the complexity and cost of treating these types of patients, administrators who run LTCHs are motivated to understand, measure and continuously improve the quality of care delivered to their patients.

Your MedTech system may deliver promising solutions that significantly impact a LTCH’s ability to maintain and improve the quality of patient care at their facility. Aligning that value proposition to each prospect’s unique situation should be part of your message during the sales process. 

Including information about your technology in your email marketing to physicians can help build awareness and get the message across that they are market leaders in progressive, innovative, and quality patient care. However, before they can use your MedTech system to enhance care and convince physicians that they are the right choice for their long-term care facility, you have to convince both your administrative and clinical buyers that your MedTech system will deliver value to their organization. Here are four ways to communicate your value-add through your marketing and sales processes.

Your MedTech company’s success is directly tied to your clients’ success. The healthcare organizations benefiting most from your systems or services need to maintain an adequate patient volume — and adequate revenues — to operate and continue to use your products. Patient leakage (i.e., patients seeking care or receiving referrals outside of a healthcare organization or outside of an expected catchment area) can threaten your clients’ ability to maintain volumes which impacts their viability, and in turn, could create a negative impact on your bottom line.

According to a study by referral management platform Fibroblast, 87 percent of healthcare executives consider patient leakage extremely or very important, although about one in five healthcare organizations do not understand where and why leakage occurs. In addition, 43 percent of healthcare executives say they’re losing more than 10 percent of annual revenues due to patient leakage.

Understanding where patients come from — and where they go — will provide valuable insights that you and your clients can use to make business decisions that lead to greater patient volume and greater profitability.

Across the US, 39.8 percent of total healthcare spending is spent in hospitals (ranging as high as 49.4 percent of dollars in South Dakota to as low as 32.9 percent in New Jersey). Collectively, hospitals employ 42 percent of the physicians in the country. 

Clearly, hospitals play a central and significant role in our $3 trillion healthcare system. Given those stakes, it should come as no surprise that hospitals are complex businesses.

There are multiple layers of leadership and decision makers; it can often be challenging to identify the right stakeholders to target. One of our recent posts focused on the C-Suite level of hospital leadership — who they are and what they care about — but there are more roles within a hospital that a MedTech business needs to understand. Clinical leadership encompasses some of those roles. In this piece, we’ll examine what clinical leadership is and who makes up a clinical leadership team.

​Your MedTech system may add value to healthcare providers in a wide variety of settings, but successfully selling to different types of organizations takes different approaches. To illustrate this point, consider these five types of hospitals, what makes each unique, and how marketing and sales need to adapt their messaging and processes for each to move prospects through the sales funnel.  

​An Accountable Care Organization (ACO) plays an important role in reducing costs and re-aligning incentives across the healthcare system to encourage less focus on the volume of services delivered and emphasize the quality and outcomes of the services delivered. ACOs have the potential to revolutionize healthcare, but what exactly are ACOs, and why should they matter to you?