Physician marketing isn't the same as your garden variety big box store. Most doctors don't need to do any physician marketing to stay busy. If they're going to do physician marketing, it's likely a cash cow business they're trying to sell you. Hospitalist medicine has changed the landscape for how subspecialists get referrals.
Before hospitalists become standard in many communities, how other specialists got consulted in the hospital was mostly a matter of outpatient relationships between the primary care doctor and the surgeon, cardiologist, nephrologist etc...
Not anymore. Since hospitalists don't have clinics, and most primary care physicians have left the hospital, consultations inside the hospital are now mostly a matter of relationships built around the hospitalists. Over the years, Dr X from the family medicine clinic may have built strong working relationships with specific groups of doctors outside the hospital. All that inpatient relationship building ends the day that doctor leaves hospital based medicine. For the sub specialist, that means building new relationships with the hospitalists and maintaining the outpatient bread and better referrals.
As always, doctors are probably the best judge of the best doc for the job. We all know which doctors we'd want working on us if we got sick. We all know which ones practice aggressive medicine and which ones are highly conservative. We all know which ones practice reflex medicine and which ones offer actual thought medical care. We all know which surgeons act like an ass and which ones tell a mean and funny constipation story.
When given a choice between two competent physicians of the same specialty, for Happy, the only physician marketing necessary is
- Be nice.
- Be funny (optional but helpful).
When you tell the hospitalist
"If you don't want to admit my patients for me at 3 am, you shouldn't have become a hospitalist"
you break rule #1. You won't hear from me again. As for being funny, here's a recent interaction I had with an orthopaedic surgeon. This guy learned rule #2. He doesn't need any more physician marketing. I'll set this story up. The on call orthopaedic surgeon was getting killed in the ER with admissions (CPT 99221, 99222, 99223) and consults (CPT 99253, 99254, 99255). He was four surgical patients deep in less than an hour.
He was going to admit a young patient with an ankle fracture and wanted a preoperative evaluation by the hospitalist. So I came down to the ER (where there was actually a patient faking a seizure in the ER), and found the orthopaedic surgeon looking at the digital films. Here's how this conversation went:
Happy: I hear you need a hospitalist consult on your patient.Orthopaedic Surgeon: What, what, what? Which patient? I've got like four of them down here. It's crazy down here.Happy: That one there. The one on the monitor you're looking at. I think it's the 40 year old with an ankle fracture.Orthopaedic Surgeon: Oh yeah. I need a medical evaluation. He's got medical issues, a history of asthma blah, blah, blah.Happy: Laughing Asthma and blah, blah blah? That sounds serious. What kind of fracture does he have?Orthopaedic Surgeon: It's a... (inaudible description of the fracture) ankle fracture.Happy: Oh, I see, so he has a blah, blah, blah fracture.Orthopaedic surgeon: Laughing. Yep.ER Doctor: I'm glad you guys got that all sorted out.
That's how physician marketing is supposed to work. Sometimes a few blah blah blahs between physicians will get you exactly what you want. And that's how some doctors take care of business. Remember rule #2. It works.
