SavvyDoc Myths Part 2

One of the biggest myths when speaking to people about our product is the lack of attention to the marketing value proposition that, in my opinion, is one of the strongest aspects of our service offering. In our market research, we’ve found that 37% of the dentists claimed to have a website, yet 18% of their patients actually knew about it. With the SavvyDoc platform, we give the physicians an easy to set-up website, that enables them to provide much more information than most physician websites, in an easy to read and edit format. Most of the physician websites that we’ve come across look like an off-the-shelf solution, that is extremely arduous for the physician or their staff to update or easily manage. If they need to make a change, they have to hire a webmaster or IT specialist that can be costly.

With the SavvyDoc profile page, the physician can easily edit their educational information, awards and certifications, languages spoken, insurances accepted, payment methods accepted, and a host of other fields that take a couple of quick clicks of the mouse. The physician won’t need expensive software, or have to worry about maintaining their server and website, because that’s SavvyDoc’s job. We provide the back-end support and systems upgrade, which allow the physician to do what they went to school for, practicing medicine and helping people.

With our market research, we found that there are actually two main demographics for doctors in this space; those 28-39 and the over 40 physician. In that market research, we have also found that the 28-39 demographic cares about acquiring more patients to the practice, and the over 40 physician would like to maintain a solid pipeline of new patients, but their primary concern is to streamline and enhance their practice.

For the 28-39 individual, the marketing aspects of SavvyDoc is a tremendous value add. With our embeddable schedule “widget” which enables anyone to add the physician’s schedule to their blog, personal website, MySpace account, and soon to be completed LinkedIN and Facebook accounts, we aim to provide endless access points to the schedule of the physician, which is both viral and useful, the key to all widgets. Additionally, we spent a considerable amount of time enhancing the search engine optimization of each physician website, to ensure that they are located at the top of Google searches, not some spam site which provides inaccurate data about physicians. With over 117 million U.S. adults searching for health information online, you, the physician, want to be where the people are searching, and SavvyDoc will be the most cost effective solution. We provide analytics that detail just how many people are going to your SavvyDoc profile so you can test different marketing campaigns and promotions to determine what works best from a marketing perspective.

Additionally, we are going to provide additional services and marketing tools for the doctors to market themselves, and we’ll touch on them later on, so stay tuned.

The Doctor’s dilemma: How to maintain a profitable practice?

Last week I commented on the role IT has in reducing healthcare costs and in particular how adopting web based appointments can provide doctors with an immediate ROI whereas other IT tools are viewed as long term investments. In doing more research on the financial stress placed on doctors as Medicare reimbursement decreases, I came across an essay by Dr. Sandeep Jauhar that I believe is particularly good at framing the issue of high healthcare costs from the doctor’s perspective. Dr. Jauhar, a cardiologist from Long Island, argues that patients undergo unnecessary tests and procedures because of a combination of pressure from patients wanting everything done for them and the need to counteract low Medicare reimbursement with increased volume. A pointed example is given where a cardiologist describes needing to perform 10 non-stress tests a month to break even. As a physician that was a difficult example to read because despite the reality of this doctor needing to run a profitable practice I cannot help but consider the implication that there are patients undergoing tests at the end of a month not because it’s medically indicated but because the doctor needs to break even for the month. My comments are not here to condemn doctors, we are doing the best we can to treat as many patients as possible within the confines of a complicated system that forces the healthcare provider into moral dilemmas. It does not take a rocket scientist (or neurosurgeon) to realize the easiest why for a doctor to maintain a profitable practice in the face of decreased reimbursement is to see more patients in clinic, order more tests and perform more surgeries.

