Interview with John Olive Executive Director of Better Hearing Institute.
Share:
Marketing to Physicians through Medical CMEs.
AO/Beck: Hi John, nice to speak with you again.
Olive: Hi Doug, thanks. It's good to spend time with you again too.
AO/Beck: I know the BHI (Better Hearing Institute) has recently launched it's comprehensive campaign to get more physicians involved with hearing loss and the issues related to hearing loss, and I was hoping you could get us up to speed on these issues please?
Olive: Sure Doug, happy to help. The entire BHI program has really matured nicely over the past year.. Everything the program is today in 2002 is a direct result of the experiences and lessons learned in 2001. We spent the final two months of last year evolving the program to its current format. I can tell you that we studied and learned a lot about how to get the word out regarding hearing loss, to the physicians. You know the statistics are amazing...there are some 28 million people in this country with hearing loss, and only about 5.5 million who have done anything about it. So we have an 80 percent non-penetrated potential market...meaning we have never reached over 80% of the people in this country who could benefit from our services. That is dramatic.BHI's mission is to design ways to reach that vast unserved population. Right now, our singular focus is the family physician. In fact, we've realized that if the family physician doesn't think hearing loss is important, the patient never will.
AO/Beck: I think you're exactly right. In fact, others have also identified physician education as a key element in reaching the majority of hearing impaired individuals in the USA. Part of the problem has been that the physicians have such limited time to spend with their patients, and many of them learned decades ago that sensorineural loss couldn't be helped with amplification - which we now know is incorrect, and in fact, probably more than 90 percent of the patients fit with amplification have sensorineural, or nerve loss.
Olive: That's right. We've heard from many patients that they were told by their physician that there was nothing that could be done about hearing loss, and that hearing aids weren't able to help. Which is of course not true. Truthfully, physicians are not hostile to our message. They are just completely unaware of the prevalence of hearing loss in their patient population and the profoundly negative impact it has when not treated. So, our challenge is how to reach the physicians in the trenches, how do we reach the very busy professionals out there seeing the patients? With 28 million hearing-impaired Americans and over 240,000 primary care physicians, we realized that if we're ever going to impact the industry, we needed to act on a national scale. So we started to work on a program model that was Internet and CD based. We realized that one element that was lacking in 2001 was a training module for physicians...an accredited CME (continuing medical education) course that would give ultimate credibility to our message...something the hearing industry has never had in all its history, because until the year 2000, we never had the bona fide clinical research to support our position that untreated hearing loss is devastating to those who suffer from it and that amplification is highly effective in 90% of all cases. We took all the clinical material from our program and produced an educational CD-ROM for physicians and nurses. The CD has been approved for CME/CEU's for physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. We couldn't be happier with the result.
AO/Beck: John, how do the audiologists and dispensers get this information to the physician? In other words, even though you guys have a wonderful program - and I say that having seen the entire program - how do we go about getting it in the hands of the right people?
Olive: Thank you - great question! We have learned that regardless of how good and competent you are as an audiologist, the physician will not place a patient in your hands until he/she knows and trusts you . So our program is entirely built around using the local hearing professional to deliver the material and the strategies on literally how to get your foot in the door.. Relationship development is as important, if not more important, than the message itself, There is no short cut. Hearing professionals must meet and establish relationships with the physicians and their office staffs, but once that's done, the program provides the tools that will help the physicians understand the issues and the answers related to hearing loss. In fact, you also have the ability to help them solve a problem they all have - which is to find the time to obtain their CMEs! So this program goes a long way towards addressing our problems as professionals, and it helps solves one of their problems too. But make no mistake...one CME credit does not revolutionize an industry. The most important lesson we learned in 2001 is that nothing replaces the personal familiarity and trust that must evolve between a physician and any healthcare professional who sees his patients.
AO/Beck: OK John, can you describe the nitty gritty for me? How does the BHI program work?
Olive: When a hearing healthcare professional joins the program, the first step is to complete the Training Module in the Basics of Physician Marketing. This program is on CD-ROM and requires about 2 hours to finish. We carefully construct our entire platform as to why we focus on primary care physicians...the facts and figures and logic that creates a powerful message to the physician about hearing loss in his patients. We look at the most aggravating and intimidating physician traits, and present specific strategies for capitalizing on their predictable behavior. A major portion of the training module is actual video of primary care physicians explaining exactly what works and what does not work in referral development. You watch live footage of physicians talking very frankly about how they select the clinical professionals they use in a hundred different specialty areas, and you begin to see very clearly how to become the hearing professional in that group of preferred providers . There is also significant video of audiologists who are hugely successful physician marketers, again speaking very candidly about how we did it. We use all this material to weave a detailed list of strategies to take the hearing professional from the desire to have physician referrals to the reality of knowing physicians and their staffs, educating them about hearing loss, and presenting themselves effectively as the local provider of choice for hearing healthcare. We basically spell out how to make sure the physicians know them, trust them, and refer their patients to them. It really is a nice program, and we have shown time and time again that it works. Of course, you cannot just enroll in the program and solve the problem. It takes time to learn the materials. The strategies aren't difficult, but they are precise. You really need to follow the program, and you have to follow-up with the physician in a timely and professional manner. Consistency is everything. Once the physician knows you, knows the quality of your work, and knows that his patients like working with you, he/she will continue to refer to you.
