Merrily Orsini Speaks

,

One Thing is for Certain: CHANGE! That’s How You Spell “The Future” in Home Health

New England Home Healthcare ConsortiumBy 2029 (the next 15 years), there will be 71 million baby boomers over age 65, an increase of around 73% from today’s numbers. More and more physicians and hospitals are awakening to the fact that, not only do patients want their healthcare in the home, but home care is significantly less costly than hospital care and oftentimes care provided by a skilled nursing facility.

One study conducted by the Milken Institute projects a 42 percent increase in cases of the seven major chronic diseases (cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, pulmonary conditions, and mental disorders) by 2023. The time to discuss the future of home health care is now.

Please join me at this year’s New England Home Healthcare Consortium in Uncasville, CT where you’ll learn how to nurture, market, and grow your home care agency, while facing the challenges and changes of our industry.

My session, The Future of Home Health, will take place on Monday, November 10th at 11 a.m. This session will be a visionary overview of the dynamic forces that are changing the healthcare landscape in the United States, from the perspective of the home health industry. The Future of Home Health is an ongoing project sanctioned by the Alliance for Home Health Quality and Innovation of Washington, DC, and involves the National Research Council, Institute of Medicine, and thought leaders nationwide. AXXESS is a primary sponsor of this incredibly important project, and some insights from the recent 2-day workshop held in DC will be reported. The presentation will focus on technology developments expected to have a direct impact on home healthcare services, policy changes needed to accomplish care for the growing number of seniors in our country, and some results from the innovation projects that are now in their 3rd year.

Please join me for this unique opportunity to stay informed and current in an evolving, dynamic industry.

Click here to learn more about the New England Home Healthcare Consortium and to register.

,

Traveling to Texas to Talk About Ingredients for Success

Texas Home Care Association Annual MeetingWell, Howdy, Partners in Home Care! I am beyond delighted to announce that I have been asked to present two educational sessions for the 45th Annual Meeting of the Texas Association for Home Care and Hospice (TAHC&H) that will take place next month in San Antonio. The theme for this year’s meeting and conference is “Home Care and Hospice: Ingredients for Success.” (Notice those hot peppers on the meeting graphic? Those undoubtedly represent the passion it takes to run a successful aging care services business.) On Wednesday, August 20th, I will be speaking about two topics that are near and dear to my heart and absolutely essential ingredients for any aging care services business to succeed in today’s challenging new marketplace. The session descriptions are listed below:

Marketing Aging Care in this Mobile Device Era

Remember when the best we had in our lead generation tool box was the  Yellow Pages? Those days are LONG gone. If potential customers can’t find your business in an Internet search, chances are good they won’t find you at all. Searching the Internet is the number one way aging services providers get found today. What does all of this mean? It means your company needs to have a strategic plan for making sure your website gets found when customers are searching. This presentation will focus on the essentials of digital marketing strategy, including, but not limited to search engine optimization (SEO), blogging and authorship, social media, email marketing, and creating systems that reach out to both the consumer and referral partners in real time and on the go. Mobile devices have created even a more important role for the agency website: calls to action and inquiry that funnel the interested person into the site for more action steps. Bonus? Physicians are adapting mobile devices at an even greater rate than other professionals!

Make It Meaningful: Mutual and Active Engagement in Care

As aging care providers in pursuit of providing the best “care” we often overlook providing active engagement with clients. In so doing, we sacrifice the greatest care need of all – having meaning in one’s life. Today there are a host of tools, kits, resources, and technologies that help caregivers make meaningful use of time with clients. Putting these into action can help create better client and family satisfaction, as seen in this video from the Music and Memory organization’s Alive Inside documentary, premiering this month. These tactics also can be used in marketing, since a top concern of adult children is that caregivers will spend time watching TV or otherwise disregarding their parent when not performing necessary tasks. You can learn to gauge client special interests, match activities to interests, and create activities designed to actively engage clients in meaningful ways. A variety of conventional, innovative, and technological engagement tools will be discussed.
In any aging care business, the key ingredients for success are marketing your services through the right channels to reach the right audiences, and delivering the best quality services to your clients so that they are well-served, satisfied, and say wonderful things about your company to others. It will be invigorating to speak about aging care service from both the marketing and operational perspectives while in Texas next month. I can’t wait!

