Resources

Kure Pain Management is the Mid-Atlantic’s leading pain management practice specializing in spinal treatments. With 14 locations across Maryland, Delaware and Michigan, it offers comprehensive treatment options for patients suffering with severe pain, and advanced training and education for certified physical therapists and providers to meet wide-ranging needs.

The Challenge

Kure Pain Management knew they wanted to deliver first-rate customer service across their seven healthcare centers, but they didn’t have an effective way to measure patient experience. As a result, they had no idea how their current efforts were performing and believed they were at risk of losing a large number of patients. Nick LaRosa, Kure Pain Management’s Director of Sales and Marketing, leveraged Binary Fountain to help better understand their performance and determine what changes needed to be made to help deliver world-class customer service.

The Initiative

The need to measure and improve their patient experience drove Kure’s patient feedback initiative. “We immediately saw Binary Health Analytics platform as a crucial tool to helping us gain patient feedback, benchmark and track progress,” said LaRosa.

The organization had been using iPads to conduct patient surveys initially, but that revealed itself to be a very time-consuming process. As part of the Binary Health Analytics initiative, Kure switched to digital patient surveys through email campaigns. As a result, Kure increased survey responses, greatly improved office staff time management and uncovered critical data on patient concerns.

Boosting Employee Performance with Patient Feedback 

There was some pushback within the Kure organization before they began receiving the data, but once they did, they were able to use it as a developmental tool and uncover patient experience issues. This became an opportunity to improve operations.

By circulating surveys and scores throughout the organization, physicians were held accountable for their customer service and engaged in a little friendly competition to be the top performing physician. According to LaRosa, “Binary Fountain’s platform helped us reveal and share insights on how patients were really feeling. It was a definite eye-opener.”

“Measurable data is really giving us the drive and baseline to improve the customer lifecycle,” said LaRosa. “For instance, one physician really wanted to review his patient experience scores and feedback. He was a brilliant doctor, but his scores didn’t fare so well in the customer service category. Once he was aware of the areas he needed to improve upon, he went from the lowest scoring physician at the practice to the top scoring doctor by implementing personal changes.”

Outcomes

 With the help of digital patient surveys, Kure greatly improved their customer service by educating staff members and introducing better processes, which significantly increased patient experience and loyalty.

After less than a year, not only did Kure manage to enhance online reviews and scores by 95 percent because of the initiative, but positive reviews increased over 30 percent and patient loyalty increased about 35%.

“The Binary Health Analytics platform has allowed us to measure how we do as a business and provides insights on how we can successfully continue forward,” said LaRosa. “We’ve been able to track performance with automated reports, communicate internally and develop our staff. It’s also improved staff time management, decreased patient wait times and even reduced spending across the organization. We’re striving to become world class and Binary Health Analytics is helping us get there.”

LaRosa continued, “the Binary Fountain Health Analytics platform has helped us improve our reputation and the brand image of Kure Pain Management by increasing transparency with our patients as well as throughout the organization.”

Patients now have more choices and information to help make one of their most important health decisions – selecting the best physician for their care. With consumers using online ratings and reviews to help make these decisions, Providence Health & Services (PH&S) saw an opportunity to become a more trusted voice in the provider selection process.

Learn how PH&S’ marketing team directed a transparency initiative, leveraging patient experience surveys to create trusted reviews, helping inform and guide patient choice. They’ll share their experiences and best practices for reviewing and publishing survey data to physician profile pages and present consumer insights they’ve uncovered.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Strategies for planning and managing the initiative
• Steps to gaining buy-in from physicians
• How a technology platform can help manage the program
• How patient comments can increase SEO for provider pages

Watch now to learn how your organization can leverage patient experience surveys to guide and inform patient choice.

Featured Speakers

Karina Jennings
AVP Marketing

Dr. Sunita Mishra
Medical Director – Innovation

Watch Now
 
Patients now have more choices and online information when it comes to shopping around for healthcare. With patient acquisition and retention impacting revenue of healthcare systems and providers – even more so in competitive markets – do you have a strategy in place for engaging patients online and influencing their decision making?