AO/Beck: John, what can you tell me about follow-through?
Olive: I guess the most frustrating part of the past 2 years is seeing so many hearing professionals who want all the payoff with none of the work. If I stress one thing effectively in this entire interview, it is that follow-through is the most important element of the entire program. Invest the time and energy to earn a physician's respect and trust and patient referrals and you will have them forever. It is bewildering to see how few enrollees in our program have even that most basic level of commitment. It certainly explains why we have never reached 80% of the people in the world with hearing loss.
There is a one-time enrollment fee of $100 to join our program, but I have to stress that the program is 95% funded by the manufacturers and suppliers in the industry. They have paid for the program for your readers' benefit...for the benefit of every hearing professional in the country. As soon as an enrollee completes the training CD and selects the physician practices to target, we ship a full set of materials and unlimited replacement supplies from that point onward. Of course the crown jewel of the program is the accredited 1-hour CME course for physicians on CD. We provide the CDs and all the accompanying support materials you will ever need to establish referral relationships with physicians in your community.
The rest is just the discipline that is necessary to make the physician contacts. For those who commit themselves to do it, the payoff in terms of new patients and revenue growth is enormous.
AO/Beck: John, what are major points of the program regarding physician relationships?
Olive: There are so many, Doug, but I will address just a few. Just like everything else in life, if you're going to have a successful relationship, you need to establish familiarity. . Even if you have no physicians that refer to you at this point, as you go through your charts, you'll see that some of your patients have the same doctors, and those might be some of the best physicians to target initially , because you are already seeing their patients, and that provides you with a starting point for your discussions. You can't imagine how powerful it is to identify 2 or 3 physicians who are familiar with your work and use them for recommendations to their colleagues. As time goes on, you can add more and more physicians to the recommendation list, and perhaps you can professionally prepare that as a document for your waiting room, or perhaps as a letter of introduction for your meetings with new physicians. One thing that is very important for many of the physicians is patient satisfaction.. They want to see hard data indicating that you are one hundred percent committed to your profession and your patients, and that your patients are highly satisfied with your products and services. Of course it takes time to gather the data, but it is essential if you ever want the physician to view you with the same respect he has for nurses, physical therapists or any other clinical professionals. They all do quality improvement and patient satisfaction work. Our profession complains a lot about being regarded as second class citizens . We have to elevate our standards to be more like our peers in other disciplines. One thing which can be done quickly is to have a quality care statement for your practice and have all of the employees read it, agree to it and sign it. Again, that can be in the package of materials you send to new physicians, and that can also be framed and available for the patients to read in your waiting room. In other words, you cannot just say, I am committed to quality and I'm committed to patient satisfaction. You need something to back that up, or it has little meaning. Importantly, another thing that physicians look for is accessibility. You need to be able to tell the physician that you will see the patient the same day the patient is referred - that's how physicians treat each other, and that's how they expect you to treat them.
AO/Beck: John, what is the easiest way for the readers to get in touch with you?
Olive: Simply go to our website and enroll online. The website can be found at www.betterhearing.org and the details of the program are easily reviewed there.
AO/Beck: John I understand that the program has been very successful over the last few months. Can you give me any idea as to how many people have already signed up?
Olive: From January 14 to May 14, we have had nearly 800 hearing healthcare practitioners enroll in the program, so we're off to a good start. A significant number of those, maybe 60 or 65 percent or more have completed the training module, so we're happy with the preliminary results. But again, the hearing healthcare practitioners must complete the training module before we'll send them the physician CDs and the other marketing materials. . We believe it's important to make sure that everyone does their homework and has the proper training before they start working directly with the physicians, and this program essentially forces that to happen.
AO/Beck: John this is a great program. I want to thank you for developing the program and for organizing the materials. I have seen the entire program and I endorse this as an excellent training and marketing program. I certainly believe this will help the hearing healthcare professional obtain better relationships, and of course more referrals, from primary care physicians. The program makes sense and it really is an exceptional value.
Thanks so much for your time and your efforts.
