The Tactical Side of Referral Development

Once your strategy is firmly in place, now comes the tricky part: implementation. In this article, we'll pick up on the previous discussion, but focusing now on the messages and staff needed to implement and support your referral development strategy.

A recap of the seven best practices:

1. Planning to Achieve Goals
2. Structure, Model and Approach
3. ROI
4. Messages
5. Right Staff in the Right Roles with the Right Pay
6. Training
7. Market Intelligence

Messages

While many of us are communicators by training, we often take for granted how to develop messages for this important strategy. Here's a recap of some key areas where messages are required:

Strategic Messages – Internal and External

Strategic messages allow you to frame the “spin” of negative or positive aspects. Early strategic messages about referral development might be those you have the CEO and other leaders use to gain commitment and engagement in the strategy:

“Physician relations is a critical strategy for our hospital. We value and rely upon the physician to refer their patient to our services AND participate as a provider in the delivery of a high-quality procedure. We want our clinical and service-line team members to participate through improved communications, a focus on satisfaction and service to the physicians in our community.”

Service Messages

Nobody's perfect. So inevitably, there will be a time you'll need to acknowledge an issue or complaint or help the client understand what's been done to correct it. For long-standing issues, prepare messages that explain the issue, the plan for change, how physicians are involved in helping achieve the change and a timeline. 

For issues that are fixed, turn this into a positive: “We listened to the primary care physicians in last year's focus groups and realized that this was one of their number-one concerns. To that end, we have a team of primary care physicians who have helped us build a new scheduling process for their patients. We're in testing mode now and the current patient satisfaction rate shows 97 percent success.”

Reporting Messages – Selling Internally

Keep in mind that while you live this strategy passionately, others are focused on their own goals. Develop an internal marketing communications plan and mechanisms to remind your internal customers of your program's value to them and their goals.

This might be done in several ways:

• Customized reports to demonstrate the results you've achieved for their department/service line
• Anecdotal success story of a change or save in referral volumes
• A physician testimonial for Leadership about the value of the specialist appointment that you helped set up for their patient
• A presentation at the director's meeting about how physician relations can impact upon their efforts in operations.

Right Staff in the Right Roles with the Right Pay

Logical as it may seem, many programs have paid a price here. The importance of this strategy and the desired outcomes for your organization should drive the focus/accountabilities for these positions, the type of person (skills and competencies) hired for the role and how you compensate them to hit their goals.

If you're seeking to manage current referral relationships (retention), you might need to seek out a staff member with service, issue management and strong operational integration within your organization. 

If, however, you want to grow targeted service lines, you'd likely want to hire a clinically oriented salesperson who will focus on shifting referral volumes and/or selling to prospective physicians. The skill set, style, approach and personal comfort zone of the staff member is entirely different for the goals discussed above. 

Key attributes to seek out:

1. Must like working with physicians
2. Ability to think and work strategically combined with tactical implementation
3. Listens, asks good questions, likes to learn and help customers see how the solution will benefit their business/practice
4. Ability to build solutions from services offered to meet customers' needs
5. Ability to reflect organization culture, values and leadership style and approach with physicians

Options within your model:

• One FTE: Review your business plan and targeted physicians and identify what the primary focus for this staff member's time will be: Is it retention or growth?  Determine what the key skills and competencies are that will enable them to be successful.
• Two FTEs: Consider these options:

• One person focuses on retention/service; the other manages growth/sales
• One person has a clinical background; the other has a strong sales/marketing background. Some hospitals have used one representative in the local market with a second representative working the regional market.
• Another option is to focus one FTE on the primary care/internal medicine and the other on specialists. 

As you can see, there isn't a right or wrong model. You have to determine what will work in your organization, what best reflects leadership style and what delivers results.

Right Pay

These staff members should be hired at a salary level that ensures a seasoned, professional representative for your organization. 

Additionally, with the physician as a customer, it's especially important to minimize turnover or competitive poaching of your talent. These functions nationally are at a base pay of $48-$68K annually for a single hospital, up to $68-$88K for systems. Management positions of these functions range from $68-$88K up to $88-$128K in a system.

These positions have evolved to also receive consideration for performance pay. Most organizations track by physician or service line to give credit for the staff member's results in referral development:

• New programs typically combine a weighted group of activities and results that measure growth or retention from an agreed-upon baseline of referral volumes or procedures.
• Seasoned programs usually continue to track/measure activity, but shift performance pay to referral volume results only. 

Performance pay, as measured nationally, has been averaging 12-17 percent of annual base pay. Managers of these functions usually receive performance pay based upon the overall performance of their team in referral volumes coupled with other hospital management performance measures that all management are held accountable to.

Click here for more how-to's for effective referral development management.

Read more about the research CHG conducted on compensation trends.

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