Parallels or a Powerful Agency?
Posted on June 14, 2010 in Featured-writers
by Carl Ganter
Very seldom do you find an agency operating where the clinical and marketing departments communicate effectively. Clinical and marketing departments often operate in parallels without coming together in pursuit of a common goal. The tension created between these very important aspects of your business can be unhealthy for your organization unless treated with care. Healthy debate between marketing and clinical is normal and can benefit the company with increased communications and understanding.
Break the barriers that can keep your agency from reaching substantial heights by bringing these two parallels together for a common goal. Here are seven things you can do to help bring these teams together to make sure that tension does not build into conflict, ultimately getting in the way of growing your business:
Set Clear Goals for Growth
Set SMART Goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based - for your marketing team and activities. Involve your Clinical Managers in the development of goals. Realize that they need to support the sales and marketing team in achieving those goals.
Recruit, Recruit, Recruit
Always be recruiting nurses and therapists, even when you don't have an opening. If you find a great clinician, hire them immediately. Then turn your marketing team loose to find new patients to fill the visits that will keep the nurses busy. In this day of nursing shortages, you will rarely be overstaffed with nurses by this proactive approach. If you can find the nurses, your marketing team will find the patients.
Define Clear Admission Standards
Work with your clinical managers to clearly define your admission standards. Communicate the standards to your marketing staff so they are clear about which patients you will and will not admit. It's their job to educate physicians, discharge planners, and other referral sources about the criteria for patient admission to home care.
Team Builder Training
As part of your sales training process, teach your marketing representatives how to create teamwork with the intake department and the clinical managers. If they are bringing in referrals that are not being admitted, they have a responsibility to work with intake and clinical to find ways to get more referrals that can be admitted. They need to sit side by side focusing on the problem, not arguing back and forth about who is to blame.
Track Referral Conversions Rates
Set up a system to track every referral that comes into the agency, and the % of patients that are admitted. Use this information to meet with marketing and clinical to work out issues that are getting in the way of growing the business. If your marketing team is bringing in a large number of referrals that are not admitted, then you need to get both clinical and marketing together to look at the specifics. What is keeping those patients from being admitted? Not enough staff? Patients don't meet the requirements? Marketers are targeting the wrong referral source? Clinical is getting too picky about the cases they'll take?
Create Accountability
Hold both sales and clinical accountable for growth. If you are not getting referrals that turn into admissions to meet your growth goals, bring the two sides together. Work to get them in alignment and focused on the goal. Don't let them move in the direction of placing blame on the other side. They need to be working side by side to achieve the mutual goals.
Celebrate Small Victories
Celebrating small victories in pursuit of the ultimate goal will not only help maintain the energy necessary to keep the team engaged, but it will also provide an avenue for the valuable team building between clinical and marketing. Celebrate each step in climbing that ladder towards reaching the team's goal.
Breaking down the walls and eliminating the two parallels will ultimately result in your agency performing as a fine tuned machine. Utilizing these seven steps and bringing these departments together can bring you rewarding results.
©2010 Carl Ganter. All rights reserved.
Carl Ganter is the President and CEO of the Ganter Group, a leading provider of planning, development and management to the homecare industry, including home health, hospice, home medical equipment and private duty nursing. Mr. Ganter is a Certified Homecare Executive with over 15 years of experience in management, development and executive leadership in homecare. His company, The Ganter Group provides consulting and assistance with marketing, regulatory, reimbursement, operational, financial, interim management, policies and procedures, training and more. To learn more visit www.thegantergroup.com.
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