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How Healthcare Sales Teams Can Use Content For Supply Chain Success

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You need to stand out to your customers. Advertising campaigns and person-to-person sales strategies are excellent tools for bringing awareness to your company and your offering, but to really carve out mind share among your customers requires more – especially for sales in the healthcare supply chain.

Today’s health care buyers have a lot on their plates and, since they won’t be the end-users of what they’re buying, they work closely with their clinical value analysis team to make contracting decisions about new products and services.

Your messaging needs to go deeper than an advertising campaign, since marketing materials are often outright ignored by purchasing and value analysis leaders (Frustrating, but true!). They know that the goal of advertising is to showcase the best parts of your offering, they liked what they saw, and now they need to know more.

“Hard data” about your offering is a crucial asset, but to really get through and set yourself apart you need to tell your product’s story.

That’s where content saves the day. 

Savvy, successful suppliers know that creating captivating, targeted content is the best way to close the deal. Never underestimate the power of success stories that clearly demonstrate how the value of your offering is multiplied by the added value of having you and your company as a supplier partner.

Know your customer better than they know themselves

Getting on contract is just the beginning of the journey.

To get on contract, your customers have to know who you are. Forging a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship means you need to know your customer better than they know themselves.  

We’ve asked supply chain leaders across the country what their top supplier partners have in common, and they all say the same thing: Good suppliers respond to problems, best-in-class suppliers are so well-informed – so dialed in – that they can anticipate their supply chain partners’ needs and proactively collaborate on solutions.

When it comes to contracting in the health care supply chain, there’s nothing more critical to your success than knowing everything there is to know about your customers and prospects. But how do you get those high-level insights? What’s the secret?

Keep reading to learn why content is critical for health care sales teams and how you can leverage content to take your sales success to new heights.

Content takes out the guesswork.

A good database is a valuable tool because you can use data to uncover the story of what’s happened. But sorting through data to find what you need to know can be tedious and time-consuming. Putting that data in context and translating it into meaningful insights – a specialized skillset in itself – even more so.

Moreover, it doesn’t tell you what problems your supply chain leaders are dealing with right now or what their plans for the future are.

The best way to get relevant, actionable information for sales success is going to come from consuming content. Supply chain leaders want all the help they can get; they aren’t hiding what their needs and goals are. Whether its press releases, blogs, podcasts, or news articles, the content and media surrounding an IDN can tell you exactly what they’re dealing with, what they’re planning to do, what their priorities are, and so much more.

Industry magazines and publications, like The Journal of Healthcare Contracting, are treasure troves of details and nuance. Not to mention that there are countless podcasts and videos out there as well – a perfect way to stay in-the-know when you’re traveling or on-the-go.

Personal interviews and webinars with supply chain leaders are doubly helpful because you can get to know the supply chain leaders’ personalities and interests as well as clear information about exactly who you need to approach and what you need to do to get your foot in the door and get on contract.

Industry networking organizations like ANAE (the Association of National Accounts Executives) and platforms like the IDN Directory are outstanding resources for fresh health care supply chain content.

At Share Moving Media, we have a dedicated, captive audience of supply chain leaders across the biggest IDNs in the U.S. For over 30 years, we’ve been partnering with suppliers and distributors to create compelling content and messaging. Share Moving Media has developed the tools, resources and expertise to help you tell your story. If you’d to brainstorm about content ideas to help build an audience and get through to Supply Chain Leaders, please email me at jpritchard@sharemovingmedia.com.

5 Ways Healthcare Marketers Can Understand Customer Needs Better

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Optimizing the customer experience is a vital way to earn new leads and foster loyalty with customers for long-term growth. After all, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. 

Many companies develop a new shiny product or hottest industry trend to improve the buyer’s journey but forget the most important component — their customers. As a result, marketers still continue to disregard their healthcare customer’s needs before and after the sale. 

However, your customers are one of the most important components of your overall medical supply growth and longevity. While the concept of creating a customer-centric company isn’t new, it’s important to arm your marketing strategy with the right insights to drive results.

Let’s discover what healthcare customer needs are and how you can better understand them. 

What are Healthcare Customer Needs?

Customer needs are the motives that prompt someone to buy a service or product from your company. To successfully market to customers in healthcare, you need to be aware and act on their needs to drive purchase decisions. When you’re able to understand your customer’s needs, you’re more likely to have a 23% higher share in revenue, relationship growth, and profitability. 

Common healthcare customer needs include:

  • Finding a balance between usefulness and price
  • Providing convenient shopping experiences that conserves time and resources
  • Offering a dependable transaction where your brand delivers on its promises
  • Giving attentive customer service

Physical vs. Psychological Needs

Humans have both physical and psychological motivators. Physical motivators are easy to identify and have a measurable cause. If your customers run out of medical gloves, you need new ones. 

