Smart Selling: Distributor Sales Strategies from HIDA

By Elizabeth Hilla, Senior Vice President

To Boost Sales, Learn to Discuss Quality Metrics

Quality metrics are more important than ever for your healthcare customers. Years ago, providers mainly focused on attracting patients – more volume meant more revenue. But today, their performance on measures such as flu vaccination rates, hospital readmissions, or infection rates can directly impact how much they get paid.

Nearly every market segment, payer, and payment model has its own set of quality measures – resulting in hundreds of different metrics. That’s a huge challenge for your customers, but it’s also an enormous opportunity for you as a healthcare supplier. Tying your products and services to quality metrics can be a powerful way to get the customer’s attention and meet a real need.

Common, crucial metrics
There are a number of measures that are incorporated into many different payment models, and are likely to be top-of-mind for almost every customer. Here are a few, and some ideas for how they might be incorporated into your sales approach.

• Readmissions. Readmissions metrics apply to both hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. Talk with your customers about products that help patients recover after a hospital stay, and ensure that they don’t get sick again – for example, PT testing to ensure that a patient’s blood-thinning medication is getting just the right result.

• Infections, wounds, falls. Providers can be significantly penalized when preventable infections and conditions occur. Products that kill bacteria, prevent wounds, or keep patients safe from falls can all be tied directly to quality metrics and, therefore, to payment.

• Patient satisfaction ratings. Patient ratings are now directly impacting provider payment – and of course bad ratings can also scare off new patients. Show how your products can improve patient satisfaction – for example, products that reduce noise or improve comfort.

• Provider-patient communications. This is a key element of most patient satisfaction surveys. Rapid diagnostics tests are a great example of products that can improve doctor-patient communications. Talk to your customers about how giving patients their test results while they’re still in the office might affect this rating.

• Chronic disease management. Many of these programs measure specific areas like keeping diabetic patients’ glucose under control and other metrics related to chronic diseases.

• Influenza and pneumonia vaccination rates. A growing number of providers are measured both on staff and patient vaccination rates.

Delving deeper
To maximize the impact of quality metrics as a sales tool, it’s helpful to do some additional homework.

• Find out which payers are most important. You may already know this, but if you don’t, ask. Chances are your contact person in the account can tell you who their top few payers are by volume – Medicare, Medicaid, or specific insurance companies.

• Ask about which specific payment models they take part. Is the account part of an accountable care organization (ACO) in the Medicare Shared Savings Program? Part of an ACO with private insurance agreements? Participating in a bundled payment demo? Something else? Is one of these programs considered more important than others to the practice’s or facility’s financial success?

• Learn what quality metrics apply. Almost every provider is being rated based on infection rates and readmissions. But some metrics are specific to certain programs. For example, a nursing facility might be participating in a bundled payment model that measures patient recovery types for a specific rehab service. Find out which metrics matter the most to your customers.

• Investigate your customers’ strengths and weaknesses. Many quality metrics are publicly reported. If you find areas where your customer performed poorly, you may be able to tie that need to a solution you offer (diplomatically, of course).

For more resources on building your sales skills, check out HIDA’s AMS Sales Training Program. For more information, contact Elizabeth Hilla, 703-838-6130, hilla@hida.org.