Olive: Thank you Doug. I appreciate your help in getting the word out and I appreciate the work you and Audiology Online do too.
AO/Beck: Hi John, nice to speak with you again.
Olive: Hi Doug, thanks. It's good to spend time with you again too.
AO/Beck: I know the BHI (Better Hearing Institute) has recently launched it's comprehensive campaign to get more physicians involved with hearing loss and the issues related to hearing loss, and I was hoping you could get us up to speed on these issues please?
Olive: Sure Doug, happy to help. The entire BHI program has really matured nicely over the past year.. Everything the program is today in 2002 is a direct result of the experiences and lessons learned in 2001. We spent the final two months of last year evolving the program to its current format. I can tell you that we studied and learned a lot about how to get the word out regarding hearing loss, to the physicians. You know the statistics are amazing...there are some 28 million people in this country with hearing loss, and only about 5.5 million who have done anything about it. So we have an 80 percent non-penetrated potential market...meaning we have never reached over 80% of the people in this country who could benefit from our services. That is dramatic.BHI's mission is to design ways to reach that vast unserved population. Right now, our singular focus is the family physician. In fact, we've realized that if the family physician doesn't think hearing loss is important, the patient never will.
AO/Beck: I think you're exactly right. In fact, others have also identified physician education as a key element in reaching the majority of hearing impaired individuals in the USA. Part of the problem has been that the physicians have such limited time to spend with their patients, and many of them learned decades ago that sensorineural loss couldn't be helped with amplification - which we now know is incorrect, and in fact, probably more than 90 percent of the patients fit with amplification have sensorineural, or nerve loss.
Olive: That's right. We've heard from many patients that they were told by their physician that there was nothing that could be done about hearing loss, and that hearing aids weren't able to help. Which is of course not true. Truthfully, physicians are not hostile to our message. They are just completely unaware of the prevalence of hearing loss in their patient population and the profoundly negative impact it has when not treated. So, our challenge is how to reach the physicians in the trenches, how do we reach the very busy professionals out there seeing the patients? With 28 million hearing-impaired Americans and over 240,000 primary care physicians, we realized that if we're ever going to impact the industry, we needed to act on a national scale. So we started to work on a program model that was Internet and CD based. We realized that one element that was lacking in 2001 was a training module for physicians...an accredited CME (continuing medical education) course that would give ultimate credibility to our message...something the hearing industry has never had in all its history, because until the year 2000, we never had the bona fide clinical research to support our position that untreated hearing loss is devastating to those who suffer from it and that amplification is highly effective in 90% of all cases. We took all the clinical material from our program and produced an educational CD-ROM for physicians and nurses. The CD has been approved for CME/CEU's for physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. We couldn't be happier with the result.
AO/Beck: John, how do the audiologists and dispensers get this information to the physician? In other words, even though you guys have a wonderful program - and I say that having seen the entire program - how do we go about getting it in the hands of the right people?
Olive: Thank you - great question! We have learned that regardless of how good and competent you are as an audiologist, the physician will not place a patient in your hands until he/she knows and trusts you . So our program is entirely built around using the local hearing professional to deliver the material and the strategies on literally how to get your foot in the door.. Relationship development is as important, if not more important, than the message itself, There is no short cut. Hearing professionals must meet and establish relationships with the physicians and their office staffs, but once that's done, the program provides the tools that will help the physicians understand the issues and the answers related to hearing loss. In fact, you also have the ability to help them solve a problem they all have - which is to find the time to obtain their CMEs! So this program goes a long way towards addressing our problems as professionals, and it helps solves one of their problems too. But make no mistake...one CME credit does not revolutionize an industry. The most important lesson we learned in 2001 is that nothing replaces the personal familiarity and trust that must evolve between a physician and any healthcare professional who sees his patients.
AO/Beck: OK John, can you describe the nitty gritty for me? How does the BHI program work?
Olive: When a hearing healthcare professional joins the program, the first step is to complete the Training Module in the Basics of Physician Marketing. This program is on CD-ROM and requires about 2 hours to finish. We carefully construct our entire platform as to why we focus on primary care physicians...the facts and figures and logic that creates a powerful message to the physician about hearing loss in his patients. We look at the most aggravating and intimidating physician traits, and present specific strategies for capitalizing on their predictable behavior. A major portion of the training module is actual video of primary care physicians explaining exactly what works and what does not work in referral development. You watch live footage of physicians talking very frankly about how they select the clinical professionals they use in a hundred different specialty areas, and you begin to see very clearly how to become the hearing professional in that group of preferred providers . There is also significant video of audiologists who are hugely successful physician marketers, again speaking very candidly about how we did it. We use all this material to weave a detailed list of strategies to take the hearing professional from the desire to have physician referrals to the reality of knowing physicians and their staffs, educating them about hearing loss, and presenting themselves effectively as the local provider of choice for hearing healthcare. We basically spell out how to make sure the physicians know them, trust them, and refer their patients to them. It really is a nice program, and we have shown time and time again that it works. Of course, you cannot just enroll in the program and solve the problem. It takes time to learn the materials. The strategies aren't difficult, but they are precise. You really need to follow the program, and you have to follow-up with the physician in a timely and professional manner. Consistency is everything. Once the physician knows you, knows the quality of your work, and knows that his patients like working with you, he/she will continue to refer to you.