Starting with a “first impressions matter” approach, Yext Head of Healthcare, Carrie Liken, and Binary Fountain’s EVP of Strategy, Andrew Rainey, will share what types of information influence patient decisions most, where patients go to look for them, and how increasing discoverability leads to increased appointments and increased revenue for your health system.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Steps to creating a strategy that will help impact patient acquisition
• How to attract more patients by optimizing “Rich Listings”
• The power of online rating and reviews – and why you need them
• Why taking a transparent approach to sharing information is vital to engaging patients

To learn more, watch the recording now.

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Providence Health & Services (PH&S) is the fourth largest not-for-profit health system in the United States, committed to providing for the needs of its communities across five states. PH&S operates 34 hospitals, 600 physician clinics, 22 long-term care facilities, 19 hospice and home health programs, 693 supportive housing units in 14 locations, and has over 82,000 employees. Its health plan serves caregivers and other large employer groups covering 513,000 members. PH&S includes a family of organizations and is part of Providence St. Joseph Health, a parent organization created by PH&S and St. Joseph Health.

The Challenge

Patients now have more choices and information to help make one of their most important health decisions – selecting the best provider for their care. In fact, a PH&S digital marketing team analysis revealed that the number one consumer activity on its website is finding a physician.

Since rating and review sites are now a key component of a patient’s research, PH&S saw an opportunity to become a more trusted voice in the provider selection process. After improving the accuracy of its provider directories, and building out biographies and related information, PH&S identified ratings and reviews on its provider pages as a priority for increasing consumer interest.

The Initiative

PH&S selected Binary Star Ratings from Binary Fountain to help manage and publish ratings and comments from patient experience surveys to its provider pages. Binary Fountain met PH&S’ needs with its robust transparency solution and healthcare industry expertise. PH&S’ Oregon region was selected as the first market for the program.

The digital marketing team sourced patient feedback data from its Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys, and created an approval process to optimize survey comments. To prevent skewed ratings, providers needed at least 30 patient ratings to have survey data posted on their profile pages. The team gained buy-in from physicians – many whom were skeptical of online reviews – by letting them review their patients’ comments from CAHPS surveys before they went live. This allayed their concerns about the validity of the comments and gave them a voice in the process.

Impacting Consumer Engagement

Binary Star Ratings rolled out across PH&S’ Oregon market in 2015, with star ratings and reviews published on more than 500 of its physicians’ profile pages. Several months post-launch, an analysis of 150 physicians (86 primary care providers and 64 specialists) revealed the program’s dramatic effect on consumer behavior. Primary and specialty care providers with star ratings saw a 25 percent and 29 percent increase in page views, respectively, as compared to providers without star ratings, who saw only a 5 percent increase. Patients confirmed that they found the information valuable in informing their provider selection. In a recent survey of patients who viewed online provider pages, 87 percent found the star ratings to be helpful and 85 percent found the comments useful in their selection process.

PH&S is also meeting the rising demand for transparency in healthcare by publishing all provider reviews, regardless of the rating. To ensure patient privacy as part of this process, Binary Fountain provides PH&S with the tools to analyze comments and remove protected health information (PHI).

PH&S also partnered with Binary Fountain to help raise the visibility of their providers online, given that nearly 80% of consumers start their search for a provider online. Previously, third-party ratings and reviews appeared above a provider’s PH&S profile in search results. Working with Binary Fountain to generate greater and more recent consumer content, providers with reviews on PH&S physician directory pages are now more likely to appear at or near the top of search results – and with more reviews compared to other sites.

Binary Fountain continues to help PH&S engage its patient population online, building a relationship as their trusted healthcare provider. As of September 2016, PH&S expanded the program to include nearly 2,000 providers across several states.

“Consumers expect to shop for and purchase healthcare just like any other service. Binary Fountain is helping us empower them to see what other patients are saying, so that they can find the best physician,” noted Orest Holubec, senior vice president of communications with PH&S. “As an added bonus, fresh reviews keep our online physician profiles relevant, which helps their profiles hit the top of the list when consumers search for physicians on the web.”

In this webinar, Spartanburg’s Medical Group of the Carolinas marketing team will share how they’re uncovering opportunities to improve “Timely Care.”

Spartanburg will present the strategies, process and technology they’ve used to:

• Efficiently capture and monitor patient feedback
• Quickly uncover and report patient experience trends
• Collaborate with leadership to initiate operational change
• Improve physician engagement

They’ll also share practical advice and lessons learned along their journey to impacting reputation management and the patient experience that healthcare marketers can apply to their programs.