When there isn’t a physical need, psychological needs are the decision-making forces that are based on preferences, desires, opinions, and more. Often, psychological needs will guide a customer to your brand over a competitor. 

5 Ways You Can Understand Your Healthcare Customer Needs

The key to achieving your business goals is having a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s needs. Whether you’re trying to boost sales or engagement, knowing your customers will help you develop a better experience that drives results. Here are five techniques to help you get started:

1.Collect Feedback

Collecting feedback is one of the easiest ways to understand your customer’s needs and pain points. You can develop a few key questions that ask your customers about your product, brand identity, customer service, and more depending on your goals. Consider collecting feedback by the following methods:

  • Surveys
  • Interviews
  • Focus groups
  • Sales teams

By reaching out and asking your customers their opinions or preferences, not only will they feel like you genuinely care about their input, but you’ll also gather important insights.

2.Complete a Competitive Analysis

While you might keep an eye on your competitor’s most recent product launch, they can also impact your customer’s needs and expectations. When comparing your brand to a competitor, create a competitive analysis that includes the following elements: 

  • A high-level overview of the brand’s mission statement
  • The value they provide to your customer’s needs
  • A deeper look into the brand’s product or service features
  • Cost and pricing structure

If you notice gaps between your brand and competitors, you can better determine how you can provide additional value to meet your healthcare customer needs.

3.Create Comprehensive Buyer Personas

62% of customers expect companies to adapt based on their behaviors and actions. To dive deeper into customer preferences and engagement, it’s essential to develop in-depth buyer personas that not only detail demographics but also keyword data, social media preferences, and more. You can implement these insights throughout your website and other online interactions to ensure you’re using your customer’s language.

4.Utilize Data from Customer Analytics

From reading your content to clicking a link, every interaction on your website is valuable to understanding your healthcare customer needs. Use sources like Google Analytics to analyze behavioral data and dissect your audience to create a better website experience. For example, discover which pages are performing well or underperforming to determine enhancements that increase conversions.

5.Implement Social Listening

With over 3.6 million social media users worldwide, tracking social mentions and engagements is a great way to identify customer needs on their preferred platform. Your customers are likely to speak more candidly on their social platforms about your products and services, so monitoring their opinions may help you understand their pain points and help you find brand improvements.

Implement Healthcare Customer Needs into Your Marketing Strategy

Understanding your customer’s needs is the missing puzzle piece to developing an enhanced customer experience that boosts your bottom line. With advanced technology, feedback, and analytics, you can analyze data points that help you discover how you can improve your brand awareness and conversion rate.

Contact Share Moving Media to create engaging content that meets your customer’s needs.

The Top 5 Benefits of Using Healthcare Contract Management

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Contacts are a necessary part of business in every industry. The healthcare industry is no exception. Healthcare contract management software will ensure that medical offices remain compliant with laws that regulate organizational standards. 

Hospitals and healthcare organizations often struggle with managing the agreements necessary for the daily operations of their offices. With 60 to 80% of all transactions within a healthcare organization requiring contracts, finding an automated solution to managing these essential contracts is critical.  

Regulatory compliance is not the only reason to implement contract management software within medical facilities. There are many benefits to this software. Take a moment to learn what healthcare management software is doing to advance healthcare organizations’ workflow processes.  

What is Healthcare Contract Management Software?

Healthcare contract management software automates the lifecycle of medical contracts and agreements. It assists medical providers in complying with data security standards required by law. Manual contract management costs healthcare organizations approximately $157 billion dollars a year. Therefore, it not only mitigates the risk of non-compliance but also decreases the cost of operations for medical providers.

Here are the types of agreements healthcare management software manages:

  • Physician employment agreements
  • Non-physician staff employment agreements
  • Vendor contracts
  • Equipment purchase, lease, and/or sale contracts
  • Pharmacy agreements
  • Real estate contracts
  • Grants and research agreements

Top 5 Benefits of Healthcare Contract Management

While compliance is essential, there are many more benefits to selecting contract management software. There are five principal advantages for medical offices to switch from manual processes to an automated contract management software for healthcare facilities.

1. Agreement Visibility 

Keeping track of the contracts within a healthcare organization is impossible without a centralized location for all of the documents. Digitizing these documents ensures they remain accessible to those who need to view the documents. 

Regardless of whether a medical practice has multiple locations, they can gain access through the portal of the contract management software. Therefore, medical office contracts remain secure. Legal teams and essential stakeholders are also able to access necessary documents.

