Coordinating Services

Sharing Customers

Developing  the  occupational  product  line  is something that every program faces, regardless of size or age. Eventually a customer will request a service or express a need that you cannot meet, and in the blink of an eye you are "developing" your program. Product development will also naturally arise as your program matures. When customers have positive experiences with your organization, they will increasingly turn to you for their other occupational, corporate, and general healthcare needs. Whether driven by special request, market maturity, or increasing competition, product development is the lifeblood of any occupational health program.

Since managing the occupational health product line requires a more "entrepreneurial" mindset than other areas of the hospital, many program managers tend to be creative, resourceful, and naturally predisposed to product development. However, expanding the corporate health product line requires more than creativity and desire. It also requires thoughtful market analysis, planning, business development, and product execution. Getting the right product to market at the right price and at the right time requires more than luck—you must understand your customers, their needs, your ability to deliver cost-effectively on those needs, and what, if any, competition you might have for any new or expanded service you develop.

Product development also requires the right foundation. If your current products are not known for their quality and service, their negative or lack-luster reputations will carry over into any new products you develop. In the absence of excellent clinical quality and a reputation for high quality service, your ability to retain current business will be seriously compromised and you certainly will not be in a position to grow it. Individual product successes contribute to group product success, the result being that the sum is larger than the individual parts.

Once the occupational health product is established, other employer-driven needs such as health promotion, on-site services, outpatient counseling, and brown bag lunch educational sessions quickly become apparent. Determining which of these corporate health products to develop next will largely be driven by the external market (consumer demand and market supply) and organizational resources to meet identified needs.

Regardless of which product comes next, it is essential that organizational and product integration be carefully considered and planned with each product addition. Support and client services for each product should be carefully designed to provide not only organizational efficiencies and cost savings, but also to maximize client management and relationship building for the program and larger health organization. Some of the key organizational success factors are:

Management

The senior administrator of the product line must be able to coordinate, integrate, and grow the product line in such a way that the products work synergistically, not separately. It is important that this individual develop the product management team to be cohesive and knowledgeable about each other’s programs and services. Growth of the product line and integration of services will only happen if the individual orchestrating it ensures that each individual manager supports teaming, integration, and non-duplication of services. Underlying this must be sound decision-making that keeps quality and the customer’s best interests at heart, rather than predicating decisions strictly on internal financial performance or politics.

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Information Systems

What software application will be used and how will client data be integrated and coordinated across product lines? For shared client companies, client contact names, addresses, phone numbers, and recipients of bills and reports can often be very different for the EAP than they are for occupational health or even work-hardening. Your ability to manage your customer relationships and measure your performance for those customers will, in large part, be driven by your information system or systems. All of the products and services you sell directly to the corporate customer should either share an information system or client data base or have the ability to share or exchange data easily. You also want to be assured that there will be parity and consistency in the types of outcome reports produced by shared or integrated
systems.

Billing

All of your products will need to bill for the services rendered. This is not only part of your branding strategy, it is also important for superior financial performance. Make sure your bills and billing processes are as uniform as possible, yet appropriately flexible for individual products. Having the same group of billers using the same software application is ideal, and allows not only for unified financial reporting but also standardized collections and management of bad debt. And it allows your program to appear unified and organized to the external customer.

Quality Assurance & Clinical Management

All of your products will need to have quality assurance measures and sound clinical practices, albeit sometimes unique or differing measures depending on the product. Organizational consistency and sharing of resources is as essential at the divisional level as it is for the larger healthcare organization. Standards and measures must be in place to ensure consistency while allowing for appropriate variation.

Medical Leadership

These products share not only the same organizational foundation; they also share a common need for medical leadership, which ensures clinical consistency. This does not necessarily mean having the same medical director for each corporate health product, but it does mean that medical leadership must be coordinated and consistent across products.

Brand Identity

Marketing materials, letterhead, brochures, client communications, giveaways—anything your division uses to promote a single or group of corporate products should have a consistent look and feel. This will help establish your corporate health brand identity. While individual pieces may be necessary to promote a particular product or service, the individual pieces should be consistent with your branding strategy and consistently cross-sell other, related products. For example, your DOT information should cross-sell SAP services provided by your EAP, and vice versa.

Sales & Marketing

Sales and marketing should also be integrated for the division and for the larger health delivery system. Account representatives who are selling your services to employers should be unified based on their shared customer: the employer. Sales efforts should be coordinated so account reps are not stumbling across each other. However, you should segregate accounts by size, territory or zip code, so the same account representative calls on each customer for your health system and all of your corporate health products. This model will better solidify long-term relationship building with customers, and avoids embarrassing episodes of different representatives from the same organization calling on an account or "managing" that account’s development within your system.

Client Management & Communication

Developing long-term relationships with our customers is really what corporate health is all about. Occupational medicine and corporate health services are only successful and profitable if this fundamental axiom is built into every endeavor and every product extension. Sometimes, as customers grow, so do their needs for our services. In other instances it is simply a matter of market maturity and timing until certain corporate health products are accepted and customers are ready to purchase them. Client management assists organizations in determining which products and services customers need and which of their products will best meet those needs.

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Finally, it is important to understand that there may be an inverse relationship between key customers/customer groups and the various corporate health products. Generally, the larger a corporation is, the more likely it will have its own medical department. This typically decreases their need for your clinic-based occupational services, but generally increases their need for your on-site services (which can include occupational health, rehabilitation, health promotion programs, fitness classes/fitness center management, and EAP). The larger the corporation, the more likely you are to have multiple company contacts for each product, and the more revenue will be driven into your system simply because of the size of the corporation and employee population. Consequently, key accounts for some products may be small accounts for occupational health.

Conversely, small to mid-sized employers are the bread-and-butter of your occupational health program but typically they do not have the financial resources for EAP, fitness, and health promotion. However, many programs are developing modified corporate health products geared to the smaller employer that offer a competitive product (usually with reduced or modified benefits from the "standard" product) and at a lower cost. These programs are often pre-packaged and designed for self-use or self-implementation or, in the case of EAP, offer 1-3 assessment and referral options instead of the typical 1-8 or 1-10 models.

Whenever you have a customer using more than one product, internal communication and service coordination becomes critical, not only from an efficiency standpoint, but also from a client management perspective. Will your DOT inservices be delivered through the occupational health program, on-site services or EAP contract? Who delivers the service is not as important as avoiding duplication of services and maximizing service coverage (and cost containment) for your customers through existing contracts.

It is also important that product representatives that share customers or customer segments share client and industry information. Team meetings for shared customers should be held quarterly or on whatever schedule best serves the dynamics of that customer relationship. This is an opportunity for the customer representatives to meet with your corporate health product representatives to discuss health and safety issues, goals, outcomes, and objectives for the next reporting period. It also supports teaming in the best interest of the customer and shows a unified face to that shared customer.

Expanding the corporate product line is an exciting endeavor and a good indication that your program is doing something right. Products must be carefully grown and integrated so that organizational resources are efficiently used and customer relationships are supported and coordinated. Otherwise, it is easy to develop separate products with standalone systems that are listed under one division but in reality function separately. Planned product growth and integration can avoid these costly mistakes and fractured relationships with customers, resulting in a product line where the sum of the whole is larger than the individual parts. 

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