Today we're obviously going to be talking about how to stay independent in today's world, which is a challenging task. With the tight competition and increasing consolidations, independently owned medical practices, they're facing a lot of challenges, like probably more than ever before in the history of the U.S. So to help us tackle this challenge, we are super lucky to have Ryan Evans here with us today, an expert in the field. So let me just introduce Ryan a little bit. So over the last few years, Ryan has helped hundreds of independent medical practices stay independent. While working with the physicians from these practices, he has gained a lot of insight into the challenges that are uniquely faced by independent practices over the years. So Ryan, thank you for being here with us today. Yeah, happy to be on. Awesome. Okay, well, we're going to move into our first question. So if you could tell us how you got into health care marketing and why you care about this area. Yeah, so I've worked in the SAS world for many years. I've worked in marketing outside of health care and I've worked in data outside of health care. So I've worked with many agencies, many organizations. I love working with marketing and there's a huge gap in health care marketing, or so I have thought and have come to find out. So I just think with my experience in marketing and then also an interest in health care. Awesome. Okay, well, what are some of the trends that you're seeing in health care when it comes to independent practice specifically? So I know there's a lot going on, but let's focus on independent practices. Yeah, I mean, in their title, independent practices, it's acquisitions are huge right now. I mean, it's huge in all over the place in our economy, but there's been a real big focus in health care for these PE firms, shifting their attention to independent practices and seeing how can we consolidate, how can we grow? That's a big one for me. Obviously, independent practices trying to keep up with big health care systems is gaining traction. And I also think health care systems are starting to pay attention to independent practices. Of course, you'll always have that brand name. And then really just the emphasis on data-driven decisions. Health care has not made a ton of data-driven decisions in regards to marketing. And it's a question being asked a lot. I don't think a lot of people know how to solve it yet, but they're asking about it. Those would be my biggest three. There's others, but those are my biggest three. Yeah. So you mentioned acquisitions, and obviously that's a big topic right now and kind of the heart of this webinar. So what can practices do from a marketing perspective to remain independent when all these acquisitions are going on? Independent groups may not like this answer for those listening, but to remain independent, I think you need to think how these PE firms are thinking, right? Because they're coming, this sounds dark, but they're coming to your area. They're trying to dominate and compete with big brands as well as the independent practices. And thinking how they think in regards to, they're wanting to acquire practices to make them more efficient. To grow them, to scale them. What's the purpose of a group? They're not just wanting to purchase an independent practice, they're wanting to grow it. So they're going to come in with a growth mindset. And for you as an independent practice, you really have to have an equal growth mindset. What marketing tactics, what operations tactics am I going to use to help us grow and compete in a market like this? I know that's vague, but that's a starting point. And I'm curious, in your experience in the past, have you seen that independent practices typically do have this growth mindset or is that something that they kind of need to adopt? It depends. It depends on how long we want to go on this topic, but you get those really successful independent practices with still a growth mindset, right? Our practice is full, we're super busy. Well, that's totally fine. The firm still want those groups. They're going to take that super full practice. And how do I take it to the next level? But then you have the other side of independent practices are like, you know what? We're full, we're happy. I don't really want to change what we're doing. We've always done it this way. It's gone well. We're going to stay the same. So I've seen it on both ends of the spectrum. Okay, good to know. So that kind of means, I guess, if you are a successful independent practice, you're still up for consolidation. That's kind of what I gathered from that right there. I've seen some of the most successful independent practices in the United States and specifically, let's say, like within orthopedics, for example, or gastroenterology. Yeah. They're also consolidating and becoming a part of these acquisitions. Okay, that's good to know. So when it comes to marketing, how can a practice, you know, you talked about data driven decision making, how will a practice accomplish that? How can they know the effectiveness of their marketing? How do they know if it's working? Yeah, it's been tricky in healthcare. So step outside of healthcare. When you think about like brick and mortar, retail, e-commerce, automotive, all these other industries. So my background is I work for a business intelligence tool, right? Our job was to help companies become more data driven in their decision making. Um, everybody's been doing it outside of healthcare. It's tricky with healthcare because everyone thinks