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Today’s healthcare environment is highly competitive
and, as such, selecting sites for new facilities must be based
on the highest level of analysis. No longer do real estate
characteristics or even demographics give a healthcare system
adequate information to assure success for clinical facilities.
While demographics may tell you where people live, and what
their age, sex, ethnicity, household income and other characteristics
may be, these variables do not identify who will most likely
be the best probable healthcare consumers. Fortunately, there
are vast quantities of information that can be used to precisely
identify who a specific provider’s patients are, what
their lifestyles are and what their healthcare “purchasing
habits” are. This is the science of psychographics.
In the simplest terms, demographics identifies people; psychographics
identifies customers/patients.
The process of psychographic analysis, or segmentation, begins with a detailed
profiling of the healthcare entity’s existing patients.
Patients are analyzed utilizing thousands of psychographic
and lifestyle consumer behavior and not relying solely on
medical records. The psychographic behaviors analyzed range
from retail buying habits to leisure activities to restaurant
and healthcare usage. Core patients are further analyzed based
on MDC and ICD-9 coding and can then be divided into categories
based on these detailed psychographic profiles.
The patient profile is then analyzed against thousands of external
databases that provide healthcare-related information. These
databases include specific information about a household’s
healthcare purchase decisions, including the likelihood to see
a doctor, frequency of doctor visits, medications taken, insurance
policies held, types of healthcare purchases made on the Internet
(medications, vitamins, health information, etc.), as well as
the types of media that household members respond to. This information
is then compared and interfaced with comprehensive databases
covering virtually every household in the United States. (Buxton
uses in-house databases which include household-level data on
more than 116 million households with up to six individuals
in each household.) In total, more than 2,000 other variables,
in addition to the psychographic information, are considered
and evaluated to determine their impact on the success of a
given facility.
Determining an accurate definition of each facility’s
service or trade area is imperative to the success of your organization.
Patients travel analysis is based on drive-time rather than
distance in miles, as most people today are far more concerned
with how long it takes to get to a destination than how many
miles they must travel to get there. This information is applied
to a map that charts, from all directions, the specific time
a patient travels, taking into consideration speed limits, road
classification, length of road, time of day, as well as other
factors. As a result, the trade area looks like an irregular-shaped
polygon rather than a circle.
When you combine the patient analysis with the trade area analysis,
a predictive patient acquisition model can be developed to pinpoint
where the best locations are for a particular type of healthcare
facility in a given market or in any market across the United
States. This information is absolutely essential in properly
locating a facility close to where the highest concentrations
of core potential patients are. In the case of healthcare networks,
having this information, based on hard data analysis and not
“gut instinct,” substantially assists in developing
efficient networks to maximize patient access as well as capital
allocations. With the correct patient information, a network
can also open new facilities without fear of “cannibalizing”
existing locations.
Providers can use this information in a variety of other ways
to help them make more informed strategic decisions. Being able
to track trends can assist providers to adapt services around
patients’ needs. As the population grows or changes, a
provider’s range of healthcare services may need to change
or expand. With the right information, a provider can better
evaluate service lines and more confidently add services and/or
equipment.
One of the first questions that every healthcare administrator
or physician thinks of when considering psychographic patient
profiling is, “What about HIPAA?” The answer is
that a properly crafted HIPAA Business Associates Agreement
allows any healthcare entity to provide patient data for analysis.
The data must be used exclusively to prepare materials used
by and for that healthcare entity, and material provided by
that entity will not be used for any other purpose or made available
to any other parties. It is also advisable to execute a Mutual
Non-Disclosure agreement to assure complete confidentiality
and protection of proprietary information..
As Paula Crowley, CEO of Anchor Health Properties in Wilmington,
Del., stated, “Healthcare projects often were put in the
back of an office park or on a healthcare campus in an area
that was hard to find. However, we think about location like
a retailer, and we think of the project as a branch store. We
want it to be as accessible and convenient as possible.”
Think of patients as consumers--as retailers do--and utilize
the technologies that the most successful retailers use for
effective, profitable site selection.
Ken is Vice President of HealthCareID, responsible for business planning, market development and sales focusing on the healthcare industry. Serving patients at his private practice in Albany, NY for 22 years, Ken contributes greatly to Buxton's executive medical experience by helping understand the needs of clients in the medical field.
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PATIENT-CENTRIC PROFILING... continued 
