FON: The Business of Integrative Health & Medicine
A physician tirelessly invests more than a decade of her life devoted to scholarly study in college, medical school, residency and fellowships. However, the long journey in pursuit of a medical degree rarely intersects with practical opportunities to learn the fundamental basics of business development and management. This is a most unfortunate reality when considering the ramifications. Let’s take a look.
I am widely known as the “digital” marketer based on my writings and consulting practice which often focus on customer engagement via online strategies. That’s fair. And today I’m here to tell you that there are plenty of tried and true methods for building clinic utilization not dependent on the Web or digital marketing.
Creating quality content and delivering it in a format that your customers (aka patients) and prospects prefer to consume their media is more important than ever. For many, that preferred format is now video.
Special report by Glenn Sabin and Taylor Walsh examines the confluence of factors affecting primary care medicine—including volume-driven traditional care, concierge models, shrinking reimbursements and ACA’s non-discrimination clause—and the opportunity for integrative healthcare.
While there’s no denying the Internet’s huge impact on just about everything—including the continued ascent of evidence-based integrative health—the following facts should not be overlooked when considering an overarching marketing approach to increasing clinic utilization and the sale of natural products and services.
Content is the fuel that launches thought leadership, the glue that binds social media and the only path to meaningful, sustainable health consumer engagement. It is now imperative for your clinic or center to become a content creator—that’s right, a publisher—to effectively build trust around your brand and grow patient volume. Download our FREE 31-page eBook.
So here we are. There’s roughly just shy of $10 billion dollars left in the Prevention and Public Health Fund, and according to top health economists, some of these so-called preventive services save lives and treasure, and others not so much. Now is the time to redefine what we call preventive medicine by combining the useful screenings and educational interventions that are proven to effectively save lives and money, and incorporate the basic tenets of integrative health and lifestyle medicine to promote health.
Your brand name and logo are the first things a prospective customer (patient) typically encounters when searching for an integrative healthcare provider.
Notably, the list of 25 initial PCORI awards includes two that are CAM or integrative health focused. One is Evaluation of a Patient-Centered Risk Stratification Method for Improving Primary Care for Back Pain. The second is led by University of Pittsburgh researcher Michael Schneider, DC, PhD: A Comparison of Non-Surgical Treatment Methods for Patients with Lumbar Spinal Stenosis.
Section 2706 of the Affordable Care Act prevents health insurance plans from capriciously excluding a range of integrative health practitioners from coverage, based solely on licensure. While HHS Secretary Sibelius moves forward to ensure its implementation, the AMA contemplates what actions they may take to upend this landmark non-discrimination language.
