“Well Steve, I’m a home care company and if the hospital offers home care, what’s the point in me going in there?” In this week’s episode of A Drink With The Hurricane, Steve explains how to get referrals from hospitals with a closed system.
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Video Transcript
Hi folks, Steve the Hurricane here, and on today’s episode of A Drink with the Hurricane, we are going to continue our discussion on hospital marketing.
Last week I talked about LinkedIn, the week before I talked about finding out what events they have and today I’m gonna talk about finding out if they offer what you do as part of their hospital system, or if they do it in-house. Why is this important? Sometimes people are like, well Steve, I’m a home care company and if they offer home care, what’s the point in me going in there, because they’re gonna give all the referrals to themselves? Not necessarily, I got into many closed hospital systems that did not refer private home care because they had their own.
The reason why I was able to get in there is the reputation of the agency affiliated with the hospital is usually a poor one. Why? Well think about it, every part of health care is insurance pay, Medicare, AARP, Horizon, Aetna, whatever it is the person.
So hospitals are used to dealing with stuff or services that are a benefit as part of an insurance payer source. They have a SNF, home health, hospice, and a private duty. The only part of those four in that system that just been in the hospital itself, that’s not insurance based is the private duty. It’s the only part of it that’s not insurance based. As a result they’re not used to offering a service that is fee for service. They have a difficult time selling it and they don’t do well with it. This is the reason why many hospitals are stopping or pulling out of this part of the business is because they can’t figure it out. It’s not worthwhile so they just get rid of it and focus on what they know and they can give it to you.
Now here’s the cool thing. If you get into a hospital that has it’s own home care, there’s two ways you can go about doing it. You can go directly to that home care company and find out what services they are not willing to provide, what services do they not do and then offer it, and then be their exclusive referral that they give to people who are looking for what the hospital home care doesn’t do.
Great example, one of my clients many years ago, who’s now one of my coaches, Nini. She was working her territory, she went into a hospital that had their own home care and she asked them, what services do you offer? What services do you not offer? And she found out that they did not do live-in care, they would not do same-day discharges. Interesting. No same-day discharges and no live-in care provided because it was just too much for them. They didn’t want to get involved with it.
So the agency that Nini worked for, specialized in live-in care and they were willing and able to staff same-day discharges. So every time this home care company had a same-day discharge, they called my client. Every time they had somebody who wanted or needed a 24 hour live-in caregiver, they called my client. So every week Nini’s getting three to five referrals from the hospital’s in-house home care company. They’re number two on the list and they’re getting a ton of business, a ton of clients, a ton of growth, from this one way of getting into a hospital.
Want more on hospital marketing? Come to The Millionaire’s Boot Camp this July in St. Louis, Missouri, so you can go back and blow away the competition. Sign up now and I’ll see you there!
https://www.homecaremarketing.net/hurricanebootcamp/