Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs to Mature with Your Aging Patients: 4 Keys to Success
// By Lisa D. Ellis //
Has your health care organization’s marketing strategy kept pace with your largest payer—Medicare? If not, you could be missing important opportunities to target seniors and caregivers with your services and keep them coming back for more.
Need to Focus on Seniors — and Their Caregivers
Dan Ansel, founder and CEO of Active Daily Living
As organizations have become more focused on trying to keep people well and heading off illness, the needs of Medicare patients have become increasingly important, since they represent a growing portion (more than 60 percent for most providers) of a system’s revenues. Medicare patients also will continue to lead the way, as organizations leave the fee-for-service model and embrace more managed-care arrangements, says Dan Ansel, founder and CEO of Active Daily Living, a population health platform that provides interactive tools, personalized content, resources, and advice for seniors, caregivers, and people with functional limitations.
To help groups think more strategically about how to market to seniors and family members, Private Health News (PHN) recently brought together Ansel, Linda MacCracken, Kathy Divis, and Kerri Lenderman for a web presentation called Attracting and Retaining Seniors and Family Caregivers: Operation Critical!
“Seniors are the biggest segment of people who use health care services,” Ansel points out. Yet despite their importance in current and future business models, many groups, including health care providers, haven’t yet made a conscious effort to keep pace with the array of needs that go along with an aging population, he says.
4 Key Lessons Learned
While the issues around caring for Medicare recipients and meeting their needs through a coordinated continuum of care is very broad, Ansel and his co-presenters identified four lessons that can help groups sharpen their marketing efforts in this area.