Tools for Marketing to Healthcare Providers

These days, healthcare providers are inundated with marketing messages from all sorts of vendors—from EMR companies, to medical device manufacturers, to basic medical supplies, to physician enablement platforms and health plans seeking to expand their provider networks. With so much competition vying for their attention, getting a message heard is becoming increasingly difficult. But by understanding the nuances of targeting healthcare professionals and leveraging specific strategies designed to appeal to different specialties across the board, you can successfully navigate even the choppiest of marketing waters. In an earlier post, we discussed best practices for reaching this holy grail audience and arming yourself with a strategy that will help cut through digital clutter — all while respecting the tightening time constraints in the ever-evolving space occupied by doctors, allied health professionals, and administrators. There's some good marketing moxie in that post.

A Plug for Platinum

We'll focus here on CarePrecise Platinum, the most popular healthcare marketing database package from CarePrecise, and, arguably the most powerful and affordable available anywhere. It offers more than 7.4 million up-to-date records of U.S. healthcare professionals and organizations, including contact details, searchable specialty location information, used by hundreds of companies to establish tightly-defined target segments within the provider universe, plus software for easily compiling highly specific target lists. Building these lists is one of the earliest steps in organizing a successful campaign. With Platinum's sophisticated but simple search capabilities, users can easily identify the likeliest prospects among any number of specialties, anywhere in the U.S., using Zip Codes or the powerful geographic radius search tool. From there, users create custom audiences segmented them according to their specific criteria, and then export lists for every segment in formats compatible with every external software, from sophisticated CRM platforms, to the most basic mailing and telemarketing services. Platinum even offers the ability to automatically proper-case names and addresses for the most professional presentation; SharpMail is our exclusive tool for intelligent generation of correct salutations and full names with credentials, specific to the healthcare field.

Video: Introduction to CP ListMaker, the targeting software in CarePrecise Platinum

Because email addresses are costly to obtain, it makes sense to trim the target list to a cost-effective number. CarePrecise can match email addresses to prospects' NPI numbers; Platinum has the ability to export a target file for sending to CarePrecise for email matching. More on that in a moment.

A healthcare marketing strategy needs to be tailored for specific targets' attributes — not just a one-size-fits-all approach that may have worked in other industries. There are 869 different descriptions of healthcare providers in the industry's standard Provider Taxonomy Codes. Among these are 228 distinct specialties for physicians. It's important to keep in mind that there are 58 specialties for physician assistants — advanced practice clinicians who are providing more and more patient contact, prescriptions, and orders for treatment, and becoming decision-makers and excellent contacts for many kinds of marketing campaigns. All of these specialties are linked to their practitioners in CarePrecise Platinum, as are other criteria, including geographic location by state, county, city, and Zip Code.

Platinum's data is sourced from millions of Medicare claims every month, the PECOS database, and other huge data stores maintained and updated regularly by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CarePrecise is among the most respected distributors of healthcare provider data used in marketing, and CarePrecise Platinum is the most powerful, user-friendly, and affordable software and data available for creating campaign segmentation in U.S. healthcare. As of this writing, Platinum and its 7.4 million healthcare provider records and targeting software — the most used U.S. healthcare provider data tool — is priced $874 for a single download, fully functional, with no expiration date. It isn't a "trial edition," it's the real thing, despite its surprisingly low cost.

Fresh Data

CarePrecise Platinum's underlying provider data is updated every month. With a subscription to the updates, users receive a download link either quarterly or monthly with a simple drop-in data update to the most recently added new records, retired records, and changes to contact information, licenses, and all the rest of the included data.

Healthcare Provider Email Addresses

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels, especially when accompanied by good business intelligence on the contacts. As mentioned earlier, CarePrecise Platinum can help to focus email campaigns on precisely the email addresses needed for the campaign, without buying emails for thousands or hundreds of thousands of clinicians that just don't match the the target profile. After identifying prospects using Platinum's criteria options, one button click creates a file that the user can send to CarePrecise for a count and quote on the available email addresses. CP Preferred Email™ is a closely curated universe of millions of healthcare providers' direct email addresses. The quote returned to the user includes details on multiple pricing options, and a link to place the order. Email addresses can be pulled right into Platinum, where the user can create precisely the file that fits the campaign, choosing which columns to include from the vast number of data points in CarePrecise Platinum.

