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Activation Pathway: Conversion Rate

Share of inquiries and calls that become booked, kept appointments. Also searched as: conversion rate, call conversion, lead-to-appointment.

What Is A Medical Marketing Funnel And How Can It Help Your Practice?

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Medical marketing strategies range from having an effective website to your advertising, digital marketing, educational videos, and more. However, when it comes to driving more qualified leads to your medical business, understanding the medical marketing funnel is of the utmost importance. So in this article, let’s talk about what a medical marketing funnel is. That way you can implement a great strategy for your business that improves customer outcomes and grows your brand.

The Benefits Of A Medical Marketing Funnel

Having a medical marketing funnel in place has several benefits. Here’s why to use medical marketing funnels:

Attract more leads

Generating leads is ultimately the most important part of any health practice. If you don’t have any patients to serve, then you can’t hire doctors and support staff. That being said, when you have a funnel, the first step of that funnel is to attract new and potential patients to your company.

Explain your services

Having a strategic marketing funnel for your medical practice helps you explain what you do at a high level. You can get into details about the differences and advantages between what you offer versus the competition. This ultimately can set you apart in a competitive health field.

Capture data and feedback

A marketing funnel can help you capture user behavior, engagement, and direct feedback in the form of surveys. You can also create a follow-up system via a marketing funnel. This allows you to stay engaged with your customers. Ultimately, you can let your patients tell you exactly what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. You can design new services and offerings around that direct market feedback That being said, let’s talk about what a medical marketing funnel entails.

Medical Marketing Funnel: What Is It?

A medical marketing funnel can be strategized in four parts. Let’s talk about the four categories of the funnel step-by-step.

Awareness

In the awareness stage, you’re ultimately simply trying to get brand exposure. You’re trying to help more patients know that you exist, where you’re located, and what services you offer. Someone at this stage may not even be aware that they have a problem. For instance, if they have back pain, they may not be aware of the symptoms that indicate that they could have a serious issue that’s worth seeing a doctor for.

Consideration

At this stage, someone has to understand that they have a problem, but now they need to be convinced that there are actually solutions that can help them. Therefore, this is the time to tell them that your solutions can potentially help the problems, pain, or symptoms that they’re feeling. It’s one of the most important marketing strategies for the medical field.

Conversion

At the conversion stage, this is where you ask someone to come in for an appointment, see a specialist, or even follow up on an appointment. Ultimately, you’re taking mere thoughts and ideas and turning it into action.

Retention

Obviously, churn is something that can negatively affect your hospital or healthcare practice. The more patients you retain for follow ups and repeat services, the higher your revenues will be. This ultimately expands your offerings, investments in equipment, and more. Therefore, retention is an important part of funnels because it focuses on building that patient relationship over the long run. That being said, let’s talk about the different stages of a funnel.

The stages of a funnel

There are three primary stages of a funnel:

The top stage

This is related to awareness. This is where you’re simply trying to create a broad message that starts to have a conversation meeting the patients where they’re at. Middle funnel.

The middle stage

At the middle funnel of the stage, you’re starting to nurture patients. You’re starting to provide comparisons, more detailed information about your services, and additional education. This also grows trust between you and the patient.

The bottom stage

This is where patients become converted. They become loyal to your practice, doctors, and medical care. In the next section, let’s talk about some specific tactics that go into marketing funnels.

Specific marketing funnel tactics

While there is a near infinite amount of tactics you use in your marketing funnel, there are a few that are particularly powerful. Let’s cover how to use medical marketing funnels:

Medical call centers

Call centers can take inbound calls, outcome calls, schedule appointments, follow-ups, and even verify insurance. This is incredibly important for all stages of your funnel.

Blog posts

People can find you online and read about your offerings and other things on your website.

Infographics

This can help take complex information and turn it into something that’s easy to understand.

Radio, billboard, and TV ads

Classic advertising still works incredibly well for health centers. Leveraging these is an important part of marketing when it comes to your funnel.

Reach Out To Guideway Care Sequence of Activation For A Medical Marketing Funnel Today

At Guideway Care, we are experts in call center videos, digital advertising, and marketing funnels for medical services. No matter what type of medical marketing service you need, our experts can help you put together a plan that meets your needs. We can help you reach more people so that way you can change lives while focusing on your own core competencies.

Bridging Bariatric Patient Conversion Rates and Practice Growth

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Our Final Rule for Growing Your Bariatric Practice Addresses the Importance of Managing Patient Pipelines with Better Monitoring, Tracking and Analysis

Before we explore our fourth and final rule and conclude our series about how to grow your bariatric practice, let’s revisit the first three rules:

• Rule #1: Know Your Numbers: The foundation of any successful bariatric practice marketing program! Having a firm grasp on your bariatric patient acquisition data is crucial for developing and gauging effective marketing strategies.

