Building and maintaining patient relationships in a large metropolitan area is daunting enough for a healthcare organization. Accomplishing these tasks in a widely dispersed, largely rural region is another challenge altogether. The solution lies in taking a multipronged approach: integrating online and off-line programs to promote service lines and create valuable interaction between the organization and its community.

Early Outreach Efforts

Located in Billings, Mont., Deaconess Billings Clinic (DBC), a multispecialty physician group practice and 272-bed trauma hospital, serves a rural population of more than 500,000 individuals. The nonprofit regional healthcare organization has a service area that spans a 250-mile radius in Montana and northern Wyoming

With such a widely dispersed patient population, we recognize that our organization cannot rely on just face-to-face and phone contact with community members to build and maintain lasting customer relationships. This is due to long driving distances for the public and our clinical staff, the cost of long-distance phone calls, and the need to provide a continuity of quality care, including the availability of DBC physicians.

As an initial participant in VHA’s Women’s HeartAdvantage program in January 2002, we had access to resources such as information packets, media advertisements and Web links, as well as clinical and consumer research and proven process methodologies, that promoted overall awareness of the risk factors and symptoms of heart disease in women. Our plan was to use these resources to improve clinical performance, increase community health and provide our organization with a market advantage.

By all measures, our initial effort worked well. Within 14 days of the Jan. 31 launch, we had more than 1,000 Women’s HeartAdvantage-related calls to DBC Healthline, our call center staffed by nurses. Also, our first two community educational sessions reached capacity by drawing more than 230 women.

As we continued our program, though, we wanted to be sure we could maintain strong relationships with women in our community. We wanted to develop a plan for ongoing contact with the women who participated in the education programs and build lasting customer loyalty among women who had found value in choosing us for their heart health and care.

Adopting New Strategies

DBC engaged Irving, Texas-based HEALTHvision for an answer. In 1998 and 1999, we had relied on the application service provider as a partner in the development of our organization’s Web strategy to improve interactivity with the public, so we knew that HEALTHvision understood our challenge and could work with us to create a solution. In early 2003, for example, we marked a 110 percent annual increase in traffic to our physician referral and nurse triage services in our call center. This was largely a result of our partnership with HEALTHvision, since we chose not to add to our technical infrastructure supporting the delivery of quality content to the public.

In late 2003, HEALTHvision recommended that we enhance our approach to community outreach. In addition to asking community members to attend Women’s HeartAdvantage events, schedule heart health screenings with their physicians or call for more information, HEALTHvision suggested an additional yearlong program for 2004 that focuses on creating continued contact with program participants and promoting organizational objectives.

This comprehensive, interactive customer relationship management (CRM) program for our Women’s HeartAdvantage efforts includes online and off-line marketing elements designed to attract new participants, renew interest in existing participants and create ongoing dialogue between DBC and the women of our community.

The CRM program will be measured against the following goals:

* Acquire 500 new, active participants in the Women’s HeartAdvantage program;

* Retain 75 percent of participants currently active in the program for at least three months;

* Re-engage 25 percent of participants who have not been active in the program for the past six months.

Pushing e-Newsletters

Once our goals were set, the HEALTHvision team began work on developing the program itself. Target audiences were segmented according to heart disease risk levels, with the intent of sending customized communication pieces to each segmented group. The team then developed direct mail pieces, point-of-service signage and HTML e-mails that specifically highlighted the Women’s HeartAdvantage program, our Web site and call center phone number, and–most importantly–encouraged individuals to continue their relationship with DBC.

Capturing this information via phone logs or WebTrends, for example, allows us to send group-specific e-newsletters to program participants. In one month’s e-newsletter, for instance, members of the “high-risk” group received content that emphasized the factors that put people at risk for heart disease. In the same month, members of the “health management” group instead received tips for managing stress.