Healthcare Starz increases client acquisition rate by 32% and top line revenue by 24%

The astonishing cost of a vacant healthcare position

With labor making up about 60% of hospital costs, having a fully staffed, skilled workforce is critical to maximizing hospital revenue and operations. As such, when a position is vacant at any level of the healthcare organization, the monetary impact is significant. When a physician leaves a hospital, the cost of this turnover is estimated to be $400,000-$600,000 per provider. In addition, the average cost to replace a mid-level hospital employee is 150% of their annual salary, and this number becomes even more staggering at the executive leadership level. When a leadership position becomes vacant due to an unexpected resignation, termination, leave of absence, or demotion, the effects of this vacancy can be felt long-term, taking an average of 3-6 months for hospitals to find a full-time replacement. To mitigate these costs, many hospitals nationwide are in need of services to help fill these vacancies as soon as possible so they can maintain continuity of leadership in the departments that have leadership vacancies.

Healthcare Starz is an interim/transitional leadership and locum tenens consulting company that delivers measurable financial and operational improvements to acute care hospitals nationwide. Specializing in interim and transitional nursing and operational leadership services, they fill vacant positions with highly experienced healthcare consultants, buying their clients the time they need to find the right permanent leader. During these 3 to 6-month consulting engagements, their consultants assess the departments and their staff and provide practical recommendations that save money, improve operational efficiency, and boost employee morale. Additionally, Healthcare Starz’s consultants help hospital nursing and ancillary services departments prepare to pass their upcoming Joint Commission Surveys. Healthcare Starz also provides other consulting services such as conducting targeted Retained Searches for department and C-suite leaders while their consultants are holding down the day-to-day operations of the departments until the right permanent leader is identified and hired. They work closely with the hospital’s HR departments, C-suite, and other stakeholders to ensure that the right permanent leader not only has all the necessary clinical and operation skills for the permanent role, but also that they are a perfectly aligned match with the culture of their clients. They also provide locum tenens services, where they staff various physician and nursing roles including anesthesiologists, nurse anesthetists (CRNAs), radiologists, and hospitalists.

The challenge

Accessing quality hospital and executive information to grow marketing and sales

For over a decade, Healthcare Starz has demonstrated an impressive track record of ROI for their clients. Knowing the impact their services have on healthcare organizations, the company set sizeable growth goals to expand their client base. However, closing more business was dependent on scaling their marketing and sales efforts. They needed to grow their marketing funnel, identify more qualified leads, and gain a comprehensive understanding of these prospects before outreach. To get the information they needed, they spent an excruciating amount of time sifting through hospital and provider websites, cold calling hospitals, and reaching out to executives and their assistants one-by-one on LinkedIn. This research was fragmented and extremely time consuming to aggregate, and at the end of the day, it wasn’t very comprehensive or accurate. Without a reliable source for this information, the team encountered the following challenges:

1. Lead generation: They needed a better way to find five types of C-suite hospital executives, which were the CEO, CFO, COO, Chief Nursing Executive, and Chief Medical Officer. To find this information, the company would research these contacts through Google, phone calls, and LinkedIn. Collecting this information took key members up to 10-15 hours per week which could have been spent on other revenue generating activities.
2. Email marketing: The company struggled to find accurate contact information for these C-suite executives. They tried purchasing email lists from vendors promising this information, but they found the lists were never exactly what they needed, and they often contained incomplete and incorrect information that resulted in astoundingly high bounce rates, which caused their corporate email to get labeled as spam on a few occasions. The team encountered some short-term success when they accessed a static list of hospital executives that contained current and accurate contact information. However, as the information aged and as executives changed positions, the bounce rate for this list increased to nearly 70%.
3. Sales prioritization and planning: The company’s research on healthcare organizations was limited to what they could find online through public sources. They recognized the need to have better intelligence that would help them to focus their energy on the right prospects. In addition, having a better understanding of how hospitals operated, who the key executive contacts were, and how to reach them would lead to more targeted and informed sales conversations.

These challenges truly exemplified their urgent and crucial need for current, accurate, and regularly updated data on hospitals, networks, and executives.

