The Power of Physician Databases

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare in the United States, access to accurate and comprehensive provider data is crucial for improving patient outcomes, optimizing resource allocation, advancing medical research, and communication between providers and innovators. Clinician data stands at the forefront of this revolution, offering a treasure trove of information that empowers stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem. From pharmaceutical companies seeking to collaborate with key opinion leaders to healthcare organizations aiming to enhance their referral networks, the value of physician and other prescribing clinician data cannot be overstated.

The Backbone of Healthcare Insights

Physician data serves as the backbone of healthcare insights, providing centralized repositories of information on medical professionals, including their specialties, affiliations, contact details including email addresses, and clinical interests and treatment patterns. These databases are meticulously curated, drawing from authoritative sources such as federal provider data maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), medical licensing boards, professional associations, and healthcare institutions. Good physician databases can offer a comprehensive view of the healthcare landscape, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions and to reach out for strategic partnerships.

Driving Medical Innovation

Innovation in healthcare relies heavily on collaboration and knowledge sharing among medical professionals. Authoritative physician data fosters these connections by facilitating networking opportunities and identifying experts in specific fields. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, leverage physician databases to identify potential investigators for clinical trials, gather insights on prescribing patterns, and engage with thought leaders to advance their research agendas. By streamlining the process of connecting with relevant healthcare providers, these databases accelerate the pace of medical innovation and drug development.

Enhancing Patient Care

Effective patient care hinges on seamless coordination among healthcare providers and access to timely, relevant information. Physician databases enable healthcare organizations to build robust referral networks, ensuring that patients receive the specialized care they need. Primary care physicians can quickly identify specialists based on their expertise and proximity, leading to shorter wait times and improved patient satisfaction. Access to comprehensive physician profiles allows clinicians to make well-informed referrals, resulting in better treatment outcomes and continuity of care. 

Accurate fax numbers for pharmacies facilitate delivery of prescriptions where prescribers do not subscribe to an ePresciption system, and contact information for the prescribers is crucial when a pharmacist needs clarification, or has potentially life-saving information on a drug interaction that may have escaped a prescriber's notice.

Communicating Vital Information to Doctors

The process of updating physicians on advances in their areas of practice relies heavily on good physician contact information. Up-to-date, accurate physician databases, with practice addresses, phone and fax numbers, and email addresses, from a reliable vendor are the basis for communication. Companies use authoritative these data resources to update their own in-house databases, keeping the lines f communication open and effective.

Informing Healthcare Policy

In an era of evidence-based medicine, data-driven insights are indispensable for shaping healthcare policy and regulation. Physician databases provide policymakers with valuable information on physician demographics, practice patterns, and geographic distribution, enabling them to identify areas of need and allocate resources effectively. By analyzing trends in physician workforce dynamics, policymakers can develop strategies to address shortages in underserved areas, promote diversity in healthcare, and support initiatives aimed at improving access to care for underserved populations.

Ensuring Data Accuracy and Privacy

While physician databases offer immense benefits, ensuring data accuracy and privacy is paramount. To maintain the integrity of these databases, data providers employ rigorous validation processes and adhere to strict privacy regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the United States. Additionally, data anonymization techniques are often employed to protect sensitive information and preserve patient confidentiality. By prioritizing data quality and security, stakeholders can harness the full potential of physician databases while safeguarding patient privacy.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Physician Databases

As technology continues to evolve, the future of physician databases holds tremendous promise. Advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to revolutionize data analytics, enabling stakeholders to extract deeper insights and predictive analytics from vast datasets. Integration with electronic health records (EHRs) and interoperability standards will further enhance the value of physician databases by providing real-time access to patient information and care coordination tools. With data coming in from so many sources in government and the healthcare industry, intelligent tools for merging information into a “single source of truth,” such as the CarePrecise Collection™ healthcare provider dataset, are key. CarePrecise developed its QoRelate™ record collection and linkage intelligence to build a range of data modules that can be used in any relational database environment across the industry.