Also, office administrators can ensure access is granted only to those who should view the document. This feature enables the facility to remain in compliance with the following regulations:

  • HIPAA
  • HITECH
  • False claims
  • JACHO
  • Federal Anti-Kickback Statute
  • Stark I, II, III

2. Customized Notifications

When a deadline passes and a healthcare company misses the opportunity to renegotiate any terms, fines can be imposed on them as prescribed by law. What’s more is that if some element needs to change, but the contract automatically renews because of this missed deadline, then it could lead to unnecessary risks and potential penalties for these healthcare companies.

Missing contract deadlines and not renegotiating company contracts could lead to throwing away money on expensive equipment or services that are no longer needed. In terms of healthcare compliance, if a medical office has a physician agreement with an expiration date for renewing the agreed-upon price, which falls within Stark Law’s window, the company is likely exposing itself to additional risk as well by missing this renegotiation deadline.

Setting up alerts and notifications for contract deadlines means you have enough time to renegotiate terms. Knowing exactly when your agreements expire removes the worry of forgetting when agreement terms are due, which leaves less room for mistakes or missed opportunities. 

3. Contract Responsibility 

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There will inevitably be questions about the content of a contract. Who better to answer these questions than the owner or manager of that particular contract? Contracts Management Software should allow providers to assign one person as an owner and another person manager. This way, they can handle any issues with this specific document through each stage – from creation until it’s time for renewal.

Sometimes it can be challenging to shift through or distinguish if a particular contract is relevant for the department. Healthcare contracts management software should allow medical providers to assign agreements within designated departments and areas so searching will become more defined, especially when there are multiple contracts in various departments.

4. Financial Metrics Tracking 

Keeping track of financial metrics is just as vital to the success of a healthcare facility’s contracts, and it improves departmental efficiency. Understanding the financial metrics of a facility will help ensure that everyone has their needs met. Healthcare Contracts Management Software provides data-driven snapshots about the organizations’ financial standings. 

Keeping track helps each department run smoothly. Also, it provides valuable insight into which vendors may need attention concerning contract compliance. 

Metrics show progressive or regressive performance. Therefore, without these two factors in place, it would be hard for management to know if who is doing well at their job.

5. Detailed Reporting

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Not taking a proactive approach with reporting can lead to several different issues. Industry regulators will want to know that a company is compliant and may put up red flags if they see no systems or processes in place for compliance.

Data-driven organizations know that the most efficient way to operate is by tracking data. Healthcare contract management software offers customizable reporting options. Therefore, medical providers can schedule reports that track any number of measurements on contracts, including compliance with industry regulations and internal use-only items. 

Contract management software gives healthcare companies detailed reporting across all aspects of contract measurement and workflow, from creating new ones at specific times or complying with regulatory requirements constantly changing based upon location.

The Importance of Healthcare Contract Management 

Contract management software is a vital step to take in the healthcare industry. The most heavily regulated industry faces harsh penalties for non-compliance, and it’s crucial to avoid any violations. Implementing contract management software will help keep healthcare companies compliant.

Once medical providers organized all of their contracts in a contract management repository and set up alerts to stay updated on deadlines, the next step is reporting key metrics. Working with risk and compliance departments will help improve transparency into healthcare company’s contracts and demonstrate that they have systems for meeting industry regulations.

For more information about the right healthcare contract management software for you, contact us here Shared Moving Media.

CRM for Healthcare Vendors: How to Excel at Customer Relationship Management

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Whether you are in hospital distribution or medical sales, customer relationship management (CRM) is an essential strategy for any business in the healthcare supply chain. Building a customer base takes time, effort, planning, and effective execution. First, your company must educate prospects and attract them to your services. Then, you build engagement and develop customer loyalty through valuable messaging and superior service. This process is called CRM.

Consumer needs are constantly changing, especially in the healthcare industry. New research findings, government regulations, technological advancements, and new medications, all impact the decisions of healthcare consumers. For this reason, healthcare suppliers need a deep understanding of their prospects’ needs and concerns to effectively guide their campaign strategies and increase market share. This is why CRM for healthcare vendors is so important. 

Benefits of CRM for Healthcare Vendors

CRM is essential to your manufacturing business development strategy because it provides invaluable insights to guide your marketing campaigns and the way you approach your prospects. 

CRM allows you to:

  • Analyze opportunities: You can assess the market and prioritize your efforts.
  • Predict your audience: Based on behaviors, trends, and demographics, you can gauge which prospects are potential customers.
  • Engage your users: You’ll know how and when to reach both current and potential customers to maximize their engagement and build customer loyalty.
  • Prove your impact: CRM enables you to track your progress and share results with stakeholders.

