Market Assessment for Medical Practice Competition

For healthcare organizations, a competitive analysis is a means to assess who your competitors are, what value they provide, understanding their (and your) strengths and weaknesses, and where your practice fits in. A good competitive analysis is a scouting report of the actual market terrain that your practice must navigate in order to be successful. While analyzing the competition is an essential component of your strategy, most medical practices don’t conduct this type of analysis systematically enough. However, a thorough competitive analysis is indispensable.

• First, begin by compiling a list of your practice’s competitors. Most of the time, such a list is comprised of who your practice considers to be its chief competitors. However, there may be other healthcare organizations that indirectly compete with yours, perhaps ones outside of your catchment area that offer services such as telemedicine or niche treatment modalities that are aiming for the same patients. You will also want to include information on healthcare entities that may be entering your market in the coming year. Once you have compiled the list, you can highlight those practices that will be the greatest challenge.

• Second, analyze the competition’s services in terms of features, value, and target patients. How do they market them? How do patients see your competition? How do referring physicians view your competition? Take an honest look at their offerings. Is your quality commensurate? Do you have similar offerings? What is the unique value you provide that competitors don’t or can’t? Emphasize these benefits in your marketing.

• Third, compile a list of competitor strengths and weaknesses and remember to be objective. You’ll do your practice no good if you allow bias toward your own physicians, staff, and services to cloud your judgment. Try to see the competition’s practice as though you were them. What makes their practice so great? If they are growing rapidly, what is it about their practice that’s promoting that growth?

• Fourth, observe how your competitors market themselves through advertising, collateral material, and perhaps the use of physician liaisons. You will have to go to many different sources to get a complete picture. It takes practice and a little shrewdness on your part to piece together a complete picture of strategies and objectives, so the use of a qualified consultant may be to your benefit. Focus on the facts, be persistent, and trust your intuition to help you.

• Fifth, what are the market demographics for your practice like now? Is it growing? If so, then there are likely quite a few patients left to go around. If on the other hand the market is flat, then the competition for patients is likely to be fierce. Your practice will find itself scrambling to win market share. The outlook portion of your analysis may seem like forecasting, but it’s really a measure of trends. By the time you’ve done most of your research, you’ll have enough information to determine what the outlook really is.

By evaluating yourself against your competition, you’ll likely find new ideas for your practice. While compiling a competitive analysis is an interesting piece of work, it can indeed be challenging. Consequently, you may want to seek the help of a healthcare consultant to guide you through this process. You’ll learn a lot about your market and in the process become a more valuable resource for your patients and referring physicians.

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Contact ABISA for healthcare consultancy support or speaking engagements.

Outlook on Digital Health Data

Digital health tools can improve consumers’ direct visibility into and control over their vital health metrics and ongoing healthcare needs.  Millions of Americans report that smartphones and apps have changed the way they manage their health and wellness.  As Americans begin to use wearable devices to track and collect their personal health data, we will see more of a willingness to share that data with healthcare providers and intermediaries.  Consequently patients’ expectations for care and care delivery are changing, and will force the healthcare industry to change.  Providers, however, are having to tackle long-standing interoperability and data access challenges.  So, while many would agree that the future of digital health data is bright, there’s much work to be done.

The 2015 Digital Impact Survey surveyed 1,000 smartphone owners over the age of 18 and found a 70% increase (over its 2013 survey) in adoption of smartphone and apps to manage health and wellness.  Meanwhile another report has been published which analyzes consumer attitudes and preferences about making care choices and decisions and provides guidance to healthcare stakeholders regarding how to communicate and engage with consumers for self-care and support.  The report shows the increased adoption of connected health devices which includes items such as blood pressure meters, connected treadmills, digital fitness trackers, and networked weight scales.  Now, a research study conducted in the fourth quarter of 2016 reported results of its findings of patient evaluations on of technology.  The study polled over 12,000 adult patients and here is just a snapshot of some of the findings:

96% of respondents said they left their physician office visit with poorly communicated or miscommunicated instructions on patient portal use.

94% of patients with fitness trackers reported that their physician informed them the practice had no capability or interest in coordinating their outcomes currently via their electronic health record (EHR).

93% expressed concerns over the security of their personal financial information being used by healthcare providers; 70% of Americans reportedly distrust health technology.

91% of respondents noted feeling slighted by their providers who would not accommodate their personal data and believe their physician practice’s EHR should store any health-related data they request.

87% of patients are unwilling to comprehensively divulge all of their medical information.

84% of patients said their trust in their provider is influenced by how the provider used health technology; 69% of patients stated they believe their current primary care physician does not demonstrate enough technology prowess for them to trust divulging all their personal information.

On the physician side of things, the study states that 94% of physicians find the volume of digital health data to be overwhelming, redundant, and unlikely to make a clinical difference.  Additionally, 85% of physicians reported that the addition of EHRs has made patient care too impersonal.

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Contact ABISA for healthcare consultancy support or speaking engagements.

