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Referral Doubling Strategy - Executive Summary

Physical Therapy, Hospice, Home Health,
and Other Providers Receiving Referrals from Doctors

Introduction

Brazzell Marketing Agency has used this strategy to double referrals for multiple agencies and practices. After two decades of consistent success patterns, ongoing effectiveness testing shows that it still works today. Find the results of a controlled trial measuring the effectiveness of this strategy below.

Premise: Underutilization

Doctors and discharge planners commonly underutilize referred-to providers such as home health and physical therapy, and referrals are going to hospice later than they should. Even loyal referral sources who send 100% of their referrals to your company are often not identifying all the patients who should be receiving your services. Medical journals and standard continuing education for doctors focus on pharmacological and surgical treatments. The problem is that doctors and other referral sources need better top-of-mind awareness of your services when they are in the exam room. It's your responsibility to do that in your community.

Premise: Most Providers Don't Give Doctors the Information They Want

Doctors are telling you exactly how they want to receive information about treatments and care plans. Look at the information they voluntarily consume. They read, respect, and respond to medical journals such as the Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Consider how medical journals are by doctors and for doctors. They pay hundreds of dollars per year, per journal. Resultantly, the articles influence how doctors treat patients. Here are the characteristics of the articles in these journals that make them valuable to doctors:

  • Research based
  • Scientific references, so readers can explore the validity of stated premises
  • Factual and matter of fact
  • Individual diagnoses: these articles break down exactly how a particular care plan can address a specific diagnosis

Premise: There's Only Three Ways to Reach Doctors

If you want more referrals from doctors and discharge planners, you have to be in front of them. For most local, referral-based healthcare providers, there's only three ways to do that reliably:

  1. Sales: You have a community liaison who represents your company
  2. Mail: You send materials to referral sources by mail
  3. Facebook: We can use this social media platform to serve ads only to discharge planners, the right types of doctors, and their staff.
Referral sources are very important. Use all three. The latter two are cheap compared to the real cost of a community liaison or sending a clinician on sales calls. To get the most out of investments in your sales efforts, support and/or supplement that effort with mail and social media.

Solution: Referral Doubling Strategy

Use one, two, or all three of those methods to give doctors the information they need in the format they want. The Referral Doubling Strategy gets you started by sending to your doctors monthly bulletins detailing different diagnoses, health care challenges, your services, and other issues that interest your doctors.

Our package:

  • Perform an initial marketing interview and analysis to determine your optimal communications strategy
  • Provide ongoing analysis and consulting
  • Research to build a mail list of the medical referral sources who mean the most to your company
  • Update the mail list on a monthly basis
  • Research, write, and design physician-oriented bulletins for your agency every month
  • Bulletins can be completely custom-made for you or utilize material that has worked for other providers
  • Brazzell only publishes your bulletins after getting explicit approval from you
  • Designs can include custom graphics
  • BMA will maintain and use extensive libraries of healthcare stock photography
  • Guaranteed geographic exclusivity
  • Print color copies
  • Mail with first-class postage, your logo, and your return address

Examples of the Referral Doubling Strategy

PDF Downloads. Top Categories. Contact us if you do not see your provider type.

Results to Expect from the Referral Doubling Strategy

  • After three bulletins, medical referral sources who already refer to you tend to increase the number of referrals they send per month.
  • After six to twelve bulletins, new sources begin to experiment with referring to you, giving you a chance to win their loyalty.
  • Multiple providers have doubled monthly referrals by adding this strategy to their marketing mix. Our research shows the median and mean increase in monthly referrals is roughly 33%. Download the effectiveness review.

Each contract comes with geographic exclusivity. Order now to lock in your exclusive territory.

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