CRM is critical in identifying your target audience, understanding what they want, and continuing to build a relationship with them in the future. CRM for healthcare vendors helps suppliers streamline their processes while nurturing leads, improving the quality of leads, and increasing conversion rates. All of these are essential to business success.

Where CRM benefits your organization the most is in aligning marketing and sales departments.

It does so by:

  • Improving communication: Managers can track the success of each department’s approach and maintain open dialogue through shared records.
  • Providing deeper insights: Shared results give both departments full access to lead contact information, including details like competitors, background, and brand interaction.
  • Bridging gaps with shared goals: Sales and marketing work side-by-side in defining lead generation and nurturing strategies. 
  • Streamlining efforts: Both departments can see where each prospect is in their user journey. This allows marketing to create more effective messaging and sales to approach interested parties with more focus.

CRM creates opportunities for teamwork that help marketing and sales departments work together to generate quality leads and sales growth.

5 Ways Healthcare Vendors Can Excel at CRM

CRM is an effective way for healthcare vendors to target, nurture, and retain potential customers efficiently. Here are five ways healthcare vendors can excel at CRM.

1. Identify Your Target Audience 

Healthcare suppliers can use CRM to pinpoint strong market opportunities and make educated decisions about where and how to allocate their marketing budget. Learn about your target audience by:

  • Analyzing yearly trends: Compare data year-over-year to determine a customer’s average financial value and predict their future value.
  • Assessing demographics: Look at quantitative and qualitative traits, from gender and age to professional background and user behavior. Identify patterns, healthcare needs, and general trends to develop a more in-depth understanding of your audience.
  • Finding opportunities by location: CRM helps to determine ideal populations by geography given demand, need, digital engagement, and risk. 

Once you have a better idea of who your target audience is, you can begin to develop campaigns tailored to meet their needs and increase the likelihood of converting them to customers.

2. Predict Highest Value Customers 

CRM provides predictive models to discover prospective customers most interested in getting your messages. This allows you to locate, contact, and engage them more easily, which maximizes your marketing approach. 

There are lots of CRM tools available, but you need to realize that not all systems are the same. Understand the predictive models provided by your program and gain an understanding of what they reveal about customers who could benefit from your services, how best to reach them, and how much revenue you can expect to make from each one.

3. Segment Your Audience 

Once you have a better understanding of your target audience, you will want to categorize them into meaningful segments to tailor content that resonates with their needs. Personalized messaging that provides value to an audience is more likely to engage them and entice them to convert to a customer. When you group them into segments, you’re able to further define their needs by identifying personas that shape your custom messages.

Personas can be anything from medical needs or financial value to purchase behavior or job title. They should be specific enough to differentiate distinct identifiers among your target base. To track your efforts and measure your results, audience segments should be distinguishable in your CRM database.

4. Understand the Customer Journey 

Enlist journey mapping to recognize opportunities throughout the customer journey where prospects can be encouraged to take action. When you have a deep understanding of the customer journey, you can develop effective messaging and track useful conversion metrics. Use your audience segmentation to strategize detailed customer points of entry, identify the conversions you’ll measure, and relate them to your marketing goals.

As you begin to gather campaign data, you can analyze the activity generated by each channel. This can help you see which touchpoints yield the most conversions. With this information, you can better see how the customer journey is impacting your overall ROI.

5. Assess Your Omnichannel Approach 

An omnichannel approach allows you to expand your reach through various platforms. However, it can be difficult to track results to see how well your campaigns are performing. CRM provides dashboard capabilities to help you assess results by individual channels or across all channels. 

This information lets you see which channels are performing well, and where there is room for improvement. You can track which pathways are driving conversions most effectively and set realistic goals to ensure you arere constantly improving your approach.

Trust the Experts to Help You with CRM

CRM plays a major role in the success of any healthcare business. Share Moving Media is a full-service content and media company that helps healthcare suppliers attract, reach, and retain prospective customers through effective marketing strategies. 

Contact us today to learn more about CRM for healthcare vendors.

4 HIPAA Regulations You Should Be Careful Not to Violate

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2020 was a busy year for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR). In addition to dealing with a pandemic, they resolved 19 HIPAA violation cases. Over $13 million worth of fines were paid, costing more than what’s settled in the previous years, since OCR now can implement HIPAA violations.

As a manufacturer of healthcare products, you need to ensure that the medical devices you sell comply with HIPAA regulations. If you are unaware you are in violation of HIPAA and there is a breach of patient data, you can still receive a fine. 

Knowing the commonly violated HIPAA regulations is the first step in ensuring your healthcare products are up to code. 