About CP Preferred Email™ for Healthcare Providers

We are often asked what we mean by "CP Preferred Email," our trademarked, proprietary email curation system. The "CP" part is obvious. The "Preferred" part, in a nutshell, is the way CarePrecise acquires, verifies, and maintains high quality email addresses for physicians, nurses, dentists, chiropractors, and other U.S. healthcare practitioners. Since we offer a 95% deliverability money-back guarantee, it is critically important to our business that the medical email addresses we sell are solid.

"Preferred" Physician Email Addresses?

When doctors and allied health professionals sign up for conferences and CME opportunities, subscribe to medical journals, and join medical organizations of various kinds, they're asked for their email addresses, and whether they want the organization to share with other organizations within the healthcare industry. You might be surprised to learn that a majority do "opt-in" to sharing. This doesn't mean that they have opted in for your particular use, but that they are OK with having their email used for a variety of medically related purposes. This is one way they can get timely information on new conferences, continuing education opportunities, new medical products and services, etc. It's where we source the vast majority of medical professionals' email information. 

Other sources include places where they give an email address for goods and services and have permitted sharing, and the small number of places where they are required to publicly share an email contact. We do NOT "screen scrape" to get email addresses surreptitiously from websites. That's just not cool, and could lead to unhappy addressees (and unhappy email customers, of course).

Email addresses sometimes "go dark." How do we keep up?

How does CP Preferred Email follow a physician when they move from one practice to another, or add an entrepreneurial venture email address, or one for a teaching position? And how do we know which address is the best one to use to get the email into the environment most likely to result in it being opened, read, and responded to positively?

The answer is partly a "secret recipe," of course. We wouldn't want every other medical email vendor to compete with us. But it's also partly just common sense, and we'll gladly explain.

First of all, we only use good sources. When we get new email addresses we immediately verify every one for deliverability. We also use a proprietary system to determine whether the email is addressing the correct practitioner (we track them by NPI number so we can be certain). There are many components in this step that take into account IP address locations, and domain and local-part components of the address making sense (our own proprietary AI), among other factors. All this happened before a single email is sent.

And then there's the vitally important technique of Spending Gobs Of Money On Fresh Email Addresses So Often It Makes Our Finance Director Cringe. Keeping up with moving clinician emails requires it.

Anatomy of an email address

There are two primary components to an email address. The "domain" is the part following the "@" sign, and this may contain both the primary domain and a subdomain:

maryjones@[bighospital.com] or maryjones@[cardio.bighospital.com]

The domain and sub may be used anywhere in the world that has Internet access. The local-part generally identifies the specific mailbox associated with, for instance, a physician assistant's email address, and is usually the person's name:

[maryjones]@bighospital.com or [Dr.Bob]@GeriatricAssociates.co

Note that email addresses are not case-sensitive. People can use as many uppercase letters as they like, but the servers treat them all as lowercase. 

Many of the special characters may be used in the local-part of an email address, notably !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~  (and the ever-popular "." as long as it's not the first or last character). So, depending on the specifics of a given email server's configuration, you'll may some nutty or genuinely creative email addresses similar to ///pediatric.care///@hugehealthsystem.org, or even Hi,Kids!_:-}@jonespediatric.com or You-Like-Ice-Cream?_It'll-Put-On-###_And-Costs-$$$!@weightclinic.com. No kidding.

But knowing whether an email address is a "well-formed email string" means little in determining quality. 

Crowdsourcing for the highest quality medical email addresses

Through our gathering process we collect more than one email address for many individuals. Working with some of our higher-volume email customers, we ingest email bounce reports containing data on up to hundreds of thousands of email addresses per report. From this we get information on which email was opened, which addressees opted out of future mailings from that organization or program, and many more technical clues. Real world data not only lets us know which email is getting through to the mailbox, but also which ones were deleted without being opened, and which ones were opened, responded to, and which ones produced a real ROI based on information shared with us by users. This process lets us tag one of the several email addresses for Dr. Jones is being responded to in a positive way. It may become one of our "Preferred" email addresses, if, that is, it meets other quality criteria and maintains its quality over a period of time.

