How to identify and attract new patients in your area

There are many ways to care for patients as a physician—in a private practice, as part of a physician group, based out of a hospital, for instance—but from a business perspective, the success of any given approach involves one common factor: the ability to attract new patients.

While patient retention is a critical part of any healthcare organization’s operational strategy, patient acquisition is the key to growth. The specific acquisition target depends on a practice’s current volume and provider capacity: Newer practices may need to seek dozens of new patients each month to be profitable, let alone attain growth, while more established organizations may be able to set their goals lower.

Whatever your target figure, the challenge for you or your marketing team is to 1.) accurately identify new patients and 2.) effectively engage them, attracting them to your practice.

In this guide, we’ll explore some ways to leverage a range of intelligence—including procedure and diagnosis claims, healthcare reference and affiliations data, and population insights—to build and execute an effective patient acquisition strategy.

Define your ideal patients, then find them with data

A targeted patient acquisition strategy that addresses the unique needs of specific audiences will always be more impactful than one that attempts to speak to patients generally. Think about the kinds of patients your practice is best suited to caring for:

• Are they seeking a primary care provider or a specialist?
• Are they made up of a specific age range or gender?
• Where do they live, and how are they getting to your office?
• What’s their socioeconomic status?
• How are they most likely to engage with your marketing?

It’s okay if you don’t have all the details yet—you’ll get clarity as you study your market and re-evaluate your engagement efforts over time.

Speaking of your market, you should have a baseline understanding of the market share in your target area. You can use a combination of procedure and diagnosis claims data and population intelligence to determine potentially attainable opportunities across locations and service lines.

With your patient audience defined, it’s time to learn more about them. Using population insights like demographic data and social determinants of health (SDOH), you can analyze the entire population in your primary service area and identify the patients with the highest need and closest proximity for your target service lines or procedures.

Segment your audience and craft your messaging

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can segment them however you see fit (by service line, age range, income bracket, etc.) and begin to build a marketing campaign with crafted messaging for each segment.

Use population data along with any marketing insights you’ve uncovered from previous campaigns to determine the most effective channels for each segment. If you’re primarily targeting retired seniors, for instance, LinkedIn and X.com are probably not your most lucrative channels. Direct mail and sponsored healthcare content in the local media may prove more effective for that audience.

On the other hand, if you’re targeting teenagers for a sports medicine or pediatric practice, you might get great results from a dual-pronged approach via TikTok (for the teens) and outbound emails and search engine marketing (for their millennial and gen-X parents).

Rather than fixating on a single channel, take the omnichannel approach to patient marketing and consider all the ways your patients might engage with your brand. Most likely, you’ll benefit from employing a variety of channels, including social media, email, search engines, and sponsored content.

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 20% of U.S. adults surveyed did not have a primary care physician, which means some of your ideal patients may already be established at another practice. Claims data can help you track patients’ journeys within your market. If this data suggests that your target audience is largely accounted for, you might use reference and affiliations data to identify the physicians caring for them who are most likely to refer out of network—in other words, into your network—and market to those providers, too.

After you’ve segmented your audience and identified the best channels for engagement, you should craft messaging that positions your practice as the best equipped to meet their needs.

Use the full scope of your gathered intelligence—including claims, population, and reference and affiliations data, as well as primary market research—to highlight the factors that matter to them. Those might be your practice’s access to innovative technology that enables more effective treatment of a specific condition, record-low wait times, high patient satisfaction scores, or proximity to certain businesses or neighborhoods.

Launch your campaign, analyze, and adjust

It’s time to kick off your patient acquisition campaign. Activate your segments, start capturing leads in your CRM, and gather as much data as you can over the course of the campaign.

As the leads and engagement data begin to flow in, you can run return on marketing investment analyses to identify revenue gains related to new-new and retained patients. If certain channels or tactics don’t seem to be working, take note and make the appropriate adjustments going forward.

At this stage, be sure to leverage your population data and any acquired insights to assign leads from your current campaign to additional nurturing programs that address their propensities for other healthcare services.

Unless you have a particularly robust data team and a lot of time on your hands, you’ll likely have to work with a vendor to get the data and analytics you need to carry out this process from start to finish.

Healthcare commercial intelligence from Definitive Healthcare delivers claims, reference, and affiliations data and powerful analytics to help you navigate your market more effectively. And our Population Intelligence product enables predictive patient targeting with clinical propensity models, providing insights into consumer demographics, behaviors, and media habits to help you to better understand your market, pinpoint consumers most likely in need of care, and determine the most effective ways to reach them.

Want to explore our platform firsthand? Sign up for a free trial today and start planning your data-driven patient acquisition strategy.