Analyze Your Vascular Market
The first step to increase your vascular volume is to understand your vascular market. This means more than just having a hunch about where the vascular patients are coming from and why they are choosing your practice or hospital. It means finding the data and doing the research to know exactly what the numbers show.
The most important questions to ask when analyzing your vascular market are:
- What are your current vascular volumes?
- Were do your vascular patients come from?
- Are there any trends in patient volume i.e. zip codes, referring physicians, etc.
It is of utmost importance to understand current patient volumes to determine how a hospital can increase vascular volume. Once this basic portrait is created, you can compare your vascular patient profile with your geographic location. This is where you start to connect the dots.
Look at your geographic location. Are your patients coming from near the hospital or from outlying areas? If patients that live close to the hospital are not using the hospital’s service, it’s time to figure out why. Likewise if patients from outlying areas are not using the hospital but they could be utilizing services, why aren’t they?
Look at your local transportation lines. If you want to increase vascular volume, you have to raise awareness about your services. Determining where to do raise awareness depends on how easily people can get to you. That is why you should take a look at your transportation lines – freeways, subways, bus lines, etc. This will provide a road map for where you spend your marketing dollars to increase vascular volume. It also helps you refine which patients you want to educate about your services.
Look at the patient demographics. What types of patients utilize your hospital’s services now? What is their average income? Do they have health insurance? What are their lifestyles like? Is health and healthy living important to them? Are they unaware of the consequences of poor cardiovascular health? Understanding your current vascular patients and potential vascular patients will help you craft educational awareness messages that are meaningful to your audience.
Often patients are underserved and uninformed about cardiovascular disease risk factors. This presents a great opportunity for your hospital to be the trustworthy, reliable source that makes patients more knowledgeable about their health. In turn, if they do experience a vascular event, they will immediately go to the hospital they have learned to trust.
Once you get an idea of your current vascular patients and begin creating a picture of where they come from and what is important to them, you will be able to begin determining your vascular marketing potential for increasing vascular volumes.