Keeping rural patients 'home' needs broad physician-hospital marketing plan

Rural physicians, especially specialists, who want their patients to stay interested in getting care near home rather than going to big cities or suburban areas must join with local hospital administrators--who often have the same concerns--and develop a comprehensive strategy to keep patients "home," says a leading health care marketing consultant.

Adrian Percy of Percy & Co. in Baton Rouge, La., explains that because hospitals in rural areas often fill more health care functions (such as main supplier of many key ancillaries) than they do in suburban or urban areas, rural and small-city physicians must work with hospital administrators on new marketing plans when both are concerned about the loss of patients to providers in more populated areas.

While most applicable in rural areas, Percy contends that the following strategic and marketing ideas are applicable anywhere, including suburbs and cities, to rejuvenate a hospital and its affiliated medical practices. Percy's firm serves hospitals and their medical-staff groups mainly in Louisiana and Florida.

If a rural area loses its hospital, physicians there will find it difficult to hold on to patients for purposes other than primary care, he explains, because patients having more sophisticated needs will view the physician as having limited capabilities. Losing a hospital is a real possibility, he adds, citing eight to 10 closures over the last 10 or 15 years in the rural parishes (counties) surrounding Baton Rouge. Hospitals in all locations have lower profit margins today than they had in the mid-1990s.

In general, Percy says, hospitals with fewer than about 150 beds can have a difficult time holding onto their local patients in today's business environment--and physicians who serve those hospitals lose patients as well. Such hospitals need strong marketing plans, he contends.

The costs of putting together such plans usually are borne by the hospitals, he notes. For physicians, the main "costs" are time and a willingness to work creatively with hospital managers and bury old disagreements that often stand between the doctors and the managers.

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