Physician Employment ≠ Quality of Care

As previously mentioned regarding physician practice acquisitions, many hospitals around the country have sought in recent years to increase their number of employed physicians.  Their goal of doing so is to be better prepared with healthcare reform that reimburses based on quality of care, outcomes and cost control rather than the traditional fee-for-service system.  The belief by many hospitals has been that employment of physicians will lead to greater care coordination, more closely aligned incentives, and ultimately better patient care.  However, a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine demonstrates that “no association was found between switching to an employment model and improvement in any of 4 primary composite quality metrics.”  Specifically, there were no resultant changes in mortality rates, 30-day readmissions, length of stay or patient satisfaction rates.  Researchers noted:

“Although some of these improvements certainly are taking place as hospitals increasingly employ physicians, on the basis of the hospital performance metrics we examined, we found no national-level evidence that these changes have translated into better patient care.”

In the study, 803 acute care hospitals in the U.S. that switched to an employee relationship with their physicians were compared with 2,085 hospitals that maintained unaffiliated or contractual relationships with their physicians.  The researchers’ summed up their study by stating:

“During the past decade, hospitals have increasingly become employers of physicians. The study’s findings suggest that physician employment alone probably is not a sufficient tool for improving hospital care.”

Consequently, the study recommends hospitals should instead focus on ways to boost clinical integration and improve patient care instead of hoping those goals will be accomplished solely by employing more physicians.  The study that was recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine can be found here.

On a related noted, other data proving that financial integration between physicians and hospitals has been associated with higher commercial prices and spending for outpatient care, can be found in my Consolidation ≠ Efficiency article.

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Contact ABISA for healthcare consultancy support or speaking engagements.

Hacking Healthcare

Many businesses (including healthcare organizations) go through great lengths to secure consumer (patient) data.  And while that effort is noble and important, we should not go around with rose colored glasses believing that the efforts are failsafe.  Indeed, much has been written about data breaches over the past couple of years as this profitable trend of theft increases.  The healthcare industry is no stranger to this; in fact it has been reported that a patient’s healthcare data is worth at least twice as much on the black market as regular consumer data.

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) recently released a report showing that healthcare is an ideal target for hackers.  The report notes that healthcare organizations have actually been quite lucky (thus far) that more serious attacks haven’t disrupted patient care or placed patients at risk for harm.  As with other industries, connected devices are becoming more and more prevalent (e.g. pacemakers, treatment delivery software, MRIs, etc.).  And this trend continues to consumer items such as blood pressure meters, connected treadmills, digital fitness trackers, and networked weight scales.  The Director of Health and Mobile Product Research at Parks Associates, Henry Wang, commented on the growing demand from Baby Boomers:

 “These consumers face a variety of health and mobility challenges, so there is tremendous potential for accelerated adoption, improved outcomes, and ultimately significant cost savings for both companies and consumers. Interoperability and standards compliance will be the primary challenges as companies look to expand the connected health market and engage this demographic.”

The ICIT report recommends healthcare organizations:

• consider the long-term consequences of existing cybersecurity tactics
• improve organizational security controls
• develop actionable incident response plans to prepare for distributed denial of service attacks.

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Contact ABISA for healthcare consultancy support or speaking engagements.

State of the U.S. Healthcare Industry

Healthcare leaders in the U.S. are preparing for more changes to the industry in 2017.  The pace of change in healthcare is extremely rapid as the pressure continues to mount on physician shortage issues, quality focus, cost containment, payment reform, etc.  Managed Healthcare Executive recently released its annual State of the Industry Survey results which reveal the top 2017 challenges, priorities, initiatives, and opportunities for the U.S. healthcare industry.  Here are a few highlights:

Biggest Challenge:  36% of respondents stated the biggest challenge facing healthcare organizations is complying with new government requirements and mandates; 25% stated it was implementing value-based reimbursement; 19% stated it was technology acquisitions/investments/implementations.

Revenue Predictions:  When asked to forecast 2017 revenues compared to 2016, 39% predicted it will be about the same; 35% predicted 2017 will be better; 26% predicted 2017 will be worse.

Expanding/Securing Market Share:  52% of those surveyed stated they are expanding customer improvement initiatives in order to expand and secure market share; 43% are focused on cost/quality transparency; 42% claimed to be focusing on increasing consumer outreach.

Top Disease States:  When asked to select the top three therapeutic categories and/or disease states their organization will be focused on in 2017, diabetes garnered 83%, cardiovascular 71%, obesity 49%, cancer 34%, and respiratory illness garnered 32%.

Value-Based Care:  46% of respondents stated their organization has started a few initiatives toward value-based care; 22% stated they have not yet started; 20% stated they have started many initiatives.

Value-Based Reimbursement:  37% of respondents claimed to be participating in commercial payer initiatives for value-based reimbursement; 35% claimed to be participating in a CMS/CMMI initiative; 33% stated they are not yet participating in any value-based reimbursement initiatives.

Big Data:  39% of those surveyed stated their organization uses big data “well” to improve healthcare quality and reduce healthcare costs; 34% stated they used it “not very well”.

Consumer Engagement:  36% of respondents believe that the most effective way to increase consumer engagement in managing their own health is through improved/more patient education; 29% believe it is accomplished through incentives/wellness programs.

More results from the State of the Industry survey can be found here.

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Contact ABISA for healthcare consultancy support or speaking engagements.