To maintain profitability there is a heavy focus by doctors on maintaining their revenue and there has been little attention to decreasing the costs of running a medical or dental practice. The seeds for a transition to making health care more efficient are being planted by such organizations as the Institute for Health Care Improvement , a non-profit where one of their stated goals is to improve efficiency in health care. They provide doctors with tools to learn more about the inefficiencies in their practice. There are many suggestions for improving office workflow. One recommendation in particular is to match the supply and demand in an office practice. We believe web based scheduling is an IT tool that can be used to help private practices match supply and demand. When a practice uses web based appointments a doctor’s patient population can quickly and easily make appointments or change appointments in a way that matches supply with demand. If a doctor finds that on Friday afternoons he or she has low demand but on Wednesday morning demand exceeds supply, that doctor can place open appointment slots for Friday afternoons and encourage their patients to seek open appointment times. This type of system has the added benefit of preventing patient dissatisfaction on Wednesday mornings that inevitably occurs from long wait times. Implementing IT tools like SavvyDoc allows the doctor to maintain profitability, increase patient satisfaction and avoid the moral hazard described by Dr. Jauhar.

Thoughts on reducing healthcare costs

On Tuesday the Bush administration released a report on the financial situations of two very important federal programs, Social Security and Medicare. The financial outlook for Medicare is particularly grim where funds for the program will be exhausted by 2019. Today’s article in the New York Times does a good job of reviewing the political implications. Healthcare has gotten a lot of play during the current political cycle and has led to particularly heated debates in the democratic primary. Without getting overly involved in political commentary, I will simply state that any policy needs to focus first on significantly lowering the costs of healthcare in this country before attempting to insure everyone. The system is built to withstand a modest number of uninsured patients but the current crisis is derived from the number of uninsured increasing rapidly due to out of control medical expenses.

In my experience the two mostly commonly quoted causes for the high cost of healthcare are medical malpractice and the cost of pharmaceuticals. These issues have been discussed at length. They have a significant impact on healthcare and need to be addressed. However, I see more significant factors ‘in the field’ and actually believe they are easy to address and would require jumping significantly fewer political hurdles. Obviously, since this is blog on the intersection of healthcare and technology I see this synergy as paramount to decreasing healthcare costs. It has been well documented the positive effects of technology through electronic medical records, electronic physician orders and electronic personal patient records. Each decreases medical mistakes and improves communication between healthcare professionals. The impact of decreasing medical mistakes on healthcare costs is intuitive, but improved communication has an even greater impact. Better communication leads to fewer mistakes, but also makes the system more efficient. As an example the patient with a medical emergency that has full and detailed records that are easily accessible will have their treatment expedited as time won’t be wasted gathering information from multiple unconnected sources. The impediment to progress in healthcare IT is not political, everyone agrees it is important and will eventual lower costs, in fact the president even briefly mentioned healthcare IT in his State of the Union address.

The issue slowing widespread adoption of technology in medicine is the initial cost and who is going to pay for it. The Medicare issue is at the crux of this problem, the government cannot afford to implement IT as it would cripple a program that is already on its last leg. Thus, the onus has fallen on the medical profession and particularly doctors. Problems arise as most doctors see patients in a small private practice. Expecting a small business such as a private practice to implement electronic medical records, or sophisticated IT tools that allow easy communication between an office, hospital and pharmacy is initially unrealistic if there is not an immediate return on investment (ROI) for the doctor. This is where IT tools such as SavvyDoc become the catalyst for integrating technology and healthcare as the doctor obtains an immediate ROI when creating a transparent appointment system. That ROI is realized by decreased patient no-shows as patients make appointments that fit their schedule or easily change an appointment as the patients situation dictates. Also, when doctors market open appointments those appointments are exponentially more likely to be filled. There are other farther reaching positive impacts of transparent appointments on the overflow situations we currently encounter in our emergency rooms but I will save that for a follow-up post. The major point is that as we watch these debates and develop our conclusions about the candidates and how they will or will not improve our healthcare system we cannot ignore the importance of healthcare IT. As a physician I have little to no influence as an individual on lowering costs by fighting the malpractice insurers or the pharmaceutical companies, but I can easily make the decision to embrace and implement technology.