This week’s episode looks at how having a marketer’s mindset can make a difference to your business. Kate Colbert, author of Think Like a Marketer, explains the importance of stories in today’s competitive world. She also shares the common pitfalls of DIY marketing and why companies should avoid them.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:04 What it means to think like a marketer
• 06:22 How stories can save lives and make someone stand out in a competitive world
• 10:14 Knowing your differentiator is different than knowing how to tell it
• 14:12 Why it’s important for agents, brokers, and benefits advisors to know their differentiator
• 18:34 The pitfalls of Do-It-Yourself marketing

Quotes:

02:54 “If we can teach all of ourselves how to think like marketers, one, we can communicate better with one another but two, we’d generate more sustainable, profitable growth for our organizations.”

09:02 “I’m surprised when I work with a lot of organizations that are really smart and have great products or great services, they’re absolutely brilliant, and I ask them, ‘But what makes you different from that other guy (…)?’ And a lot of times they can’t articulate it. They really don’t know what makes themselves meaningfully different. They have to understand what that difference is and then they have to have a story that will stick with their customers.”

18:18 “I would advise your listeners to be spending some time thinking about the words that they’re using because the words that they use— if they’re not intentional about them— will attract the wrong customers.”

21:13 “If you’re going to make money— if your marketing is going to have a really great return on investment— you have to stop panicking about every dollar you spend. You have to start thinking about what’s the right spend to get you the right return.”

Resources:

Think Like a Marketer: How a Shift in Mindset Can Change Everything for Your Business

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This week’s episode presents key insights into where the rising musculoskeletal claims are coming from and how we can prevent them. Melissa Gill, owner and CEO of On-Site Solutions, highlights the significant intervention of physical therapy in minimizing the risks of work-related injuries and in creating a proactive, positive, and engaging workplace culture.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:35 Where the issue on high musculoskeletal claims stem from
• 06:27 Being preventive with physical therapy
• 11:22 How physical therapists can help the virtual workforce in preventing musculoskeletal conditions
• 13:53 KPIs that are being tracked by On-Site Solutions
• 19:03 How On-Site Solutions translate their services into employee engagement

Quotes:

03:31 “I’ve seen over the years, [nurse triage lines and a lot of the companies we worked with] they didn’t know what else to use so they have a nurse call-in line. And it’s not that those are not helpful, but you have to go to the medical person that’s got the most amount of knowledge about the musculoskeletal system.”

12:28 “Even if you have a perfect setup [you have a great chair, you even have a sit-stand, everything’s perfectly set up], your body was meant to move. It was meant to move every 20 minutes, that’s really what we have to do.”

14:28 “Originally, we only had clients that had really high sprain/strain claims. Very clear ROI. Get those claims down. We can look at the report of injuries. We can look at the OSHA Recordables. We can look at work claim numbers and dollars. Very clear data. And we still track that [if that’s important to the company]. But now, what we’re seeing is more and more employers are coming to us because it’s a quality of life.”

20:12 “So many factors change that most of the companies we start with, or most of the employees we work with— we continue those relationships. We continue seeing them because there’s always something else that can be added— education, stretching, strengthening, or something to make their body skills because they can feel.”

21:23 “The surprising thing that the companies don’t realize is how well-received it is [the data and the stats go with that, right?] But it’s really looked at as a benefit. It really has helped shift the culture, especially in a tight labor shortage, to a very engaging, proactive, and positive relationship.”

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This week’s episode highlights the tools and techniques to be effective and confident in building a referral base. Bill Cates, president of Referral Coach International, provides an in-depth discussion on the “Perpetual Revenue System” and what should be covered in order to successfully turn referrals into introductions.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:39 An overview of Bill’s books: “Get More Referrals Now”, “Don’t Keep Me A Secret”, “Beyond Referrals”, and “Radical Relevance”
• 06:44 The 3-step process to building a referral base
• 11:17 How mindset works in the “Perpetual Revenue System”
• 14:27 What items are covered in the value discussions?
• 16:49 Turning referrals into introductions
• 22:14 Get access to Bill’s free downloadable e-guide

Quotes:

03:58 “The referral is not the end game; the referral is a means to the end.”

07:04 “Our studies have shown that it’s not loyal, satisfied clients who give referrals and make introductions— it’s engaged clients. What’s an engaged client? Someone who feels engaged with your value. They like the things you teach. They like the questions you ask. They’d get them thinking in ways that also teach, they like your responsive service.”

13:43 “Yes, we need to serve the heck out of our clients. And some of those people will introduce us to others because some are inclined to do it on their own. But if we don’t have a way to be proactive, then we’re gonna miss a tremendous amount of opportunity.”

17:28 “To me, the process is not complete if we haven’t been introduced— if we haven’t been connected in some ways.”