• Rule #2: Make It Easy for Patients to Find You: Patients use online searches to find healthcare services more than anything else. With so much at stake, you must leverage online search strategies and tools to get your bariatric surgery program directly in front of them.

• Rule #3: Use Online Seminars to Increase Leads: If you aren’t offering online bariatric seminars to prospects, your competitors probably do—and they are taking your share of new bariatric patients.

Now, the fourth rule: Increase conversions rates throughout the entire patient pipeline. This specifically includes patient conversion rates for:

• Leads to Surgery

• Seminars to Surgery

• Consults to Surgery

This is important because we’ve seen compelling results from our own studies that have shown direct correlation between positive bariatric patient surgery conversion rates and success bariatric surgery programs.

Getting Patients Into the Pipeline is Only the Beginning of the Conversion Process

Below is a chart from a study of one of our client’s conversion rates over a two-year period. Even without scrutinizing the chart’s details, it’s immediately obvious that as the slopes increase positively in the left column (conversion rates), the same happens in the right column (program growth). Tracking Conversion Rates for Patient PipelineTake a moment to think about how each line represents a different phase of the patient pipeline. Notice in the left column how patients are more likely to get surgery (convert) the farther they move down the lead–to-seminar-to-consult pipeline. The takeaway is that it’s not enough to just have a great marketing strategy that gets prospects to become aware of your program. Instead, you must also have a well-managed patient pipeline that can retain prospects and nurture them through the entire journey.

Once Again, You Must First “Know Your Numbers” to Improve Your Growth

Ironically, the first step in increasing bariatric conversion rates and managing patient pipelines relates to the first rule, “Know Your Numbers.” This is because having an accurate and reliable process for monitoring your conversation rates will give you valuable insights into your patient pipelines. There are multiple processes and tools for collecting statistics, ranging from simple-to-sophisticated to analog-to-digital. We asked guests at our recent Webinar, 4 Powerful Strategies That Can Grow Your Bariatric Program, about which tools they used, and the results showed a range of practices:Tracking Conversion Rates for Patient Pipeline

Using Bariatric Patient Pipeline Management to Improve Conversion Rates

Let’s presume you actively use at least one of the above processes for tracking your bariatric patient pipelines and measuring conversion rates. Would it be a fair assumption to say if you aren’t using bariatric-specific patient tracking software, you probably aren’t experiencing the growth you want or need? If this describes your situation, don’t feel bad—but also don’t overreact and get the first option you find, because it might not be the best solution for you. There are two reasons for this. First, not all bariatric patient management software and platforms integrate with all EMRs. In our experience, we’ve seen much better outcomes when the platform “plays nice” with an existing EMR because it can significantly improve efficiency throughout your entire practice. Second, not all platforms can give you easily understandable metrics about your patient pipelines that answer essential questions like:

• Where do our leads come from?

• Where do our patients stall?

Below is an example of how our platform provides a simple yet powerful illustration of where your patients are in their entire journey—including post-operation.Tracking Conversion Rates for Patient Pipeline In this example, the practice does well with getting prospects into the program (patient intake, seminar and insurance verification). But notice how there’s a sudden surge in stalled patients during the consult and clearance stages. If not already lost, then these prospects are very likely to drop out of the program (and likely go elsewhere).

A Final Thought

As mentioned at the beginning of this series, we regularly hear from bariatric surgery practices about how difficult it is to manage the day-to-day operations while also trying to increase patient volumes. Although there are no quick fixes or one-size-fits-all solutions, the truth is there are many bariatric surgery practices enjoy a healthy balance of current surgery volumes and anticipated growth. Working with a trusted patient conversion company can often help streamline processes and improve outcomes. At Guideway Care, we are privileged to have some as clients. Your practice has the capability of enjoying that kind of success, and we hope this series helps you continue to advance towards that goal.
Nate McCormack is Guideway Care Director of National Sales. Guideway Care is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Guideway Care  to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.

Bariatric Surgery Seminars: Online vs. In-Person

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Bariatric Medical Marketing Practice Rules

The Third Rule for Growing Your Bariatric Practice Places a High Value on Online Seminars

If you’ve been following our blog series about how to grow your bariatric practice, you have already learned our first two rules:

• Rule #1: Know Your Numbers

• Rule #2: Make It Easy for Patients to Find You

Now it’s time to introduce the third, which is to use online bariatric seminars (OLS) to:

• Increase qualified bariatric patient intake leads

• Expand into new bariatric surgery markets

If you’re thinking, “Well, we already have a pretty good in-person bariatric seminar in place and seem to get decent results with it,” please be advised:
If you aren’t offering online bariatric seminars, competitive medical practices probably do—and they are taking your share of new bariatric patients.
Most simply, online bariatric seminars enable a better experience for prospects—and that directly translates into better conversion rates for you. We know this because we conducted a one-year study of a bariatric surgery practice that offered both in-person information sessions and online seminars. Although their conversion rates were decent for in-person seminars, they paled when compared to OLS: In Person Vs Online Conversation RatesThere’s no mystery to why this happened. Two key reasons are because bariatric surgery prospects are often:

• Apprehensive about in-person seminars

• Too busy to attend in-person seminars at a set date/time/location

But, when prospects have access to online bariatric seminars, they can register and begin watching immediately.

