Feature Article:

Solving Marketing Challenges — Focus on Patient Education

By Shelley Simon, RN, DC, MPH, EdD
Founder, Beyond Practice Management

This is the second article in the three-part series, Solving Marketing Challenges. Part one, Focus on Communication appeared in the October, 2007 issue of Practice Your Way. Part three, Focus on Building Patient Relationships, will appear in December.

Marketing is about much more than finding new patients. It?s about retaining satisfied patients by continuing to make a difference in their health and in the quality of their lives. Part of making a difference involves patient education, which has more in common with practice marketing that you might imagine. Both marketing and patient education are intended to help practitioners identify the needs and wants of patients, offer valuable information and solutions, and develop lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

Many doctors don?t appreciate that patient education is one of their most effective and powerful marketing tools. Why not let your marketing conversations, materials, and strategies serve as education? And why not craft your educational efforts so that they serve as effective marketing tools? This article offers ideas on how to think about practice marketing and patient education as two sides of the same coin.

This three-part series is about solving marketing problems and, more specifically, about answering the five universal marketing challenges that all healthcare service providers face, regardless of their stage in practice. We addressed the first three in the last issue of Practice Your Way where the focus was on solving marketing challenges by using effective communication. If you missed that issue read it here. To quickly recap, the five universal marketing challenges are:

Attracting the attention of potential patients.
Providing the right information at the right time.
Converting ?interested? potential patients into active patients.
Maintaining the doctor-patient relationship.
Providing a level of service that results in retention and referrals.

In this issue we turn our attention to solving the fourth marketing challenge: maintaining an effective and healthy doctor-patient relationship over time. Too often, once doctors ?have? a patient, they stop listening and begin to believe that they know more about what the patient needs than the patient does. They fail to re-clarify the patient?s expectations as the relationship develops and default to social communication. And they forget that their own motives or clinical goals are always secondary to the patient?s motives and objectives. One way to avoid these common marketing mistakes is by engaging in high-quality, individually tailored patient education that evolves to meet patient needs over time.

Why patient education is not as easy at it looks

One persistent issue with patient education is that practitioners confuse it with teaching. Teaching is fine for what it is — a telling process where facts, knowledge, and information move from one person to another. The problem arises when the teacher wrongly assumes that his or her teaching has resulted in learning on the part of the patient. Genuine education involves communication — a give and take — that telling or teaching alone cannot accomplish.

Another reason patient education is challenging for practitioners is that often it does not produce intended outcomes. Effective education should result not only in a patient acquiring new knowledge, but also in the patient applying that knowledge and modifying behavior. For a change in behavior to occur, the individual must be ready, motivated, and supported to achieve a specific goal that they value. When education is too general or passive (this also applies to marketing, by the way) the process is often experienced as one-sided, abstract, doctor-centered, or is otherwise insufficient to motivate the patient in a way that prompts them into action. It is when motivation meets action that change occurs and outcomes improve.

And, finally, the last reason patient education isn?t as easy as it looks is that doctors are smart. In their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors Chip and Dan Heath describe ?the curse of knowledge? which, simply put, is the idea that once we know something we can?t remember what it was like not to know it. In other words, your hard-won depth and breadth of knowledge can actually work against you when it comes to patient education. You have literally forgotten what it is like to be without your experience, knowledge, values, and beliefs. As a result, it is difficult to imagine that others don?t value your recommendations or agree with your opinion as ?the truth.? You know what you know and it can be a real challenge to put complex information into language that someone without your level of knowledge can understand and use.

The curse of knowledge is a marketing problem. When patient education doesn?t do what it?s designed to do — inform in a meaningful way — the doctor loses the attention of the patient. How can you ward off the curse of knowledge when you?re engaged in patient education? Pay close attention to the patient?s body language and facial expressions. Watch for clues or signals to slow down, back up, start over, or check in with the patient to find out what they?re hearing and if it is interesting or relevant to them. Be aware, also, that it?s not uncommon for patients to unwittingly encourage doctors to fall into the curse of knowledge trap by appearing interested or nodding affirmatively when, in fact, they have no clue what you are talking about or they are just being polite. Pause occasionally, ask questions, and listen more.