The solution

Leveling up marketing and sales activities with invaluable healthcare organization data

For the last few years, the CEO of Healthcare Starz heard positive remarks about Definitive Healthcare by several of his consulting and staffing industry peers. Intrigued about what it could do for his sales and marketing strategy, he explored the platform and was quickly sold on the value of Definitive Healthcare’s data. Healthcare Starz chose to leverage HospitalView, which provided comprehensive intelligence on hospitals and health systems—all within a single self-service platform. With Definitive Healthcare’s market and organizational level data, the company had access to critical information including executive contacts, financials, staffing, purchasing, affiliations and more. This enabled the company with unparalleled intelligence across the entire customer journey. Specifically, it allowed Healthcare Starz to:

1. Grow qualified marketing leads: The company now uses Definitive Healthcare as a lead source for their marketing. Using the Executives Search function, they can search the entire market by role, allowing them to easily identify and locate their target executives. Using the Report Builder feature allows them to pull in additional information about the hospital to segment their audience and tailor their messaging.
2. Improve email performance: The company leverages Definitive Healthcare’s verified contact information, which includes emails, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles. The team finds the contact information to be both reliable and current despite the changing healthcare landscape, mergers and acquisitions, and executives on the move. Because the data is constantly updated and refreshed, it significantly increased their email open rates while keeping their email bounce rates low.
3. Prioritize and plan sales outreach: Definitive Healthcare’s hospital and network profiles have helped pursue the right opportunities. For example, using financial information in the database, helps to determine if a prospect has the budget for their services, which has proved to be vital intelligence, preventing them from spending time and resources on a lead that’s not a good fit. In addition, the company uses Definitive Healthcare profiles to prepare for client meetings. Having a holistic understanding of the organization ahead of time allows them to maximize their time with the client.

The impact

Increasing client acquisition rate by 32% and top line revenue by 24% using Definitive Healthcare data

The impact of Definitive Healthcare data is felt across sales and marketing. The CEO of Healthcare Starz reports that the company has already booked millions of dollars in business with hospital clients, which has substantially exceeded their investment in Definitive Healthcare.

Definitive Healthcare’s data on healthcare organizations and executive contacts has transformed the company’s marketing. The company has been able to expand their marketing database significantly, enabling them to scale their marketing efforts and reach 100x more contacts per week. “Comparing our output before and after Definitive Healthcare is like comparing a small puddle of leads and opportunities to a flowing river of leads,” says Monte Kasten, CEO of Healthcare Starz. In addition to broadening their email marketing reach, they’ve also improved the quality of their leads, evidenced by a 5x increase in email open rates and a 4x improvement in email response rate to book meetings. Having detailed information about the healthcare organizations’ operations, financials, executives, affiliations, and physicians has been an incredible time savings for the company. For lead generation, the company reports saving an average of 10-15 hours per week by leveraging Definitive Healthcare’s contact information. It has helped during the sales process to prioritize leads that are the best fit for their services and to prepare for prospect and client meetings by having a deep understanding of the healthcare organization ahead of time.

Leveraging this information ultimately has helped Healthcare Starz reach more hospitals and provide their clients with exceptional services and quantifiable results. Healthcare organizations realize an average of 2-5x return on their investment by using Healthcare Starz interim leadership and locum tenens consultants. For example, one of their consultants has been an Interim Emergency Room Director for 6 months at a large academic medical center. Within 6 weeks of starting her consulting engagement, she identified a problem with EKG billing, which saved the client $60,000 per month. She also optimized the staff scheduling which eliminated most of the overtime, resulting in even more cost savings for the department. In a recent revenue cycle management engagement, a Healthcare Starz Interim Director of Patient Financial Services was able to recover millions of dollars by fixing an inefficient billing process that had failed to meet their contractual requirements with payors and resulted in large volumes of insurance denials.

Healthcare Starz has made an impressive impact on acute care hospitals across the nation, and as they continue to expand their reach, Definitive Healthcare will continue to be an invaluable asset and resource for the company.