Marketing & the Healthcare Industry

TAB’S BLOG:  MARKETING & THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

So this blog is a little bit different than my usual blogs – not so much about health improvement but about a soapbox of mine as well as about where Insight and Restore are headed. 

This past year at Insight has been particularly difficult for us.  With the changes that are coming about with the Affordable Care Act and with where our nation’s healthcare system is headed, we have been hit particularly hard.  We have been labeled by several health insurance companies as “poor quality”. 

When we called to find out why, we were told that we don’t see enough patients (i.e. doing 5-15 minute appointments and herding people through) and that we don’t prescribe enough prescription drugs.  For instance, they consider us giving poor quality care when we diagnose someone with high cholesterol but they don’t see the patient go to the pharmacy and buy a cholesterol lowering drug.  They are tracking this kind of stuff and the accepted “standard of care” is to prescribe a drug to treat a symptom.

Well, that’s not what we do at all!  Synthetic prescription drug therapy is so far from the mission of Insight Family Health Center that it is almost laughable.  We are all about preventing disease and partnering with our patients to get them off prescription drugs and headed towards their personal level of optimal health.

Our business model of seeing a patient every 30 minutes to 1 hour and accepting insurance reimbursement has always been tenuous financially.  We have struggled a lot just to stay afloat and some years we’ve gone in the hole.  Trust me; you make a lot more money seeing a patient every 5-15 minutes!  Scarily, you can do enough in 5 minutes to qualify for the same reimbursement that you get for a 30 minute visit.  Been there, done that.  Felt guilty for doing it and opened my on practice so I could spend more time with my patients.

The whole idea that quality healthcare is tied to seeing more and more patients and prescribing synthetic prescription drugs is frightening.  It scares me for your future.  It scares me for my future.  I tell people frequently to stay healthy and not need the doctor as much as possible.  I also say frequently that I’d rather take a hundred vitamins just to avoid taking even one synthetic prescription drug.  I never want to be dependent on the healthcare system as it is now or as it is going to be if we keep going in the same direction.  I want to be healthy and vital and active till the day I die and I want to spend my life helping my patients do the same.

So because the care provided at Insight is such “poor quality”, the plan of the health insurance companies is to penalize you for coming here (higher co-pays) and to penalize us by cutting our reimbursement rate.  Considering that they barely pay us enough now to stay afloat, if they make cuts, we are in deep trouble.  The cuts are starting in January.  L

So we are forced to figure out what else we can do to stay open and provide the type of care to you that we do.  I really don’t want to be part of a system that thinks “quality” care is seeing a patient every 10 minutes and just prescribe drugs.  I worked in that system before and realized I couldn’t give the type of care that actually helped people change the course of their health for the better in 10 minutes!  That’s why I opened this office in the first place! 

Over the next months you are going to be receiving lots of emails and Facebook posts and advertising.  Just like a lot of offices in this town, we have to increase our services that are not dependent on health insurance reimbursement in order to keep the doors open.  What I want to ask of you is that you read all of it and share it with your friends and help us survive.

I’ve struggled with the concept of advertising in healthcare and of advertising extra services that are offered in this business.  And because of that inner struggle, I’ve not been consistent with our advertising.  But now, I either advertise and grow the business in other ways or close down.  And growing the business can’t be within the health insurance system because they are just planning to cut our reimbursement.

It seems a little yucky to advertise in a business that is about caring and healing people.  But the bottom line is that I do what I do because I love helping people heal themselves but I also have to support myself and pay my staff.  I can’t keep running a business that is not breaking even much less making a profit.  Insight is not a non-profit or grant supported business.  We didn’t even qualify for any subsidies provided by the government to upgrade to electronic records.  We live by what we make.  Period.

So, as we go forward, as I said, you will be receiving lots of advertising from us.  Please read it, partake of our services, and share it.  Our guarantee to you is that we don’t provide and won’t advertise any service through Insight or Restore that will not help you or that has any great potential for harm.  For the most part, the staff at Insight partakes of all of our services so that we can reach our optimal health goals.  I often experiment on myself with a particular treatment before offering it to our patients.  Trust me, we won’t offer anything that we haven’t tried or think isn’t helpful!

The great thing about natural therapies is that they usually only help and never hurt.  So there won’t be any disclaimers at the end saying “this treatment may cause cancer, heart attack, stroke, arthritis, etc….” like many of the pharmaceutical drug commercials do.  Those remedies are synthetic and have great potential for harm.  The treatments we offer are natural and have little potential for harm.  Sadly, because we live in such a litigious society with an FDA and medical board that doesn’t like anything natural, we do have to put a general disclaimer on everything we do.  L

At this time, we only offer 1 service that is 100% just about vanity and that is the VI Peel.  Total vanity that I personally take great pleasure in partaking of.  I often tell patients that I’m not completely natural in everything because I really do like to not have wrinkles and spots on my face and hands!  Getting ready to start my winter face peel series in October! J

So, I wanted to be up front and honest with each of you.  I want you to understand what’s happening and why we are doing what we are doing when it comes to advertising.  I hope you will continue to help us grow but more importantly allow us to partner with you in reaching your optimal level of health.  Our patients rock and we love helping you!

Sincerely,

Tabetha L. Smith, FNP-C & Wanna Be Advertising Guru J

September 2014

*Disclaimer: We make no claim of providing superior services, nor do we guarantee any specific outcomes from the services we provide. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration.  The information, opinions & products on this site are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.