Rigorous medical email verification

Nowhere else is it more important to respect an email recipient's time and attention than among medical clinicians. We check out every prospective email purchaser and grade them for worthwhile usage. That is, we simply do not sell to spammers. But beyond that, we re-verify all of our email addresses every few weeks to eliminate the ones that have gone dark, and those that we suspect as being problematical for a number of reasons. We don't throw out addresses only because they don't get a top deliverability score from a bulk verification service. If we did that, we would be throwing out many of our best emails – ones that are performing strongly in our Preferred email system. Ultimately, our customers don't just want email addresses that can get an automated score of some arbitrary level, they want email that actually performs.

Why are email addresses so much more expensive than other contact information?

Good email addresses are hard to come by. Our sources guard them jealously as a valuable business asset. You can't just go to Wikipedia and search for "all U.S. physician email addresses." Wouldn't that be nice? Or head on over to the American Dental Association and ask them for a free download of their membership email list. But nope. Won't work. There is no open government resource for email addresses (with a vanishingly few exceptions) as there is for phone numbers and practice addresses. If you're willing to buy a large number of emails, chances are you can score a few hundred thousand nurse emails from a company that deals in low quality and high volume (in other words, the email addresses used by spammers), and then you can run them by a verification checker and throw away the stinkers (most of them). But will they produce returns? Our customers don't seem to think so. Yes, our pricing isn't as low as the screen-scraped (and sometimes stolen) addresses you might find, but ours are up-to-date, verified, and guaranteed.

Our customers make it happen

If not for the customers who send millions of messages using our email addresses, we wouldn't have "Preferred" email. Many use our email addresses to communicate with existing and prospective provider network members. For these uses and for medical marketing, the healthcare industry is a special case among email usage. To acquire email addresses from CarePrecise, our users must agree to abide diligently by the terms of the U.S. CAN SPAM Act of 2003. Beyond that, CarePrecise offers medical email best practices that not only protect our users' reputations and their domains from blacklisting, but also help keep email communication pertinent to the recipient, and respectful of their attention and time. Together, CP Preferred Email and our users form an important piece of U.S. healthcare industry communication.

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...

A Marketer's Guide to Using Provider Data

Quality healthcare provider data is the foundation of any marketing campaign aimed at physician and dentist offices, the practitioners themselves, and every kind of hospital and medical facility. The good data just isn't free, even though it can be downloaded in thousands of pieces from various government websites. CarePrecise simplifies and maximizes the sometimes complex and hard-to-find (or shockingly expensive) resources by providing reliable and comprehensive data on healthcare providers in the United States at truly affordable pricing.

Free Healthcare Provider Data

Free data on U.S. healthcare providers is available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But with a few exceptions, the data files are difficult to understand, and many are simply too large to use in ordinary office computer software. Vendors like CarePrecise, Definitive Healthcare, and OneKey sell data that has been curated and organized for much easier use. This article is a guide to using purchased data, and will spotlight CarePrecise products. That said, CarePrecise also helps its customers locate freely available data to supplement its solutions.

The Good Stuff

CarePrecise offers a number of different provider data solutions to meet specific needs. Marketers want instant access to information like practice locations, practitioner specialties based on the standard Provider Taxonomy codes, co-located colleagues, their group and hospital affiliations, and more. With these details, marketers can create compelling campaigns for audiences that are more relevant and targeted than can be achieved with blanket campaigning.

CarePrecise data resides on your own desktop or laptop computer — there's no need to learn to code for an API, and no need for a database server. These data packages are designed for easy use with the familiar programs in Microsoft Office. You can search, sort, filter, and export data in formats such as CSV or XLSX to quickly capture insights. The complete database of all 7 million+ U.S. healthcare provider records can be used instantly to create tightly targeted campaigns, with no requirement for an Internet connection.