I cannot do this in a HIPAA compliant way. How am I going to stay HIPAA compliant and track everything and measure everything? But data driven decisions means you have to understand if I'm spending money on marketing, what is it bringing back? Yeah. Right. What is it influencing? For example, um, everybody's doing it. Just healthcare isn't. And I think a lot of, a lot of, you know, organizations just don't realize there is, there is a HIPAA compliant way to do it. Um, one question to ask, I guess, for those listening is, I mean, the organization you're stepping, you know, you're thinking about working with, do they have BAAs, right? How do they, how do they work with your information? How do they work with your data? Um, how do you know that it's not a guesswork and that it's, it's real data? Yeah. Well, and I think like a big issue in the industry right now, at least that I've seen a hot topic is the HIPAA compliance with marketing. And so, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the BAA because I think sometimes practices sacrifice, um, insight into their marketing activities for the sake of, you know, being HIPAA compliant. So it's good to hear that. Um, so how can independent practices compete with established hospitals and PE groups that have large marketing themes, right? Because typically at an independent practice, people are wearing a lot of hats. So how can they even compete in that area? Yeah. Um, those are kind of, I view those as two separate things when you talk about the healthcare systems, hospital systems, and then the PE firms. Okay. Um, I'll explain why. I mean, they're both competition, right? But what independent practices, successful ones have done a really good job of in this market is promote their providers. Whereas hospital systems, healthcare systems, these big systems, they really focus on their brand, right? Everybody knows who we are. They see us on the bus. They see us on the freeway. They hear us on the radio. Um, everybody knows who they are. But when you think about how people are looking for providers today and more specialty care, they end up looking for who's the best provider for me, not just the best organization. So independent practices largely have done a good job of promoting their providers and they need to keep that up. Um, but within the PE firms, how do I keep up with them when they have, they're efficient, they are using softwares to be more efficient. They are not afraid to, um, invest in softwares, invest in growth and say, Hey, you know what? Here's where we want to get to be. So we're going to spend more marketing to get us there. Right. Whereas you get a lot of independent practices that are like, well, we don't really have the staff. So they ended up thinking that they can't set up for software. Whereas a good software is meant to enable having all those staff. But then they, they, they also think about this is the income that we have today. We're only going to work within this. How do you grow with that? Right. How do you grow when PE firms are acquiring tech companies, right. They're, they're building out budgets to grow these. And I think independent practices have to think like that if they want to grow. And there are going to be some that are like, you know what, where we're at is fine. And they're going to try and stay there and you have those. But as far as let's say the healthcare systems, they have big teams when they start to get into different subsets of marketing and data, they assign a human to that thing. Yeah. And then they also have softwares, but they independent practices don't have that luxury. You have to enable yourself with softwares and a different mindset. Yeah. Back to that growth mindset that you were talking about at the beginning. Yeah. I hate to be redundant on those, but like, Yeah, no, it's great. People need to hear it. Right. I think, so what I'm hearing is like using technology is the way to compete with, it sounds like you're saying that PEs are more open to, you know, using technology, whereas maybe a hospital group actually has a large scale marketing team. So, yeah, I'm going to be a little bit more bold and more open. They are, they will do it. Okay. So thinking like the competition growth mindset, you know, you're going to be open to adopting technology. I like that. So specifically when it comes to profits, how can marketing improve an independent practices bottom line? I know we were just talking about having that growth mindset, but of course having a profit is still an important part of a business. Yeah. I mean, the first thing to ask yourself is, do you even understand what is yielding the highest returns for you as an independent practice? If the answer is no, it's hard to really know where to start and what to base your growth mindset off of when you don't even know where you're at today. But let's say like, even if you're super full today and you keep saying super full, but like you're a full practice, you're, you're backlogged. Identifying those high value patients for you and going out into the market and saying, how do I use data to find more patients like this, right? More, let's say total knee replacement patients. How do I find more patients that are high value to us as an organization? Because there are marketing tactics. And of course, as a healthcare provider, you want to help everyone, but there are ways to go out and target those as a knee specialist. And so one, going back to that, understanding what your high value patients are. So you need data to figure that out. And then