Resources:

FREE High-Content eGuide from Bill Cates

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This week’s episode looks into the prevalent chronic conditions that women suffer from and the main reasons why they’re unable to have access to proper care. Joe Connolly, founder and CEO at Visana Health, explains how a tech-enabled, high-touch care model can provide solutions and make a difference to women’s healthcare.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:11 Introduction to the Virtual-First Healthcare model
• 06:58 What caused the challenges in women’s healthcare
• 10:53 How the care model has transformed women’s healthcare experience
• 14:15 How big providers look at the adoption of this care model
• 16:28 Cost savings for self-funded employers
• 17:51 Majority of the population being served are women with gynecological conditions

Quotes:

03:13 “Virtual-first providers have lots of ancillary providers to have a holistic care model… The technologies that they’ll use (…), it’s a much more elegant technology platform that can include a really elegant symptom tracker so you can track patient reports and outcomes over time— which then can feed back into your care model so that you can make continuous improvements.”

04:21 “Asynchronous care— typically the way that you will do it— is a text message, email, in-app messaging, care that’s delivered not in real-time.”

11:08 “In addition to having longer times that we’re interacting with the patient, we also make sure that all of our providers go through racial disparity training where they’re educated on these differences and we make sure that they’re aware of these differences when they’re interacting with patients.”

18:06 “About 30-35% of women will have heavy menstrual bleeding or uterine fibroids; 15-20% of women have endometriosis. So these are very very high prevalence diseases, and you just don’t hear about them a lot because there’s this element of shame or stigma associated with them.”

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This week’s episode covers the significant decision factors that every patient must have in this current state of healthcare. Dr. Sanjay Prasad, surgeon and author of Resetting Healthcare, explains the need to reform the industry and how transparency can also help raise the quality of care.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:17 How COVID19 has impacted the state of healthcare
• 06:03 Avoiding the ‘Patient Trap’
• 11:10 Success Rate: One of the deciding factors in choosing a healthcare professional
• 13:25 A medical cost doesn’t have a direct relationship with quality
• 16:24 Introducing a platform that helps patients go for smarter options

Quotes:

05:18 “Biopsies were even put on hold. Colonoscopies were on hold. There were undiagnosed colon tumors that are now emerging. But 2021 and beyond, these surgeries are starting to be scheduled again. There’s an explosion of cases that’s happening in 2021 and it’s gonna continue for the next five years. This is a great time— a great pause if you will— in healthcare and a great time to reset healthcare as we know it today.”

07:04 “Depending on specialty, 15-30% of surgeries that are being performed today are unnecessary, have not been peer-reviewed. Patients are suffering from having unnecessary surgery and suffering from complications of unnecessary surgery. And patients are getting referred to surgeons that don’t necessarily have the best outcomes.”

12:03 “When you’re talking to a surgeon, you need to have their outcomes [data] the past year [the past two years], not their lifetime data.”

13:58 “Price and quality are completely unrelated. You can have a high price with high quality. You can have a high price with low quality. You can have a lower price with low quality and give a low price with high quality. We’re all trying to achieve lower prices with high quality, but the systems have to be mission-central and primarily focused on quality alone initially and truncate with pricing.”

16:13 “It’s all about creating a consumer that’s well-educated, well-informed, making good decisions.”

Resources:

• Resetting Healthcare book *Amazon Link

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This week’s episode introduces a self-care tech platform for Diabetics. Integrated with AI and Machine Learning, this new approach to healthcare is believed to enhance consumer experience. Lonny Stormo, CEO of Pops Diabetes Care, describes what these tech advances would offer as we lean toward consumer-driven healthcare.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:51 The concept and practical sense of “Democratizing Healthcare”
• 06:16 On-Demand Healthcare: What drives this trend?
• 09:15 Lonny on reasons why his platform focuses on diabetes
• 10:30 Remote patient care management vs self-care thru tech platform
• 13:46 How a Diabetic user experience looks like during an interaction with AI and virtual health assistant
• 18:50 Ongoing developments and roadmap for AI in the healthcare industry

Quotes:

05:14 “Look back at the beginning of companies like Fitbit and how we all started spending our own hard-earned money on buying simple things like activity trackers and apps that go along with that so that we could all start to kinda be healthier and take more steps; it’s clear that that has started to happen and now we see more and more coming into the consumers’ homes so they can take care of themselves as opposed to going to a doctor.”

11:11 “Self-management through a tech platform— which is where I believe all of healthcare’s gonna end up beyond kinda letting go of remotely managing people or patients— starts with nobody strives to be a patient (…). What we wanna do is give them an experience that they can use and choose to use themselves to take care of themselves.”

11:44 “At Pops when somebody starts using our solution, we don’t call them a participant. We don’t call them a member. We call them an owner because now they’re in a position where they can start to own their own life using our technology. “

20:45 “This is consumer-driven healthcare; consumer demand is going to select which solutions work for them and which ones don’t. And it’s no longer gonna be kind of what is the payor paying for or the provider providing as much as what the consumer wants, and then it’s their choice if they want to take that next step in the circle and engage with the doctor.”

21:29 “There’s a lot of data that’s starting to come out that says when people self care using tech platforms, they overall lower their claims cost. So that’s good for the payor, that’s good for the self-insured employer, and/or whatever patient pay is happening.”