More Benefits for Online Bariatric Seminars

Not only do online bariatric seminars help improve your conversion rates, but they can also be highly efficient and economical for your practice. This is because they: • Are recorded and produced once: This prevents you from having to commit resources for conducting the same seminar over and over. • Deliver the best payer mix: OLS gives you access to working and busy adults that are Internet and computer savvy.

Components of a Successful Online Bariatric Seminar

Our experience in developing successful online bariatric seminars has given us the ability to share some sound advice about key components that include:

• Requiring registration that should be captured in Google analytics, too

• Linking the registration to patient management software for a better understanding of the patient pipeline

• Polls and surveys to test knowledge

• Short, easy-to-digest segments rather than one long 30-minute clip

• Interactive playback features that allow patients to pause resume the seminar

• Optimized, professional-developed content for online viewing and NOT just a recording of a typical in-person seminar

• Tracking for analytics and viewership

• Automation for sending post-seminar requests for insurance verification, consult, etc.

Please be sure to also watch our online seminar 4 Powerful Strategies That Can Grow Your Bariatric Program to learn more!
As Guideway Care director of digital production, Karen Haft regularly engages with bariatric medical practices to find solutions that help grow their revenues and profitability. Guideway Care is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Guideway Care to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.

Driving Long-term Engagement is Key to Increasing Bariatric Surgery Volume

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What if there was a cure for diabetes but only 1% of the patient population even knew about it? And what if out of the people who were aware of it and sought more information from healthcare providers, only 15% ended up receiving it? That would no doubt be considered a national healthcare crisis. Stakeholders like advocacy groups, insurers and the Centers for Disease Control would want to know why patients were not receiving lifesaving therapy. Identifying and eliminating hurdles to receiving that care would quickly become a top priority for clinicians and healthcare systems.

The Struggle to Convert Bariatric Surgery Candidates

A feeling not dissimilar to this was present at the Texas Association for Bariatric Surgery’s 2017 Annual Meeting in Dallas last week. Bariatric surgery providers repeatedly expressed frustration at their astonishingly low conversion rate: only 15%. That means that 85% of the patients that express an interest in the surgical therapies that can help them control obesity and comorbidities like high blood pressure, diabetes, and severe sleep apnea, never end up receiving surgery. There are even more patients that aren’t measured because they don’t initiate information seeking. Let’s start with the patients that ask about the surgery but fall out of the funnel before converting. It’s understandable when you consider how lengthy the path to surgery can be. The average amount of time that passes between first considering surgery to undergoing it is three years. Those are also not idle years where patients are simply waiting for a date to open up; the path to bariatric surgery is complex and riddled with insurance pre-approvals, medical and psychological evaluations, and lifestyle changes that patients must commit to. Failure in any of these areas results in patients not receiving the surgery that can greatly improve their overall health. Read more : Bariatric Surgery Seminars: Online vs. In-Person 

How Insurance and Accreditation Impact Patient Access

In addition, most hospitals in Texas are within miles of each other, competing for the same patient. I spoke with hospital administrators with bariatric programs that, although accredited by MBSAQIP, did not meet certain standards for insurance carriers, like BCBS Blue Distinction or Aetna IOQ. In one particular case, I learned that the hospital I was speaking with had to refer out 30%, or 35 of their bariatric cases to a competing hospital because the patients were members of an insurance plan that required the insurance’s ‘seal of approval,’ and you can bet that the competing hospital was accredited by the insurance provider. Of course there will be patients who start the process, only to realize they either can’t afford surgery or don’t qualify for surgery. But the number is far fewer than most coordinators realize, and they would know that if they tracked all of their leads. Also, there are alternative ways to keep these patients engaged, motivated, and help them achieve their desired goals, like offering a weight loss medicine program, non-invasive balloon procedures, or by offering discounted procedures with financing options for cash pay patients. Read more: A Guide to How to Verify Insurance Eligibility & Benefits

The Challenge of Managing the Patient Journey

Bariatric surgery coordinators are responsible for helping move patients through the process, but they are largely operating with hands tied behind their backs. Most of them are using simple Excel spreadsheets to keep up with patient progress. They know that this is inadequate for driving engagement and leading patients through a journey full of milestones, education, and paperwork. I heard the frustration again and again throughout the conference. This is one of the holes in healthcare (and frankly, EMRs) that led us to develop Sequence and a major reason we exhibited at the TABS meeting. Tracking patient engagement and measuring outcomes through a care episode is becoming a top concern for many healthcare providers as payers move to value-based reimbursement programs — but for bariatric surgeons, moving patients through an exceptionally long and complicated funnel is key to ensuring that they receive treatment in the first place.

