Episode 4: How to Build a Six-Figure Healthcare Practice while Maintaining HIPAA-Compliance

Transcript:

Adam
Hello, Facebook. Hello, LinkedIn. My name is Adam Zeineddine, and I’m super excited to be joining you today for this first HIPAA Vault Live stream. Okay, so let’s get started. Healthcare is a competitive industry. All medical practices and healthcare businesses need to attract a continuous flow of customers. However much work goes into running a medical practice, when the number one aim is patient care, it can take a lot of work to focus on marketing to new customers and growing your business as well. Today, we’re going to explore some of these key challenges and solutions to those challenges in how to build a six-figure healthcare practice while maintaining HIPAA compliance. So joining me today is MarcApple, founder of Forward Push, a marketing agency. And Marchas a ton of experience in helping medical businesses and medical providers chart out a path to marketing success. Marc, welcome. 

Marc
Hey, there, Adam. 

Adam
Hey, Gil

Marc
How are you guys doing? 

Gil
Doing great, Marc. 

Adam
And also joining us is Gil Vidals, the founder, and CTO of HIPAA Vault. The indefatigable, the unflappable Gil Vidals. Welcome, Gil. 

Gil
Wow, I love that. Thank you. Thank you for building me up like that. Yeah, I’m glad to be here today. Looking forward to it. 

Adam
Yeah, thanks. We’re looking forward to it as well. So, Marc, let’s get started. Let’s start with a little bit of background if you will. What first interested you in digital marketing? 

Marc
That is a great question. So I grew up first in traditional media. I come from a background of being a journalist, so I went to school for journalism. I loved writing. I loved interviewing bands and getting their story. And I started a magazine, which then, as most people know, print has kind of died out a little bit, and this thing called the Internet came around. So, in some ways, to answer your question, Adam, I was kind of forced into the digital world, where I could then take those skills that I was using as a journalist to the digital realm. 

Adam
Fantastic. Yeah. Evolve and adapt, right? 

Marc
Exactly. 

Adam
Marc, what I really would like to point out is your social media posts, specifically your LinkedIn posts. They’re engaging. And that’s one of the things that stood out to me when were initially talking about coming on the show. And I would encourage listeners to check you out on your LinkedIn page. We’ve talked a little bit before as well about your love for music and live concerts. So I was wondering, how does the passion for music and live concerts inspire your creative work? 

Marc
Yeah, 100%. I was just having this same sort of conversation with one of the creatives in the agency this week and were talking about sort of stepping outside your comfort zone. So, Adam, you know I love English pop music a lot. It’s probably one of my favorite genres, but it’s not unusual to find me at a heavy metal concert, classical music at the symphony, or something that’s probably a little bit not what you might expect. And from those situations, I tend to get the inspiration. I can see what other people are doing, what other people are liking. And the conversation that I had with the creative in our office, the question that we ended up with was “Why is Taylor Swift so popular? There must be something to her, right? Millions and millions of fans, Ticketmaster controversy. There must be something going on?”

And maybe particularly that some people don’t like her music. But there’s got to be something there. There’s got to be some sort of nugget that you can grab that you could use for your marketing. And that’s how I tend to think, and that’s how I encourage my team to think as well, and others. 

Adam
That’s fascinating. And talking a little bit about your team and moving on to them, tell us a little bit about your marketing agency forward push and maybe a little bit about your clients and who you represent. 

Marc
Sure. So we are a full-service marketing and advertising agency, and we specialize in working with healthcare providers as well as legal professionals. And by full service, that means that we do everything. We have people and clients that are going to come to us, that they’re opening the doors, and we have others that are well onto their career, but we help them along the way. And one of those main things, of course, that we do is website design and development, which has enabled us to have a relationship with HIPAA Vault. 

Adam
Fantastic. And a lot of our listeners and viewers are from the healthcare sphere, whether it be small healthcare practices or maybe small It development shops that are working on healthcare apps. But for the healthcare practices specifically, I was wondering if you could give us maybe an idea of the best place to start when it comes to setting up your online marketing presence. 

Marc
Yeah. So it’s taking the time to figure out who you want calling, and who you want, and filling out the forms on the site. And the other way to say that is who are your best patients, who do you want to help? And once you know that, it’s almost easy to start to figure out what to do on the marketing side. Because that’s where an agency like us, or if you have a writer on your team, or even if the specialist wants to do the writing themselves. You can start adding content to your website that answers the questions that those patients that you want are searching for online. That’s the first start. From there, it is then going into an advertising model, right? So what are you going to do to get your name out in a paid way versus the organic way that I was talking about? 

By putting content on your website? And then certainly, like you mentioned, Adam, LinkedIn, and that’s where I kind of spend my time, is social media. I look at LinkedIn as a social media platform much different than what you can do on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. LinkedIn is really where you can maybe not find your ideal patients, but find other practitioners that you can collaborate with and certainly be able to let them know about you so that they can refer patients to you. 