CarePrecise offers a 95% email deliverability guarantee — the best in the industry. This means that for any invalid email addresses over 5% of the purchase, CarePrecise will refund in cash, or give credit towards a future email purchase at double the number.

As an example of physician email coverage, the CarePrecise can match verified CP Preferred Email addresses to an average of 75% of physicians. These doctors' email addresses are sourced from medical journals, societies, and conferences, among other high-quality resources, and all are permissioned for use. Also available are dentist email addresses, physician assistant email, nurse practitioner and RN email, pharmacist email, and many more healthcare email categories. CarePrecise audits email addresses every few weeks, and offers only those that pass verification testing. CP Preferred Email is the result of an exclusive auditing methodology that involves more than just ping testing. It includes ingestion of bounce reports from selected clients' campaigns, as well as the email campaigns of our customers who submit their reports for guaranteed refund or credit. This email quality control is the most rigorous in the healthcare space, and the only one of its kind.

A well-executed physician email marketing campaign can be an incredibly effective tool for engaging customers and driving conversions. The CarePrecise Platinum platform, coupled with CP Preferred Email, can build the kind of relationship with physicians and allied healthcare professionals that yield profitable results over the long term. To take these relationships a step further, Platinum includes primary and alternative phone numbers, as well as primary and secondary practice locations. For rounding out contact information even further, CarePrecise offers ScribeFax — the most complete and reliable fax number database for prescribing clinicians. An earlier post describes how ScribeFax is used.

More on CarePrecise healthcare provider marketing tools...

Why Do Biologics Have Such Funny Names?

If you still watch commercial television, chances are you've been lambasted with appeals to ask your doctor to prescribe you one of the new biologics coming out. The big print will feature the brand name, which is then repeated many times throughout the narrative. But the small print will give the generic name, which always seems to sound like a certain Phil Collins song.

Every year seems to bring a new parade of miracle cures, and every year the price of miracles seems to go up. I've started to refer to this trend as "Ransom-Level Pricing," because, at least in the US, the wonder drug revenue formula seems to be based on YMOYL.

I fully expect the next big med to be named after an actual rock and roll band.

What's the Rx Industry Expert Gab for 2023?

And, indeed, there is a site that blabs about all the money expected to be spent on the lab-tested snake oil in this year's pipeline. Or, if you'd rather limit your reading to a Fierce little summary, you could read an article about the drugs that will try to nab our hearts.

Or stab our kidneys. 

Or clear our minds, whatever.

But before you do even that, you might want to check out this fab decoder ring, which explains what all the suffix is about.

It's a -Mab -Mab -Mab -Mab World

Maybe the well-pharma wagon bringing just the medicine you need is coming down the street, right into your town, bearing a big shiny IV. You might even be one of the first to sign up for a jab!

 [And now, a word from our Sponsor: If you want to reach those doctors directly, check out the CarePrecise Enhanced Prescribing Clinician Fax Database™. Tell them Marty sent you.]

#aducanumab #donanemab #epcoritamab #lecanemab #mirikizumab

How to Save Money on Healthcare Provider Data

It might seem like this is a shameless, self-serving promo for CarePrecise provider data packages. Unsurprisingly, our name does come up a lot when companies stagger away in shock from the prices our competitors charge. But that's not what this post is about. We're going to talk about (mostly) free data.

Hopefully this post will help you find provider data that's available for free from the U.S. government. Using free data you can boost the information value in any provider contact list. If you're working with a helpful data vendor, chances are they'll help you find where you can download particular kinds of data you're looking for. For instance, we have a lot of customers who use our basic hospital database who need additional components that we don't package with the product, but we know where to find them and we're glad to share our knowledge. 

Of course, we could pull all of that data into our hospital dataset, but there's SO much out there, and if we did that the product would be very expensive indeed. That database sells for $939 but would be a couple of orders of magnitude pricier with all of just the 70 U.S. hospital data files listed in just one spot on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website.

So, instead of trying to pack everything in, we bring together the hard-to-find/basic-necessity data, and assist customers in finding additional information specific to their particular need. Here are some of our more common recommendations.