Four guidelines

Here are four simple guidelines that apply to both marketing and to patient education that, when followed, will help you achieve better results. Marketing and education should be:

1. Driven by the patient?s interest. Marketing and educational materials and strategies should be memorable, meaningful, simple, emotional, concrete, and communicate through stories (rather than facts or fears). You can motivate an individual to do something — become a patient, continue a course of treatment, make a behavior change, etc. — only to the degree that you can communicate that there is something in it for them.

How do you educate an individual so that they can see the value of what you have to offer? You must meet them where they are at this moment in time by letting them know that you understand their problems. Always, always remember that the question every patient silently asks is ?what?s in this for me?? Your ability to listen and educate based on the patient?s interests is crucial to establishing trust and motivating patients toward healthier choices.

2. Focused on value and outcomes. Education is the foundation of service marketing. Marketing a service business (i.e., healthcare) is very different than marketing a tangible product that can be seen, touched, taken home and used. Healthcare providers market themselves — their knowledge, expertise, and the outcomes they deliver. One very effective way to do this is through patient education. Personalized education and information has the power to differentiate you from other healthcare providers in your field. By effectively sharing your knowledge and expertise you move your services out of the category of commodity (lowest price, most convenient) and into the category of a high-impact, high-value service that delivers meaningful benefits and satisfies patients? expectations and needs.

3. Tailored to the individual. Many healthcare professionals were taught that if they gave patients enough information then those patients would accept recommendations, follow through, and make good choices for themselves. Research supported the belief that patients would continue treatment and ?be compliant? if they were well informed. Armed with this information, practitioners went out into the world and discovered that patients actually had ideas, biases, and opinions of their own. In a quest for better outcomes, frustrated practitioners turned to practice management companies that told them their job was to sell services with scripts and leading questions designed to elicit the ?right? answers from patients. In other words, they were taught the fine art of manipulation and began to equate both education and marketing with selling.

Because education is a process and individuals have different learning styles and needs for information, scripts fall short. Generic information and scripts are ineffective long-term because they are often inauthentic and manipulative, and patients recognize them as such. To rely exclusively on a script is to overlook the individual patient and disrespect their intelligence. High quality, long-term relationships are built on communication that is — in the case of the doctor-patient relationship — a two-person event. It?s not a monologue delivered by an expert who has been to too many seminars.

Keeping an individual engaged in improving their health requires education that is thoughtful and customized to the patient?s evolving needs and goals. This does not mean that you won?t ever use handouts, videos, give scripted classes, or recommend a book or website, but that you will rely on these tools selectively — giving each patient the right information at the right time for the right reasons. Use generic information for basic education or as supplemental information, but make sure it?s customized for your office and appropriate for the patient you offer it to. In other words, don?t give someone a stack of pamphlets because you have them on hand. And, of course, never offer printed materials or have patients watch videos in lieu of one-on-one education.

4. Action oriented. Whether the goal is to encourage a patient to begin care, continue care, make a lifestyle change, or engage fully in a course of treatment, both marketing efforts and patient education should have as their ultimate goal action. Otherwise, save your energy. Contrary to what you have been taught, educating patients and getting them to change their behavior are two separate things. Getting patients to take action or change behavior requires identifying a wide variety of influencing factors unique to each patient and helping them build both knowledge and skills to improve their health. Tailored communication in marketing or patient education begins with the premise that, while each person may have a condition or complaint, they experience this condition or illness uniquely and have varying degrees of motivation, urgency and readiness to make decisions and take action.

An evolving relationship

Almost without exception, the first time a patient comes to your office they have a specific complaint or request — a problem that they want you to fix or a need they want you to fill. Once you are past the stage of condition-based care, your focus and educational content need to shift in order to keep the patient engaged. At this stage, patient education becomes broader and even more personalized because the patient?s goals are changing and their need for information is different. As you move into a wellness model of care, educating the patient involves coaching them to apply what they?ve learned and to achieve their health objectives. Cultivate partnerships for health, build long-term relationships, and make a difference in the lives of your patients by offering valuable information and education at each encounter. You will discover that marketing and patient education are synergistic tools you can use to improve outcomes for both you and your patients.

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Feature Article:

Solving Marketing Challenges — Focus on Patient Education

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Dr. Simon?s Article in ACA News