Overview
Here are some common objections you might hear from Hospital Executives, along with some possible responses.
The data isn't recent enough.
- All claims-based data sets are on a lag; it's never real-time. The claims submission and adjudication process can take several weeks, sometimes months. The lag ensures you are looking at data that is settled, not data that is still being processed.
- CMS releases claims data from Medicare for inpatient and outpatient on a 6 month lag, and claims data for offices on an 18 month lag.
- This objection is a good conversation starter to discuss the latest year's numbers. From there you can begin to explore the change year over year. Investigate the Facility Dossier to direct the conversation toward year over year change in the past. Use the DRGs tab to filter for the overall volume of procedures of interest for various years.
The data isn't accurate.
- Data in Carevoyance is based on actual claims submitted for reimbursement; there is no extrapolation involved.
We don't have the money for your piece of equipment.
- Carevoyance reports can be leveraged to tell a story of how the facility stacks up against local competitors, and where they can make future improvements.
- The facility may be losing out on revenue potential revealed by the Patient Treatment Destinations, Hospital Service Area, and Case Loss portlets. With this information, you can start to emphasize the ROI potential your product will bring.
- The Case Loss portlet can be used to highlight the ROI potential of maximizing the conversion of patients who visit the facility and ultimately select to receive a procedure of interest at that facility.
I don't see ROI-potential.
There are several strategies to build toward an ROI for your technology at any given facility.
1. Find new patients.
- Gain net new patients based on greater capture from competitive geographies along with capturing more patients in their own backyard.
- Analyze the Hospital Service Area portlet to understand which geographies are currently most important to the facility. In addition, gain an appreciation for whether those geographies represent high or low patient volumes, whether those geographies are in growth or decline, and finally how competitive those geographies are. Perhaps the hospital should be targeting larger geographies or less competitive ones.
- Also analyze the Patient Treatment Destinations portlet to understand whether patients originating in the focal facility's home county stay in the county or if they elect to travel outside the county for a procedure of interest. Identify other counties, beyond their home county, where the facility has market share but perhaps could capture even more patients.
2. Keep existing patients.
- Analyze whether patients who receive care at the focal facility at some point in the year prior to the procedure of interest stay loyal or go elsewhere. The Case Loss portlet tells you the financial value of patients who decide to go elsewhere for the procedure(s) of interest.
- You can underscore that the financials calculated in the Case Loss portlet represent a conservative estimate of lost revenue, given that it's based on Medicare data only. If your piece of equipment would lead even a third of these patients to choose the focal facility for their care, the investment would pay for itself in just a few years.
3. Increase physician loyalty.
- Are the focal facility's top surgeons loyal to the facility or are they splitting their procedures of interest at other facilities?
- Use the Physician Loyalty portlet to understand where physicians are performing the procedures of interest. They may be splitting their time between affiliated facilities OR they may be taking certain cases to a competitor of the facility.
We're already doing great in this area.
- The Procedure Summary and Market Share portlets both give you a look into how a particular facility stacks up compared to their local competition in capturing patients getting procedures of interest. You can use these portlets to see not only the whole bundle of procedures of interest but also a breakdown of the share by individual procedure. As such, you may find that a facility that dominates overall may still have room for improvement in capturing a subset of the available relevant patients.
- You can use the Hospital Service Area and Patient Treatment Destinations portlets to highlight which geographies a facility is drawing patients from both in terms of overall Medicare treatments and treatments specific to the code set you used to run the report. Look for competitive zip codes and counties where the facility is drawing patients but not leading in order to emphasize the potential to do better in terms of patient capture.
Your medical technology is too expensive.
- Use the aforementioned portlets: Case Loss, Patient Treatment Destinations, Hospital Service Area, Procedure Summary, and Market Share, to explain where the money is going to come from in concrete terms.
- Emphasize specific strategies that can be deployed to capture more patients, retain existing ones, and build even stronger ties with both the facility's key surgeons and community physicians.
I need help with X, not with Y.
- If an executive claims that Case Loss is not actually an issue, you have the answer in your report. If they say that patient capture or market share is not an issue, verify it.
- Some Sales Executives bring the PDF of the Carevoyance Sales report into the meeting with them. Others elect to take screenshots of the most applicable sections and integrate those "snagged" images directly into their PowerPoint decks.
- Either way, we've found that most hospital administrators crave deep analytics into both their facilities and their local markets that they can't always access elsewhere.