Second annual Healthcare IT Marketing Conference (HITMC)

I highly recommend that folks in every company selling open source solutions in the healthcare industry attend this conference. As we have alreday addressed in Open Health News seveal times, more recently in this article as well as this other article, "build it and they will come" is not a sustainable business model for open source projects. I have known Shahid Shah for many years and he is not only a brilliant health IT guru, he is one of the very few people who understands sales, marketing and PR for open source projects as well as the appropriate busienss models. Shahid is a member of OSEHRA's advisory board and for the last three OSEHRA Open Source EHR Summits he has given well thought out presentations focused on successful business models strategies for open source EHRs.  Roger A. Maduro Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Open Health News.

Shahid N. ShahProlific blogger and health IT media magnate, John Lynn and I are teaming up again for the second year to produce and deliver a marketing conference focused on helping digital health, health IT, and medical device  innovators. We’re going to be providing actionable advice and specific techniques you can use to cut through the noise when trying to market healthcare and medical tech products to physicians, hospitals, health systems, ACOs, patients, and similar customers. Called The Healthcare IT Marketing Conference, last year’s event covered very important subjects by some of the world’s best experts on those topics and we’ll continue the tradition again in 2015.

Learn the difference between Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Branding

Everyone tells small companies that they need to “do marketing” but that’s really hard to do so I started with a quick visual to explain what it means. It comes from Marty Neumeier on pages 24 and 25 of ZAG by way of the Brand Autopsy Blog (which I highly recommend reading) and illustrates the differences between Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Branding. It’s a wonderful visual and clearly shows that small companies should focus on marketing and free PR, shoot for branding and probably eschew advertising until they have enough money. Our expert speakers at HITMC know the difference and will teach you how to make sure you’re not taking the wrong steps.

Learn how to conduct appropriate market research

Lots of (even innovative) companies don’t do basic market research so we will cover:

• Find the right search terms for your industry or product. Don’t be esoteric. Because most products will only be found through word of mouth or on the Internet, don’t choose terms to describe yourself that no one else understands. Selling to hospitals is not about creativity, it’s about value. If the customer doesn’t understand what you’re selling give up now.
• Use competitive intelligence to locate your competitors and existing firms.

Learn about the different kinds of of Business Models to consider

• Software as a Service (SaaS) and subscription model  — best model for startups with something they can maintain in their own data centers
• Consulting and Solutions model — when you can provide packaged help
• Licensed model — when privacy or complexity requires solutions to be installed in house
• Freemium model (and open source)

Learn about major healthcare industry fallacies

Selling to the healthcare community is very hard and there are many myths that our conference will dispel:

• Healthcare folks are neither technically challenged nor simple techno-phobes. Because they are in the business of saving lives and improving health, they care about technologies that help them achieve their mission.
• Most product decisions are no longer made by clinical folks alone, CIOs are fully involved. Don’t try to sell just to the clinical folks — make sure the IT side is engaged and on your side.
• Complex, full-featured, products are not easier to sell than simple, stand alone tools that have the capability of interoperating with other solutions are much easier to sell. Software as a service is a good approach.
• Hospitals will not buy unless one proves value. This seems obvious but many companies think that because they think something is important, their customers will just agree.
• Selling into doctors offices is not easy. There were a few startups looking to sell to individual physicians’ offices. Selling to to your first dozen physicians is pretty easy since we all know doctors. Just be careful, though, since selling to the next dozen and beyond is where companies fall.

Learn how to align the Payers, Beneficiaries, and Users (PBU) of your Health IT or MedTech product

There are three distinct groups you’re marketing and selling your products to:

• The payer or the person/entity that writes the check for your product.
• The person or group that benefits most from the use of the product.
• The person or group that actually uses the product.

I call this the “PBU alignment” problem. In a complex environment like healthcare, the three groups are often not the same — if you can find a market in which the payers, the beneficiaries, and the users are all the same then your sales job is easy. However, that’s commonly not the case.

Let’s take a look at the typical example of a complex product like an electronic medical records (EMR) software package in the era of ARRA, HITECH, and meaningful use (MU). The “payer” may ultimately be government reimbursements through  Medicare, the “beneficiaries” are the healthcare insurance firms and the government agencies that need the MU data, and the “users” are the doctors and staff at physicians offices and hospitals.

Why has it taken decades for EMRs to be sold to just a tiny fraction of the total industry? Because the PBU alignment hasn’t been reached — until the users, beneficiaries, and payers of the products all understand the value and are willing to work together to achieve a goal it will be tough.

Join us at the conference to talk with experts on the PBU lesson and advice for your product. Figure out the PBU alignment problem and see how you’ll sell to each of the groups and make the right arguments — you do it right and you’ll make money. If you forget the complexities of the PBU and you’ll be languishing, too.

Go home with many tips and tricks:

• Make sure your company and its value is easy to explain
• Make sure your value is defendable and differentiated (but without being esoteric)
• Make sure that you have ability to attract partners and can either create or be part of an ecosystem
• Ensure that you have word of mouth opportunity
• Have scaleable staff and systems
• Have a scaleable product — build once, sell many times
• Have an uncomplicated pricing and deployment model
• Be very focused — you can’t “solve healthcare” but you can solve very specific problems
• Try to own the relationship with and information about customers — don’t rely on partners that won’t give you access to customers