To reach out to me about marketing your aging care services business, or if yours is a business that interacts with the aging care services industry and you’d like some industry insider advice on marketing, email me or call 1-800-370-6580.

, ,

Attracting Longer Term Higher Paying Clients

Focus on Profitability is Topic for Webinar January 16, 2014
corecubed and HCAOA webinar Jan 16, 2014

Profitability is the key to success for any business, and sometimes higher revenue or more billable hours does not translate into profitability. In home care, for instance, if increased billable hours are short term with high staff turnover, the hours become not profitable. One strategy for success in home care is to reach for the higher level clientele.

Join Marissa Snook, MOST Program Administrator and me in a Home Care Association of America sponsored webinar today as we discuss how providing a high quality service, and marketing it as such, allows the capacity to really focus on the longer term, higher paying clients that need a lot of support to stay at home from frailty to the grave.

You will find out what it takes to actually focus on quality and the provision of a higher level of service, and how to market that. In order to reach the higher level of clientele, agencies must position themselves as experts in the field, and have every marketing communication emanate quality.

In today’s webinar you will learn the correlations between offering a higher level of service and:

a) how your agency is branded
b) how and what you use for education for referral sources and families
c) how your agency is positioned
d) how your agency goes to market.

The strategy behind this specific home care model benefits both the agency, because it’s more profitable, and also the clientele, because the agency can better support them in their desire to remain at home.

There is still time to register for today’s corecubed and HCAOA webinar at 3 PM Eastern time. Won’t you join us?

 

,

Branding and Strategy and Marketing in Home Care

Marketing home care involves branding
Branding is different for home care

Yesterday I spent 4 hours presenting an in-depth marketing workshop for the Illinois HomeCare & Hospice Council with a very diverse group of agencies from private duty to county health departments, with some hospital based agencies and start-ups thrown in.  The focus of the workshop was a focus on branding and strategy as basics for marketing.

Problem #1: “Marketing” in home care means “sales”. “Marketing home care” or “home care marketers” simply means selling home care or persons who are employed to sell home care.

Problem #2: Targets vary widely depending on the service. Medicare certified agencies get referrals from hospital discharge planners, physicians and skilled nursing or rehab facilities. Medicaid home care referrals come from either a managed care company, a AAA, or a designated assessor who assigns the time allotted to the agency. Private duty home care referrals come from anyone, anywhere who has a care need or knows someone with a care need, and someone, somewhere has the money and is willing to pay for that care.

Solution #1: Education on marketing strategy, differentiation, positioning, targets and messages using LOTS of examples from other industries. Branding and what it means to home care specifically, which is VERY different from other products or services.

Solution #2: Understanding WHO is the target is the key to creating good messages and visuals to support those messages.

It is easy for me to say that understanding marketing for home care is easy. That ease of understanding comes from literally hundreds of agencies working with corecubed to learn how to go to market strategically. However, it really IS easy, but it does take an open mind and a willingness to change how things are done.

After all, isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing and expecting different results?

, , ,

Keeping Your Eye on the Goal

Business is a team sport. All need to keep an eye on the goal, and work together to accomplish that goal. Marketing is really an essential ingredient in establishing and growing a successful business. And, although seemingly complicated, it really boils down to the basics:

  1. What is it we wish to accomplish? Do we want more sales in a specific area? Do we want more profitability from current sales? Do we want to offer new products or services?
  2. What is the story we want to tell in order to accomplish our goal?
  3. Who, specifically,  needs to hear it?
  4. How will they best be reached? Do they use the Internet? Do they have information filtered through another? Will they open direct mail? Are they inclined to read trade or news articles? Will they open email? Will they be searching for solutions or is your service an unknown to them?
  5. How do we know if we are successful? Based on what we are trying to accomplish, what do we measure to know if we are making inroads?

Marketing, when done strategically, works. It is part and parcel of running a business, whether selling products or services. However, setting the strategy, implementing it, measuring for results is, by necessity, a priority if success (however you determine it) is to be achieved.

In the aging care services market, there is a lot of buzz and noise now, as many are looking at the demographics and starting to enter this market segment. It really is a segment that is different than selling other products and services. Want to hear more and attend a great educational event? The Illinois Home Care and Hospice Council is holding a workshop on marketing for the industry on August 22nd in Springfield. The featured speaker? Merrily Orsini!

‹ 1 2 3 4 5 ›»