Turning Awareness Into Engagement

What about the potential patients who never make it to the information seeking stage? The same principles that start with intent and successfully guide patients through the care journey from pre-op all the way through recovery can also be used in initial marketing. It’s a matter of supplying the best education at the right time, which is almost impossible to do with spreadsheets alone. Moving patients from “I’ve heard of bariatric surgery,” to “It sounds like it might be right for me,” is a marketing journey that is driven by the same methodologies that move patients from intent to conversion: well-timed education, engagement, and follow-up with outcomes that can be measured and quantified at every touchpoint. Done correctly with the right technology solution, managing the journey from awareness to intent effectively boosts conversion rates and shortens that three year timeline to receiving surgery.

Improving Outcomes With Better Patient Management

Bariatric surgery is moving quickly, with new procedures evolving and better long-term success rates. Providers are quite aware that one of the simplest ways to improve outcomes and increase the volume of surgeries they perform is to more effectively manage patients and guide them through the entire funnel.
As Guideway Care Regional Sales Director, Nathan McCormack ensures that new clients are paired with patient management and healthcare marketing solutions that support their objectives. Please contact us to learn more about how Guideway Care can partner with you to give you the power to dramatically boost patient engagement and measure outcomes today.
The secretary. Funny picture from the office.

Online Seminars a Life Saver for Bariatric Patients

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Severe obesity is a serious health concern, and is reaching epidemic levels within the United States. As a national issue, it is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths a year due to its associated life threatening conditions such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney failure. Shockingly, living with severe obesity decreases a person’s lifespan by an average of 20 years; when you consider disabilities caused by strokes and other events, the potential impact on a person’s quality of life is incalculable.The secretary. Funny picture from the office. However, there are options thanks to weight loss procedures performed at the many world class facilities such as MountainView Weight Loss Center in Las Cruces, N.M., Park Nicollet Bariatric Surgery Center in Minneapolis and several other bariatric practices around the country that have partnered with Guideway Care. Together we provide long term-solutions to bolster patient engagement, improve patient management and generate positive patient outcomes. For individuals suffering from severe obesity, attempts at weight loss can be a challenging cycle of disappointment and negative reinforcement. Traditional weight loss methods like diet and exercise often fail to deliver the results needed for a severely obese person to reach and maintain a healthy weight. This lack of sustainable results can result in a sense of hopelessness and apathy that overwhelms the seriousness of underlying health concerns. To give severely obese individuals a better chance at an improved quality of life, a more effective option is needed. This is why many bariatric programs have teamed with Guideway Care to provide online seminars, housed on the practice’s website. These are designed to attract new patients and inform the patient of his or her treatment options. They also have the opportunity to view the video from the comfort of their home and do not have to travel, which for some severely obese people is an arduous task. “The online course is an alternative to attending one of our regularly scheduled seminars, in-person,” said Stephan Myers, MD, FACS, who works at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “The online bariatric course provides information to help you decide if bariatric surgery is right for you. It’s a convenient way to learn about our bariatrics program from the comfort of your home, at your personal computer.” Combine Guideway Care online seminars with our web-based LeadTracker™, which captures and tracks your patients from initial intake through every stage of the patient process under your care, and you are armed with the right tools to provide optimum care for your patients. Fortunately weight loss procedures are now more practical, viable and more easily accessible than ever before for a wider range of patients. A dedicated team of experienced specialists and surgeons use only the latest technology and the most proven methods to provide truly world class care. For anyone curious about the many outstanding and proven bariatric procedures available, an online seminar is the best way to learn about the surgery. With a wide range of treatment to choose from, any patient will be guided toward the exact strategy that’s right for them. Because bariatric surgery is not a one-size-fits-all procedure, highly experienced surgeons work closely with each and every patient throughout the process, from inquiry through post-op, to ensure all patients receive the top-notch care they need. This is where the LeadTracker™ proves to be a valuable tool. With one click of the mouse, you can tell where each patient is in the process. Because severe obesity is a life threatening concern, anyone dealing with its effects, limitations and consequences simply can’t afford to wait any longer before taking action. If your practice does not have an online seminar presence or a way to track the progress of your patients, your practice is not working as efficiently as it could be, and your patients are suffering. With the LeadTracker™, your practice runs more efficiently and is more productive, as the program simplifies and streamlines patient intake, appointment scheduling and outreach efforts. It’s a win for your patient population and for your practice. Don’t delay, visit Guideway Care today or call 888.986.3638 to schedule a demonstration.