AMA Adopts Policy to Guide Doctors in Use of Social Media

A new policy by the American Medical Association (AMA) aims at helping physicians to maintain a positive online presence and preserve the integrity of the patient-physician relationship.

“Using social media can help physicians create a professional presence online, express their personal views and foster relationships, but it can also create new challenges for the patient-physician relationship,” said AMA Board Member Mary Anne McCaffree, M.D. “The AMA’s new policy outlines a number of considerations physicians should weigh when building or maintaining a presence online.”

The new policy encourages physicians to:

• Use privacy settings to safeguard personal information and content to the fullest extent possible on social networking sites.
• Routinely monitor their own Internet presence to ensure that the personal and professional information on their own sites and content posted about them by others, is accurate and appropriate.
• Maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship when interacting with patients online and ensure patient privacy and confidentiality is maintained.
• Consider separating personal and professional content online.
• Recognize that actions online and content posted can negatively affect their reputations among patients and colleagues, and may even have consequences for their medical careers.

The new policy on professionalism when using social media was adopted November 8 at the AMA’s semi-annual policy making meeting in San Diego. 

Click here for a copy of the policy.

5 Key Areas of Focus when Assessing Physician Need and Alignment Strategies

What health system doesn’t have physician recruitment, integration and alignment at the top of their strategic priorities? Market competition, pipeline shortages, failing practice economics and a growing recognition that they can’t achieve quality and financial goals without physicians at the table, have organizations jockeying to win the race for physician integration and commitment.

A well-planned approach requires superb strategic thinking about possible, probable and preferred futures, and a well-crafted plan to bring vision into reality. The process will be better informed through an analysis about the current state of physicians in the marketplace and how that is likely to change in the future.

However, data is just data unless you use it strategically. 5Rs™ provides a framework and methodology in which to discover and calculate opportunities:

1. Recruitment — Recruitment strategies address physician shortages when both strategic and community assessments indicate a need for physicians in a particular specialty
2. Retention — Top producing physicians are candidates for retention strategies based upon historic commitment of activity to the hospital for inpatient and outpatient service volumes
3. Redirection — Physician candidates for redirection strategies are typically those aligned with competitor hospitals.
4. Redeployment — The goal is to increase practice volumes through better geographic location of the practice or through the presence of multiple practice sites
5. Retirement — Transition planning should be considered for top producing physicians over the age of 55.

Insights from this analysis will launch health systems out of the starting gate and into the field by producing a focused set of tactics to support the overall physician engagement strategy.

Karen Corrigan

Rapidly Restructuring Healthcare Markets Require New Approaches to Brand Management

Ever more complex health system structures, physician relationships, expanding clinical portfolios, new business ventures and expansion into new markets require a proactive, focused and purposeful plan to build and leverage brand equity across the enterprise – across geography – across constituencies.

Today, health systems’ approaches to branding must evolve to address and manage the complexities of:

• Hospital and health system mergers & acquisitions
• Physician integration, joint ventures and owned medical practices
• Ambulatory, post acute and retail diversification
• Academic, technology and business partnerships
• Multi-market, multi-state expansion initiatives
• Enterprise IT/EHR/Website strategies
• Co-branding/co-marketing relationships

This requires more sophisticated methods for determining, managing, and building brand portfolios in diversified health systems, addressing multiple facilities, strategic business units, markets, physician integration, and partnering ventures. Because at the end of the day, the objective isn’t what to call something, it’s market leverage.

Karen Corrigan

Keeping Your Brand Healthy After Physician Integration: Part I

The rapid restructuring of the physician services sector and resulting physician alignment, integration and employment models are presenting new brand building challenges for health systems, hospitals and physician organizations. Assuming the average primary care physician sees about 5,000 patients visits a year, back of the napkin math shows us that a health system with 100 employed physicians brings in a half million visits or so annually – with 300 to 400 physicians that number can rise upwards of 2 million. Now assuming that brand impressions are shaped through familiarity and frequency of use, then it’s easy to see how a large employed physician practice can be the catalyst for building – or unraveling – brand reputation.

You see, what we’re still learning in healthcare is that brand is built more powerfully through the customer experience than through promotions. The most creative imagery and well-crafted messages of killer advertising will not survive poor or inconsistent customer service – physician offices that don’t return patient calls, or don’t answer calls over the lunch hour when it’s most convenient for patients to make them, or can’t make timely appointments or see patients on time, or the poorly trained and groomed front desk staff, or the torn upholstery of the waiting room chairs, or the rushed appointment, or the doctor or nurse that enters the exam room, eyes on the chart and not on the patient. Or even worse – the missed diagnosis, the wrong medication, the preventable error.

The significance and potential impact of these everyday irritants and sometimes serious missteps cannot be underestimated once aggregated under the brand umbrella of a large health system. Every physician practice is now a branded access point, perhaps even the most critical of those touch points capable of enhancing or destroying brand reputation.

Brands are about business – growth, customer loyalty, profitability. It just doesn’t make good business sense investing millions to effect a large scale physician integration strategy if only to lose that and more by not purposefully addressing how brand equity will be preserved and enhanced.

So how can brand be unleashed to drive growth and innovation for the health system-physician enterprise? Well, that’s Part II – coming soon.

Karen Corrigan

Is Service Line Success Embedded in Design or Execution: Part 4

This is the final installment of four posts on healthcare service line strategy and structure.

With Service Lines, Imitation is Not the Answer

The classic flaw of imitation is the assumption that someone else is doing it right.

For the service line management model to be an effective growth engine, providers must move beyond benchmarking and replication to forge a distinctive position in the market. The secret to competitive effectiveness is not to be better than the competition. But to be different in a way that is distinct, relevant and truly meaningful to your customer base -- by seeking different value-producing approaches to the market, by driving innovations in service delivery, by creating unique approaches to integration and service consolidation, by cultivating unique partnerships, by understanding how different degrees of centralization, delegation of authority, and functional specialization work together to achieve differentiation.

The key consideration for health care leaders is how those differences add value to the service line model in achieving the company’s strategic vision and goals.

So, the critical question for service line execs is how differentiated value is defined, created and delivered. This requires more than an aggregation of tactics, but a leadership-driven approach to identifying opportunities, crafting strategies to create a distinct and compelling value proposition, developing a effective business model and operating structure, forging physician partnerships, and prioritizing investments.

What's important to keep in mind is that service line management, in and of itself, is not the goal. When aligned to an organization’s strategy and configured to achieve results, it can, however, be a powerful model for creating and sustaining competitive advantage.

Karen Corrigan