AO/Beck: John, what can you tell me about follow-through?
Olive: I guess the most frustrating part of the past 2 years is seeing so many hearing professionals who want all the payoff with none of the work. If I stress one thing effectively in this entire interview, it is that follow-through is the most important element of the entire program. Invest the time and energy to earn a physician's respect and trust and patient referrals and you will have them forever. It is bewildering to see how few enrollees in our program have even that most basic level of commitment. It certainly explains why we have never reached 80% of the people in the world with hearing loss.
There is a one-time enrollment fee of $100 to join our program, but I have to stress that the program is 95% funded by the manufacturers and suppliers in the industry. They have paid for the program for your readers' benefit...for the benefit of every hearing professional in the country. As soon as an enrollee completes the training CD and selects the physician practices to target, we ship a full set of materials and unlimited replacement supplies from that point onward. Of course the crown jewel of the program is the accredited 1-hour CME course for physicians on CD. We provide the CDs and all the accompanying support materials you will ever need to establish referral relationships with physicians in your community.
The rest is just the discipline that is necessary to make the physician contacts. For those who commit themselves to do it, the payoff in terms of new patients and revenue growth is enormous.
AO/Beck: John, what are major points of the program regarding physician relationships?
Olive: There are so many, Doug, but I will address just a few. Just like everything else in life, if you're going to have a successful relationship, you need to establish familiarity. . Even if you have no physicians that refer to you at this point, as you go through your charts, you'll see that some of your patients have the same doctors, and those might be some of the best physicians to target initially , because you are already seeing their patients, and that provides you with a starting point for your discussions. You can't imagine how powerful it is to identify 2 or 3 physicians who are familiar with your work and use them for recommendations to their colleagues. As time goes on, you can add more and more physicians to the recommendation list, and perhaps you can professionally prepare that as a document for your waiting room, or perhaps as a letter of introduction for your meetings with new physicians. One thing that is very important for many of the physicians is patient satisfaction.. They want to see hard data indicating that you are one hundred percent committed to your profession and your patients, and that your patients are highly satisfied with your products and services. Of course it takes time to gather the data, but it is essential if you ever want the physician to view you with the same respect he has for nurses, physical therapists or any other clinical professionals. They all do quality improvement and patient satisfaction work. Our profession complains a lot about being regarded as second class citizens . We have to elevate our standards to be more like our peers in other disciplines. One thing which can be done quickly is to have a quality care statement for your practice and have all of the employees read it, agree to it and sign it. Again, that can be in the package of materials you send to new physicians, and that can also be framed and available for the patients to read in your waiting room. In other words, you cannot just say, I am committed to quality and I'm committed to patient satisfaction. You need something to back that up, or it has little meaning. Importantly, another thing that physicians look for is accessibility. You need to be able to tell the physician that you will see the patient the same day the patient is referred - that's how physicians treat each other, and that's how they expect you to treat them.
AO/Beck: John, what is the easiest way for the readers to get in touch with you?
Olive: Simply go to our website and enroll online. The website can be found at www.betterhearing.org and the details of the program are easily reviewed there.
AO/Beck: John I understand that the program has been very successful over the last few months. Can you give me any idea as to how many people have already signed up?
Olive: From January 14 to May 14, we have had nearly 800 hearing healthcare practitioners enroll in the program, so we're off to a good start. A significant number of those, maybe 60 or 65 percent or more have completed the training module, so we're happy with the preliminary results. But again, the hearing healthcare practitioners must complete the training module before we'll send them the physician CDs and the other marketing materials. . We believe it's important to make sure that everyone does their homework and has the proper training before they start working directly with the physicians, and this program essentially forces that to happen.
AO/Beck: John this is a great program. I want to thank you for developing the program and for organizing the materials. I have seen the entire program and I endorse this as an excellent training and marketing program. I certainly believe this will help the hearing healthcare professional obtain better relationships, and of course more referrals, from primary care physicians. The program makes sense and it really is an exceptional value.
Thanks so much for your time and your efforts.
Olive: Thank you Doug. I appreciate your help in getting the word out and I appreciate the work you and Audiology Online do too.
