So far in this series we’ve covered viewing your facilities as assets in order to get them to work for you rather than against you, increasing efficiency and effectiveness by aligning your resources with demand, and the importance of understanding patient demand and who your patients are when evaluating your facilities.
Optimizing Service Lines
At this point, you know that a great site location for a facility will be one that’s as close to the highest concentrations of your potential patients as possible.
But the missing piece of the demand puzzle is knowing who your potential patients are for a particular service line. Who are the people with the highest propensity to need those services and be interested in your offering?
To know this type of patient demand, you must understand traditional healthcare demand data, including service line, supply and competition data.
But you must also analyze the vast consumer spending, behavioral and healthcare related information on every household in the U.S. – things like how these people live their lives, how they spend their money, how much they exercise and whether they take medicine at the first sign of pain.
This is important because demographically two households could be identical, but the way they live is distinctly different.
Combining that kind of consumer data with the traditional healthcare demand data for each service line will help you truly understand what the demand is at a granular level, as opposed to at a county or city level – which is not detailed enough to make actionable decisions regarding specific locations in a market.
If you know what the demand is, who the people with the highest demand for your particular service line are, and where everyone that looks just like them lives, you can evaluate your existing facilities and identify additional service lines that you could offer at each facility.
For example, you may have a primary care facility located in a trade area with strong demand for urgent care. If you can add the additional service line to that facility, then you’ve discovered an additional revenue stream that doesn’t require investment in a new building.
The Bottom Line
If you understand demand by each particular service line then you can easily develop strategies to grow your market share and enhance the performance of your existing portfolio of locations.
Don’t wait for the next post to learn about how a data-driven solution can help you maximize your assets by aligning your facilities and service lines with demand. We should chat today about a customized solution for your organization.