After you purchase a data package, you'll extract it to a folder on your computer. Depending on which components you choose, you'll use Microsoft Access or Excel to view and manipulate the data. If you've chosen CarePrecise Platinum, there's a software program, CP ListMaker, that "rides on top" of these enormous data files, and makes easy work of selecting the types of providers, their specific geographic locations by zip code, city, county, state, or the entire U.S., and with additional filtering by other attributes like gender, acceptance of Medicare, years in practice, and number of practitioners in the office. This data, priced in the tens of thousands of dollars by other companies, starts at $459. You can add additional modules as needed, and CarePrecise offers an upgrade path so you can upgrade economically. If you want the whole universe of CarePrecise's provider data,* The Collection offers what others charge $30,000 and more for at just over $3,000 — an order of magnitude less expensive — and you won't have to mess with an API or dodgy web access.

We'll cover some physician marketing specifics here, but most apply to other kinds of medical offices as well.

Marketing to Physicians

Connecting with busy physicians is one of the most arduous tasks associated with physician marketing, but good data and good tools make it simpler. 

Each physician holds the power to influence millions of dollars in healthcare purchases every year — a fact that has resulted in an overwhelming amount of marketing messages vying for their attention. The COVID-19 pandemic sent billions more marketing messages through the pipeline, from sellers of everything from masks and hand sanitizer to ventilators. While that traffic has thinned out now, many of those companies got a taste of physician direct marketing, built out the capability to deploy it, and are not likely to just walk away. We're in a whole new world of selling to frontline clinicians.

Here are the top things to keep in mind...

Different Strokes

Segment your campaign into blocks of providers with different attributes. If you’re unsure which patient practice will be your best prospect, testing out different specialties can provide the answer. CarePrecise Platinum simplifies this process by splitting your list into specialties, allowing for easy comparison of responses between a product landing page or reply card. Try it today to easily identify which of your ideal prospects spending money.

Do you sell primarily to large group practices, or small, sole proprietors? CarePrecise Platinum can help you target individuals or groups, and sort them by size.

Analyze various urban and rural areas, their proximity to a city's center, state borders, etc. to identify the most budget-friendly sections for your business operations. You can even layer these elements on top of one another in order to pinpoint precisely which areas will be the best fit for your marketing campaign. Maximize campaign ROI: Reach out to all market segments by putting together an impactful message that can then be tested and spread throughout each area once you've determined which is most effective.

Gender can be important, too. We live in a time of high sensitivity to gender, in our personal relationships, speech, and writing. Knowing the gender of the person receiving your message can help you to avoid negatives, and maybe pack in some positives. There are important differences in the responses of people identifying as women, men, genderfluid, and the many shades in between. Understanding the language of gender, and being mindful of its subtlety and power, and basic. Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Health and Human services has not seen fit to allow healthcare providers to report as anything other than M or F, but CarePrecise faithfully brings all of that information to you, along with intelligent genderization of organizations' authorizing officials, whose records do not include a field for gender.

Make it Personal

It's essential that your direct marketing campaign is as tailored to the specific doctor you are targeting as a specialist. Since what might be effective for one type of physician may not apply to another, it's important to address each individually. Your product or service can assist a wide variety of specialists, yet when speaking directly with a sports medicine doc, specifically mention how it benefits them and their specialty - this will have greater impact than using generic language.

If you want to maximize the impact of your message, consider tailoring it according to geographical location. After all, rural doctors and hospitals may have unique requirements that suburban multi-physician practices don't typically face. Similarly, small or solo practice clinicians possess a different mindset than their counterparts in large organizations - this should be kept in mind when crafting messages for them as well.

This sort of segmenting is vastly easier when you have practitioner data in a form that's easy to manipulate, and the ability to create separate lists for each angle.

