Assessments drive marketing moves for imaging centers

Oct 12, 2003

TAMPA, FL - Large corporations typically allocate more than 20% of annual budget expenditures on marketing their products and services. Imaging centers in the U.S. generally do not have the resources to commit such a high percentage of gross revenue on marketing. However, they still need to satisfy customer needs at the right price, the right place, and the right time.

"With the right assessment of your internal systems and external market, you can have the data to make knowledgeable decisions on where to focus your marketing budget," said Lori Rumreich of the department of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

Rumreich offered her insights on strategic marketing for imaging centers to attendees of the American Healthcare Radiology Administrators (AHRA) Imaging Center Administrators Conference on Friday.

"Marketing is about customer relationships. You need to know how to deliver what each customer wants, and then try to exceed their expectations. It’s about building customer loyalty, both for retention of existing business and for referral of new business," she said.

To effectively deliver marketing muscle to the areas with the most potential to deliver a return on investment, Rumreich advocates conducting a dual-pronged assessment consisting of a situation analysis and an opportunity analysis.

Situation analysis

A situation analysis starts with a practice asking itself a series of questions that help define the business. According to Rumreich, these are:

What are our available markets and in which do we compete?
Who are our customers today and what are their origins?
Who are our target or prospective customers (patients and physicians) and in what markets? Why?
Where do we have differentiating power and why?
What procedures or businesses do we want to avoid?
Who is our competition?

Answering these questions requires diligent research, both internally and externally to the imaging center. On the internal level, systems such as a RIS can be examined for CPT analysis, referral physician analysis, and payor contract analysis.

"When conducting an internal analysis of referring physicians, it’s important not only to define who is ordering the most services from your center in terms of charges, but also the ratio of collections in proportion to those charges," she noted.

External sources of market data can be purchased from demographic analysis firms specifically for a center’s catchment area. In addition, an imaging center’s current employees are often an untapped resource for obtaining market information.

"Most of your employees came from other jobs," she observed. "As long as they’re not disclosing proprietary information, you can find out a great deal about their previous practices by simply asking them about their experiences."

Opportunity analysis

An opportunity analysis consists of examining three areas of segmentation, according to Rumreich. These are value analysis, specialty analysis, and a market opportunity analysis.

A value analysis stratifies a center’s business into the three groups that provide income. These are referring physicians who are in the top 10% of contributors to a center’s revenues, the next group accounts for next 20% of contributions to the bottom line, and the final group makes up the remaining 70%.

"Finding your high-value customers allows you to concentrate your marketing resources on building their loyalty to your business," Rumreich said.

A specialty analysis breaks down the number of referrals and the dollar value of those referrals by the type of practice that places the orders. This data permits a center to develop its marketing collateral in a targeted, focused manner that meets the needs of its high-value specialties.

A market opportunity analysis looks at the distribution of imaging procedures across the market and where they are being performed. This data permits a center to examine what is being left on the table in terms of potential revenue from its referring physicians, and what procedures are being served by competitors in the marketplace.

Properly conducted, an assessment of situations and opportunities enables an imaging center to identify its high-value customers, know where the high-value market opportunities are, and know what its competition is doing in the marketplace, Rumreich said.

"The most important information you can derive from an assessment is to find your high-value customers, keep and/or grow them to their full potential, seek out new high-value customers, and minimize the attention that is focused on your low-value customers," she said.

By Jonathan S. Batchelor
AuntMinnie.com staff writer
October 12, 2003

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