What’s up everybody, it’s Steve “The Hurricane” here, and with today’s episode of a “Drink With The Hurricane.” I want to remind you and urge you to right now, make sure you are registered for the virtual boot camp, “Embracing Change From Pandemic to Profitability,” this September 17th and 18th. All new content on how you can scale and grow your home-care business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is good down time right now, like while all the pandemonium and everything’s happening outside the walls right now, and all the fear and anxiety, and everyone’s kinda quarantining and you know, social distancing themselves, we’re not allowed to go into accounts. Building our foundation, getting the training and the knowledge, then planning it out.
As soon as these bans lift go running at it because I know it’s gonna take me two to three months to start getting referrals from that day as I go forward. You can do some LinkedIn stuff tomorrow. Megan is gonna give a presentation on marketing during a lockdown. So that’ll give you some COVID-19 action plans that you can immediately implement. But when it comes to developing accounts, that’s the kinda time it’s gonna take when you go into these accounts, so let’s jump into it.
First thing you have to do in understanding and developing referrals is you have to qualify these accounts. If you don’t qualify these accounts, you could easily waste months, maybe even years trying to get business, because every account is not created equal. And the first part of it is the magic number, I talked a little bit about this yesterday, with those face-to-face visits, you should see one person for every hour that you spend marketing. So if you spend 20 hours marketing every week, you should see 15 to 25 people face-to-face.
If you are full time and you go 40 hours a week, you should spend, you should see 35 to 45 people face-to-face. I already talked about that yesterday so I’ll move on. The best referral source for everybody, every person on your home health, hospice, private duty, are your hospitals.
They are your best referral source for the simple fact that they have the volume of patients. So when you think about your average hospitals, I just said to you before discharge is around 200 patients a month. So when you think about how many of those patients are Medicare beneficiaries, how many of those patients have five or more chronic conditions, so home health and hospice, Medicare beneficiaries, that’s 60% of their discharges. 200 people going home that’s 120 potential clients for home health.
Hospice is obviously the people who have the greatest need in their end of life, so it’s not 120 out of that 200, it’s probably more like 20 out of that 200, about 10%, but still 20 potential referrals in one month for hospice, from one account, yeah, that’s fantastic. And then from the private duty standpoint you’re looking at people with five or more chronic conditions. So from that 120 Medicare beneficiaries, 20% of those have five or more chronic conditions, that’s gonna be about 25 people every single month coming out of a hospital that are going to need help beyond what Medicare covers, and that’s you, the private duty folks.
So for every one of us, the potential from a hospital is ridiculous. Now, you heard me say they are the hardest account to develop, and that’s the truth. The other thing about hospitals is I will tell every single one of you is that you wanna have like a little bit of word, or caution, when it comes to hospitals.
If your business isn’t able to take same-day discharges, and think about what I just said, right? Home health, 120 possible discharges a month could go to you. So, you know, every single week you’re talking about picking up 20 to 25 referrals potentially from a hospital. If you’re not able to do same-day discharges and screen and do what you have to do for it, don’t go into the hospitals because you’re biting off more than you can chew, right?
From the private duty, and the hospice side, when you get a phone call, somebody’s going on hospice, somebody needs private duty help, you gotta have a one-hour turnaround time and you gotta be able to get out there and see that person, sign ’em up and start them later on tonight.
If you’re not able to do that, and what I just told you, 20, 25 patients a month, are gonna need your services from the hospital. If you’re not able to handle that 20, 25 times a month, same day, then don’t, don’t start going into hospitals yet, because you’re gonna do a lot of work to get in there, they’re gonna start referring you, you’re gonna mess it up, you’re gonna burn a bridge, and then they’re not gonna refer you again. And it is 10 times harder to get back into an account where you messed up and had service failures, than it is to go in without any type of reputation yet.