Maximize the physician's time and yours

Tap into your data sources to gain insight on the physicians you are mailing or telemarketing. Learn about their specialties, gender, and if they've recently started practicing. Acquire up-to-date addresses and phone numbers so that you can establish contact efficiently. Your communications shouldn't attempt a full curriculum, but a concise call to action. Motivate the physician to visit your website for helpful information, and follow up with postal mailings, since many doctors prefer paper over electronic correspondence.

Earn loyalty

Physicians want authoritative, credible information about new products and services that may be helpful for their patients or practices. Clear, concise, high-quality information builds trust. Getting a name or credential wrong is a forgivable human error, but it doesn't engender credibility with anyone, and practitioners can be very sensitive about mistakes. CarePrecise data is updated monthly with constantly changing information reported by the healthcare providers themselves.

Educate, starting with the first sentence

Physicians are professional learners. They diagnose by observation, seeking every detail to shed light on what they see. They tend to be more attracted to factual information than the average consumer. Making sure your message stands out and provides tangible value is key to success when targeting physicians. To ensure that critical information reaches your physician, it is important to cut out irrelevant details and create a succinct message. Make sure the communication is direct and professional so that gatekeepers will be able to recognize its importance quickly. This guarantees that vital facts are transmitted directly to the doctor without wasting time or getting lost in an overload of data. Generic-looking mailers with names and addresses in all capital letters, or a salutation like "Dear Doctor:" are lame!

The SharpMail tool in CarePrecise's CP ListMaker makes your written words to physicians look smart and professional by proper-casing name and address information. SharpMail saves time by creating intelligently "attention names" (the full addressee name, like Dr. Sandra Rosenfeld, DO) and salutations (the name part of that "Dear Doctor" greeting, like Dr. Rosenfeld or Ms Rosenfeld). SharpMail is aware of whether a particular person should be addresses as Dr., Mr., Mrs., or Ms, according to their reported preference of name prefix and/or status awarded the "doctor" honorific. SharpMail is designed specifically for the medical market, and it produces beautiful names and addresses, but it's offered as open source code within CP ListMaker, and licensed customers may adapt it to their own needs.

Consider mailing information about your product that puts indicators and counter-indicators for use right up front, so that physicians and their staff know that the information is important and to the point. You should check multiple sources, to know things like whether a physician is enrolled in the PECOS system (can bill Medicare), or has been barred from billing. CarePrecise combines all of these sources in a single tool.

Relationships Count

To make sure that invoices get through to their intended recipients, establishing connections with physicians and their team members is crucial. CarePrecise Platinum can help by keeping tabs on the lists used for various communications, maintaining an opt-out list for practices which require special care, and creating separate marketing lists depending on geographical area. You'll be able to match suitable representatives with each target without relying on any external CRM software – all thanks to extensive demographic data.

Direct Mail

Although traditional postal mailings still generate considerable leads, there are alternative channels that prove to be much more effective. Direct mail is the tried and true method, while email can save on costs; however, many emails sent to physician offices fail to reach their intended audience. Postal ad campaigns fare slightly worse, but remain an important ingredient in the marketing mix.

Text messaging

A newer channel of communication has recently been gaining traction for its successful lead generating capabilities. Text messaging (SMS) is the fresh kid on the block. However, use it cautiously; text messaging has a high rate of penetration, yet it can be seen as intrusive. The "untouchable" physician isn't all that untouchable if you have a CarePrecise email list, but be sure to keep the message short and compelling, and include a shortened link to a landing page with the straight info on your product. As for telemarketing, bear in mind that the majority of your recipients will view your attempt to market something on their mobile device as unsolicited commercial messages – phone spam. That never looks good.

Sending bulk text messages may be tantalizingly easy with SMS gateway services, but they usually have an anti-spam policy that requires you to obtain the recipient's consent prior to sending any texts. CarePrecise data sets contain around 1,100,000 phone numbers for physicians, but be aware that while some of these are smartphones and some will be turned into voice mail messages by the recipient's phone carrier, a significant number will hit landlines and office phone system dead ends. Despite any technical glitches, the biggest fear should be your relationships with current physicians. Diligent list preparation is required to eliminate anyone you already connect with via more user-friendly mediums. Nonetheless, we are aware of some companies that are currently testing bulk SMS to doctors, both opt-in and cold call. It's believed that this channel will experience explosive growth over the coming years; however, it remains uncertain whether its advantages surpass the risks associated with such invasive techniques.