two, how do I use marketing tactics to then go target more of them? Yes. So I think like going back to our earlier topic of HIPAA, I feel like it's really hard to understand that targeted marketing and healthcare is possible because I think a lot of the time HIPAA kind of trips people up. So can you speak at all to like the mechanics or how is it possible to do targeted marketing and healthcare at this point? Yeah. So the only way to be targeted is to understand who you're targeting, right? I feel bad sounding so redundant, but like if you aren't, if you don't understand who you're trying to target, how do you build data models? There are companies out there that they have data models, big data teams, awesome data scientists that build out models and find patients who are more likely to need your care. You need to be using those. And then as far as tactics is there's, there's really two ways about the tactics, right? There's people who are already looking for care. So how do I spend money on marketing to capture them? And then the second aspect is how do I find those who aren't actively looking today, but they're likely to need care soon. And that's a separate ballgame, right? How do I get in front of them? Because you think about the healthcare systems, they're building their brand and they've been building it for decades. Yeah. How do I interject? Find those patients who are likely to need the care you're providing and target them specifically with messaging and not just like one message, like continual messages every month, every quarter, multiple platforms. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's an awesome answer. Thank you. So Ryan, I have one final question for you today. What is your number one marketing tip for an independent practice leader in 2023? Do I have to say it in one word or can I summarize? No, you can use more than one word. It just has to be your number one. Measure what you're doing. Track what you're spending money on. Know what you're doing today so that you can adjust for tomorrow. It's hard to make adjustments tomorrow when you don't even know what to adjust, right? At the end of the day, you're going to make guesswork or you're going to make guesses. Stop doing guesswork and use data. Use data to find high value patients and use data to track all of your marketing spend. That would be my number one suggestion. I love it. Okay. Well, Ryan, we're going to wrap up. So thank you so much for being here and sharing your insights today. And a thank you to all of our attendees. You know, as a special thank you to everyone who jumped on the webinar. Oh, wait, sorry. We're going to do questions. Okay. We got some typed on the right and the left. Let's see. Let's see what we got. Whether I choose to answer them or not is a different question. Okay. Ryan, do you want to answer them here? I can read them out to you if you want. I actually just think that that's a comment. Yeah, actually, it's just a comment here. I'll read it out loud. Okay. As someone who worked hard to make an independent practice stand out among competitors, I found that I was constantly battling leaders who thought they didn't need to spend on marketing. Patients will come to us since they need the care. Okay. So I think that was kind of going back to what you were saying, Ryan, about having a growth mindset. And I think it's easy to not have a growth mindset sometimes in healthcare, at least from what I've seen, because healthcare is an inelastic good, meaning people always are going to need it. And so you're like, why do I need a market and necessity like healthcare? But I kind of loved what you were saying about, well, there's lots of different options in the market for patients to go to healthcare. And how can you interject yourself? Did you want to comment on that? Yeah. I just think there actually is a question in that comment. And maybe this person wasn't meaning to ask it, but we get asked it and I get asked it all the time. Yeah. Is have these marketers and these independent practices who know or want to spend money to make money, but these independent practices that are physician owned and sometimes owned by providers who have been doing it for decades, they are the ones who don't want to adapt. Right. And that is a challenge is like, how do I convince these physicians to do it? And it kind of takes an army. You get these younger providers that come in and they're like, Hey, we marketing's changing. Right. Marketing is changing. And you can't, you aren't going to be able to do the things you did yesterday today, because again, like I said, at the very beginning of this conversation, these PE firms, it's happening all over the place and they're pushing forward thinking marketing. So as an independent practice, you know, your providers need to understand we have to push forward with this. Yeah. But if they don't get in the macro economy with it, they're, they're not going to think like that. So I do think that this is a challenge that this person brought up, even though they made the comment. Right. Okay. Well, I don't know that we have any more questions, so now I'm going to wrap it up. Take two. So as a special thank you to all our attendees, as I was saying, we are offering a free predictive report. Basically this report will show you patients in your area who need the high value procedures that your practice wants more of. So that's all for today. Thank you guys so much for joining. And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us.

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