Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Payer Marketing

You know and I know that a good marketer can look at a “thing” and figure out what the benefits are for our various audiences or prospects. Transparency, for example, answers a major complaint from healthcare’s stakeholders (including physicians) and it is very, very marketable.

The AMA Healthcare SIG’s November 16th event is your chance to find new marketing opportunities in healthcare information technologies. One of these is the transparency that comes from being able to access health-related information quickly and easily.

Did you want a preview of these coming attractions? Then I hope you read the Houston Chronicle article on Saturday, October 28th (Business, page D1 and D7) by Brett Brune, “The payers put to the test.” Texas PayerView Rankings from athenahealth in Boston are part of this Chronicle feature.

A speaker from athenahealth will be one of our seminar participants in just 10 days. (The firm spells its name using lower case.)

The “PayerView” rankings analyze claim performance data from more than 7,000 providers using the athenaNet® system database from athenahealth. It ranks national and regional health insurers according to specific measures of financial and administrative performance and medical policy complexity.

John Hallock, athenahealth’s Director of Public Relations, wrote me last week about visibility and transparency:

Healthcare is littered with vendors and organizations looking to communicate and market to a new service or device or functionality rather than the problems these services solve.

By marketing to a problem – defining it and bringing transparency to it – you can own it…then market your unique solution to that problem.

Transparency continues to be one of the dominant themes in healthcare today as it relates to doctors’ performance and costs; athenahealth felt that for the other major healthcare supply chain member, the insurer, there was virtually no actionable apples-to-apples data available to measure how well or poorly they perform one of their primary functions: paying for healthcare.

Our…recent Texas PayerView Ranking makes this various insurer and payer performance data publicly available…an important step in bringing transparency to all stakeholders in healthcare. The rankings and website are designed to allow physician practices, medical societies, media, consumers and payers to compare the rankings and performance of specific insurers by region.


Join me at The Courtyard on St. James Place on Thursday, November 16th, to find out how you can “own” this and other information technologies...for better marketing. Click here to register.

3 comments:

Richard Laurence Baron said...

Another part of a very complex story...Loren Steffy, writing in today's Houston Chronicle, wrote about UnitedHealth:

“When proponents talk about these plans, they talk about how they lower costs and allow consumers more control over their health care decisions.

“This is based on a myth known as moral hazard, which says we'll use less health care if we have to pay for it ourselves.” You can read about it at http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/4318193.html

Richard Laurence Baron said...

As of this afternoon, athenahealth was no longer able to attend the SIG seminar next week. The committee is currently working to replace it on the panel. Thanks for your patience.

Richard Laurence Baron said...

News on Monday, November 13: athenahealth will be providing a speaker for the AMA Healthcare SIG panel. Beth Boyette, Senior Sales Executive, will be joining us.