What are the Most Commonly Violated HIPAA Regulations? 

It can be difficult to stay current on all the HIPAA regulation changes and common violations. Here are the often-violated HIPAA regulations you should concern yourself with as a manufacturer: 

1. Securing Patient Records 

When protected patient health information is stored on an electronic device, it must be encrypted and safeguarded. While encryption isn’t a mandatory regulation, it is an effective way to prevent data breaches.  

In 2017, the Children’s Medical Center of Dallas had to pay a penalty of $3.2 million to address several HIPAA violations that spanned several years. An unencrypted BlackBerry device used by the facility that 4 HIPAA Regulations You Should Be Careful Not to Violate  contained almost 4,000 patient records was lost at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in 2009. Additionally, in 2013, an unencrypted laptop that had over 2,400 patient records was stolen from the hospital. 

The hospital knew the importance of encrypting patient information after what happened in 2009, yet they continued to distribute unencrypted devices to its staff. The failure to act by the hospital and document why their devices weren’t encrypted resulted in hefty fines. 

If you don’t encrypt patient records, you will need to use another security method. Having antivirus software on medical devices and continually updating it will help protect against data breaches. Firewalls will add another protection layer, as well as difficult passwords that you must change often. You can also use some advanced privacy tools such as fingerprint authentication for critical data. 

2. Performing a Risk Analysis

If a company doesn’t perform a risk analysis routinely, they are unable to determine where there are any vulnerabilities. Any potential risk will subsequently not be addressed, and hackers will be able to access private patient information. 

In 2020, Premera Blue Cross had to pay $6.85 million in fines for a data breach that affected 10.4 million people. A data breach occurred in 2014 when a hacking group accessed Premera’s patient information system for over nine months. The hackers installed malware through a phishing email and had access to Social Security numbers, bank information, and addresses. The investigation discovered that Premera did not conduct a routine risk analysis to find and reduce any potential risks and halt unauthorized access to patient records. Due to those factors, Premera had to start a plan of action to correct where they were noncompliant. 

Conducting a regular risk analysis and taking the proper steps to address any risks will help you avoid receiving this HIPAA violation. Some necessary steps are:

  • Figuring out what patient information your organization has access to and how it is stored/transmitted. 
  • Looking at what current security programs you have in place and if they’re adequate for protecting patient information. 
  • Evaluating where your company has vulnerabilities and the probability of a hacker accessing your patient systems. 
  • Depending upon how vulnerable you and the likelihood of you being hacked, figure out your risk level.
  • Document everything along the way, including how you will work to lower your risk.

3. Having Adequate Patient Information Access Controls 

HIPAA requires that organizations limit access to patient records to authorized individuals. Not implementing proper controls is a common HIPAA violation and has severe financial consequences. 

In 2018, Anthem had to pay $16 million in fines, the highest HIPAA penalty that was ever issued. Anthem failed to implement technical procedures and policies for their electronic health record (EHR) systems, allowing unauthorized individuals access to the information. They also did not perform a routine risk analysis to identify and address security incident detections before the breach. The breach resulted in hackers having access to the data of 78.8 million people.

4. Having a Business Associate Agreement 

As a medical device manufacturer, you’re classified as a business associate. You will need to have an up-to-date HIPAA business associate agreement with any vendor you deal with that’s provided with or given access to patient information. 

Raleigh Orthopaedic Clinic, P.A. of North Carolina had to pay $750,000 in 2016 for not entering into a business associate agreement with a vendor before sending through patient information. They sent the vendor X-ray images to have them made into digital files. They came to an agreement over the phone, but nothing was put into writing and it wasn’t HIPAA-compliant. In addition to the fine, Raleigh Orthopaedic had to enact a correction plan. 

HIPAA Violation Penalty Tiers

There are different tiers to HIPAA violation penalties that you should keep in mind. The higher the tier goes, the higher the fine:

  • First Tier: The organization didn’t know or couldn’t have known about the breach. 
  • Second Tier: The organization knew or could have known about the breach but didn’t act with neglect.
  • Third Tier: The organization acted with willful neglect and they corrected the issue within 30 days.
  • Fourth Tier: The organization acted with willful neglect and did not correct the issue promptly.

Take Precautions to Avoid HIPAA Violations Today 

Following HIPAA regulations is essential as a manufacturer of medical devices. Failing to comply has catastrophic results, from million-dollar fines to employment termination and prison sentences. Communicate often with your quality assurance, regulatory affairs, and development teams to make sure the proper protocol is being followed for dealing with patient information. With everything being digitized these days, it’s vital to protect patient information and your company from any violations.  

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