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This week’s episode suggests how employers can optimize their recruitment process to hire top talent and set them up for success. Robert Nickell, founder and CEO of Rocket Station, delves into the 3 foundational steps critical for the hiring and success of every individual or outsourced talent.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:13 The top 1 mistake that people make when hiring
• 04:20 3 Steps to Successful Hiring: Alignment, Documenting, Hiring
• 13:07 What defines an outsourced talent?
• 16:39 Social networking sites as efficient tools for reaching outsourced talents
• 19:41 Key to retaining talent

Quotes:

08:50 “The type of person, the profile, the experience that we’re looking for, and the interview questions we can ask, all of that stimulating comes from first two steps, which are getting really organized and documenting everything. Now, we can go hire the right person.”

10:54 “If you can help people be fulfilled by putting the right people in the right role (…), to me that’s caring about people— number 1 is legitimately caring about them. And then number 2 is setting them up for success.”

14:15 “Technology is now bridging the gap where— international employees that have every bit of talent, experience, and qualifications that we do here stateside— we now have access to those people.”

20:48 “The big shift in management, in my opinion, is all about managing to outcomes and to results. You gotta be able to set clear expectations and then manage to numbers.”

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This week’s episode looks into the problem areas of every regulation that puts industries through expensive endeavors and tons of paperwork. Sarah Borders, co-founder and principal consultant at Benefits Compliance Solutions, gives interesting tidbits that clients can do right away to mitigate some of the risks.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 03:23 About COBRA: What are its problem areas, loopholes, and opportunities?
• 08:41 About ACA: Misclassification of employees is identified as the biggest problem area. How do employers usually deal with late filing/incorrect filing? 
• 13:38 About HIPAA: Challenges toward privacy and security
• 16:09 With the differences in regulations per state, how can advisors give guidance to clients who are multi-sited in multi-states?
• 19:06 Updates on new regulations and their possible impacts on the industry

Quotes:

03:41 “A lot of the times when we use vendors or service providers to help us comply with their requirement, we might think that we have no obligations any longer— that we’ve sort of indemnified ourselves. Because of that, I believe the oversight in COBRA or the knowledge that an employer should probably have [at least basic knowledge] isn’t there because they aren’t thinking about it.”

06:22 “I think we all get that termination of employment triggers COBRA, but there are other triggering events such as death, divorce, child aging up the plan, also a reduction in hours. But when you have one of these triggering events, you also have to have a loss of coverage. And so [I think] sometimes employees or former employees get left out of COBRA because there isn’t enough oversight and did this person actually trigger COBRA, or should we have been offering them COBRA.”

11:46 “Before, we’ve seen a little bit of leniency related to late filings or incorrect filings or even just penalty letters for premium tax credits. However, it takes hours and hours of work to demonstrate, to go back and have to prove that this employee shouldn’t have been offered coverage in the first place or was and waived it. Also if you never file (…) or you filed late, you have to spend the time, the hours, the energy, and even paying somebody to help you to be able to [again] prove to the IRS that you did or did not comply.”

14:07 “HIPAA: Privacy, security, and the administrative simplification rules apply to covered entities. And a health insurance plan, a group health plan, is a covered entity (…) And so because an employer is responsible for that covered entity plan, they have to provide HIPAA privacy and security, which has a lot of owners’ requirements, to make sure that that PHI is being properly maintained, stored, transmitted, and so forth.”

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This week’s episode introduces a next-level type of healthcare that people can already receive in the comfort of their own homes. John Young, SVP Growth at Nice Healthcare, explains why it’s going to be a growing demand for employers and members.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• 02:39 How Nice Healthcare’s business model had come to fruition
• 08:03 Scope of healthcare services being offered
• 10:35 On the affordability of provided services
• 15:11 Time allotted for virtual and in-person visits
• 16:50 Pharmacy benefits made available for members

Quotes:

04:30 “It’s important to use the word ‘clinic’ because our scope of service— in what we’re able to provide via technology and via bringing our clinicians directly into the home— is very similar to what is found in traditional bricks and mortar clinic locations; so it’s important for us to identify as such so that our members know that they’re gonna have access to that same level of care despite not traveling into a traditional clinic location.”

05:31 “The atmosphere that had fostered in the relationship between a provider and a patient when we’re actually sitting on one of our patients’ couch (…), provides a whole other layer of relationship and interaction that is really hard to replicate in some other type of venue than actually getting into someone’s home, and we get to learn a lot about that specific patient.”

13:13 “The fact that we’re not operating in the bricks and mortar locations, the fact that we’re contracting directly with employers and that fitting claims through an insurance mechanism, and the fact that we’re in NP-like clinic— that all adds up to us being able to offer this set of price point that is affordable for our employer and for our members.”

19:59 “I certainly think that this is gonna continue to be somethin’ that not just clinics are trying to unlock, but that customers and consumers are gonna continue to demand. And so I think we’ll continue to see more and more of a shift out of traditional venues and continue to bring more and more services into the patient’s home.”

Resources:

• Nice Healthcare | Direct Primary Care 

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