Email campaigns

It feels kind of thrilling to push the "Send Campaigns" button on a few tens of thousands of email messages. When I do it I even sort of push down hard on the mouse or screen so I can get all the tingly feels.

Constant Contact reports that email marketing has a return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent. There are some gotchas, of course, but email is the winner in overall ROI, while remaining perfectly legal to send unsolicited. The ideal email list is one that was collected by the practitioners' medical society, journals, conferences, and the like. Screen-scraped email addresses just, well, suck.

The problem with cheap, uncurated email lists is that even just one low-quality, high-rejection campaign can wreck your web domain, blacklist it, and send your company's regular business email messages into the junk box. Getting off of the blacklists is an expensive and slow process. A huge waste of money.

We are extremely cautious with our careprecise.com domain and would never be so sloppy. Rest assured that we carry that same care into our CarePrecise Preferred Email data stock. Our buyers develop trusting relationships with the societies, event producers, and medical journal publishers. Dirty email lists would damage that trust on all sides. Good email addresses, particularly physician emails, are expensive to acquire and maintain, especially when we try to get only the ones that the addressee has given permission to share. CarePrecise has developed a unique system for email hygiene that combines this impeccable sourcing with constant re-verification and campaign analysis. This analysis step examines the campaign reports of some of our larger customers to know, for instance, which of the three or seven email addresses we have for one physician should be the most effective.

Tips on sending email to physicians and other healthcare providers would fill pages, so instead, here's a link to our email sending best practices.

Just the good data, please

Ultimately, if you are determined to get in touch with physicians and their personnel, it's essential that you understand the protocols. Obtaining accurate data from a trustworthy source will give you the ability to communicate professionally and efficiently. With careful planning and employing innovative strategies utilizing this data, your organization can cultivate relationships of lasting trust. The ways that you use the data will make the biggest difference of all, and will be a significant driver of your competitive edge.

With CarePrecise, you can rest assured that reliable and comprehensive data will always be accessible – right there on your computer drive – so you can concentrate on what really matters: crafting compelling marketing campaigns with precision targeting to successfully reach your target audiences.

*Well, mostly the whole universe. A few packages that are designed for very specific applications, such as ScriptFax and ScribeFax, are not part of The Collection.

– Michael Christopher, Chief Analyst

Why Do Some Physicians Dread Reading Their Email?

Imagine that you’re a somewhat to severely stressed-out doctor. Now you open your email program and you see this message: “I hope and expect that you will spend eternity in he**. You are an abusive, nasty, cheap person.” Now imagine that this happens a lot, relatively speaking; roughly 1 in every 20 email messages from patients are negative.

According to a new study from Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 3% of messages received from patients were unflattering at best, and many contained words of violent or hostile intent. “F**k” was the most frequently used expletive, but words like “shoot” and “kill” were frequently used. 609 physicians responded to the survey, roughly equally split between women and men.

The study included examples of ugly wording, such as “What a disappointment in your office and the bullsh*t I was told. I’ll be switching plans because this is sh*t!”

CarePrecise has noted recent tightening of spam filters in physician group email systems, and we have identified one of the reasons as resulting from unprecedented pandemic-related spam from PPE hawkers. The pandemic has ratcheted up stress levels for people from all walks of like; none more than physicians and other clinicians. The study’s researchers suggested that “Health systems should be proactive in ensuring that the inbasket does not become a venue for physician abuse and cyberbullying. Posting reminders in EHR patient portals to use kind language when sending messages, applying filters for expletives or threatening words…” We can expect many providers’ walls to be raised just a bit higher if high levels of abuse from patients continues.