When on the hunt for data gold, it can be painfully difficult to locate that needle in the haystack. The screenshot shows the count of the results of a search on the federal data website, data.gov, for "healthcare provider data." 127,500 datasets would be a daunting place to start digging. It's like, "Go get the gold! It's somewhere in that there mountain." Fortunately, we have had some experience with healthcare data excavation, and can often point our customers to pay dirt.

If you have talented data people, a good starting place is the NPPES dataset (National Plan and Provider Enumeration System), which contains about 7.4 million NPI records for individuals and organizations. The download file is much to large to use in ordinary office software, so your team will have to cut it into pieces. Or you can get the full NPPES already processed into a form to be used with Microsoft Office programs from CarePrecise. The CarePrecise product also contains additional data, such as sanctions, and whether or not a practitioner is enrolled to bill Medicare.

Once you have basic data on the providers, you'll want to add linkages between the clinicians and their practice groups and hospital affiliations. You can download the free Physician Compare database and have your tech team work its magic here, too, to make it useable on ordinary office computers. This used to be easier back when CMS included hospital information in the database, but now just to get all the hospital names and basic info you have to ingest ten additional datasets. The list is too big to include here, but highlights include the Licensed and Certified Healthcare Facility Listing where you'll find hospitals' CCN numbers matched to their names and addresses, and Medicare Inpatient Hospitals where you'll find some payment information. You'll want to head on back to CMS to pick up outpatient hospital info. These are just a few of the dozens of datasets we ingest on an ongoing basis to produce our monthly updates. For the datasets we monitor but don't regularly ingest, we're more than happy to help customers dig it up.

Hospital data is a bit easier to find and work with than practitioner data. For instance, the list of U.S. physicians is about 1.1 million doctors long, and that's too big to open in Excel. You'll need to get the physician files into a relational database for them to be very useful. If you're starting from the provider data catalog, you'll see the datasets for hospitals, home health agencies and other kinds of healthcare providers, as well as those doctors and other clinicians. You can also find physicians' CAHPS (patient experience metrics), as well as many of the types of procedures physicians perform.

Perhaps the best advice we find ourselves giving our customers who want to go it alone is to have a crackerjack tech team, or at least one person with a lot of database savvy, and start with buying a basic provider data product that you can use as a data structure template. Most federal data on clinicians is linked to their NPI number, so that's where you'll start building your relational database. Your next step is to talk with whoever sold you your basic data, and ask for help finding any missing components. CarePrecise prides itself on offering most of these, all ready to use, but some customers just enjoy the hunt, and even our most comprehensive data package can't contain everything you might want.

We don't shy away from telling our customers where they can find what they're looking for, even if the only place happens to be one of our competitors. In fact, CarePrecise data is compatible with data structures used across the industry. We even provide the Placekey for almost every record in our products, which connects our data with visitor traffic data and other Point of Interest (POI) products offered by other companies.

Many CarePrecise customers get our extended provider data package. CarePrecise Platinum has those elusive practice group and hospital affiliations, and software that makes it possible to get at exactly what you need without knowing anything about databases. It makes a great starting place for building your own bespoke database. 

About Updates

When you're finding and ingesting data, it's important to plan for updates. Some data sources are updated weekly, others monthly or quarterly, and some only on an annual basis. Create a table listing the resources and their update frequency, and build in the necessary automation to re-ingest them regularly.  This is especially important if your use case requires up-to-date information. This often overlooked step of building-in updates can be costly to do later on. Best if it's baked-in from the beginning. This includes your ingestion process for data you get from us, which you can automate to import the monthly or quarterly updates. We offer FTP delivery as an option, which can put the data directly onto your server, ready to be ingested by stored procedures that are triggered by the upload of the data, or by the modified date on the files.

If you want some help finding data sources, just speak with your CarePrecise representative. We may already have an affordable solution that will save you many hours of understanding an unfamiliar and often cryptic dataset. If we don't have it, your representative will help you find it.

One quick note... We offer these sourcing services to current CarePrecise subscribers. It would be great if we could open it up to everyone, but we have to keep our focus on our customers.