Adam
Yeah, no, that’s I think a really important place to start. And LinkedIn is free, right? So nothing is stopping one from getting on there and marketing themselves as a good launching pad. So moving on a little bit to some of the challenges, Marc, that you see faced by your clients and medical providers today, obviously in terms of marketing, could you talk a little bit about them? 

Marc
Certainly. So if we go back a couple of years, pre-COVID, pre-restrictions, pre-lockdown, everyone was okay making an appointment to see a doctor, to see a healthcare specialist. It was very easy to get in your car. You’d go see them, you’d be able to get a consultation and set an appointment. And then certainly the world changed and no one was going out at all, but there were still people that needed care. So if we take March 2020 today, people’s attitudes have changed. I was recently thinking about this, just in my personal life, I used to go to the grocery store every week for groceries, and now I just order them online. 2 hours later, they’re at my front door. I don’t even have to go to the grocery store anymore if I want to have a meal brought in, right? 

Gil
Lunch. 

Marc
After we finish speaking here, I just go on my app, order whatever I want, and someone’s going to leave it right at my front door, knock on the bell and hand it to me. No exchange of money. All done through the app. Perfect convenience. That attitude that we’ve all sort of now adapted goes into healthcare. Why do I have to come in and see the doctor? If I could do a consultation over the phone? Now, certainly, there are practices where you do need to go in. So I’m broadly speaking here, but the attitude of, well, I can just do a virtual consultation with you, which is what we had to do with our healthcare clients, switches them over to that thinking during the height of the pandemic. And what we’re finding is now that the restrictions have gone away and lockdowns have ceased. There’s a good batch of patients out there that still want that. 

And we haven’t been able to even convince or bring up to any of our practitioners that you should get rid of virtual consultations, because it’s one of the first things that people say. So that is the first thing, I think, that anyone in healthcare needs to sort of start to consider, if you haven’t or you didn’t do it through the pandemic, is how can you make yourself more convenient to your patients? And I know that we’re here to talk about the marketing aspects, but that is an aspect of marketing. Because if your competitor isn’t taking those virtual consultations, doesn’t make it easy to schedule online an appointment to meet with the doctor or the healthcare provider, you’re going to get beat. And it’s going to be competition down the street who’s maybe not as good as. You can’t let that happen. 

Adam
Yeah, no, definitely non to that. I think one of the questions I had about small local players, how do they compete. You might have already touched on it a little bit, but how would they compete against especially big industry players when it comes to marketing? 

Marc
Right? So it is David and Goliath out there, but I think you can’t let that deter you from doing things. That’s the first step. It’s just having the attitude. And when you walk into the ring, as I like to call it, there are going to be good days and there’s going to be bad days. But by being visible in your community and being a well-known brand name, an organization name, or a practitioner, you can beat the bigger competitors out there. So some examples sponsor the local softball team, sponsoring the high school band. There’s a chamber organization or a church group or something that would love to have a donation from you in exchange for them putting your logo and a link back to your website. Look for places to speak. Libraries are still active, Chamber of Commerce, any organization that will have you speak where you can get in front of an audience and tell them about what you do is great to do. 

And that’s marketing as well. A lot of people think marketing is, I got to spend money on social media, I got to spend money on Google. But sometimes it’s just getting out there, especially on the local front, being visible to the patients that you want to see, letting them know that you are a resource. And then it comes naturally for them when they search, when they have the Ailment or they’re looking for a specialist in that Google search, they’re going to find the bigger players in the market, and they’re going to see your name. What happens is the brain subconsciously is going to say, I know them and they’re great. And it just might be because they’ve seen your logo as part of sponsoring the high school band. 

Adam
Right. 

Marc
And the big brand doesn’t care. They’re not going to sponsor anything at the local level. So that’s where I feel like these local practitioners can win. Once you’ve got that’s really where then you can start saying, okay, I’m now going to focus on social media. I’m going to focus on paid advertising. I’m going to think about doing TV and some of the bigger things. Because you’ve built a foundation where you will receive an ROI because it’s not wasted money, because you’re going to be talking to people that know you. 

Adam
Yeah, no. There are some great tips there, and I think it’s key is there are many things that you can do, but the most important thing is to get started with doing one or two and then build and add to that as you go along. 

Marc
Yeah, you’re right. 99% is showing up. Yeah. Right. If you can get out of bed and get there, the rest sort of just comes naturally. 

Adam
Yeah. And when we’re talking about medical clients and websites specifically, we’ve worked together now, I think, for a couple of years, full disclaimer. Marcis a WordPress customer of ours. We host WordPress sites for some of his clients. Marc, could you tell us a little bit about, from a security or HIPAA standpoint, what attracted you to host with HIPAA Vault? 

Marc
For sure, probably the biggest thing is customer service. And I’m not just saying that because Adam and Gill are on the phone because I can tell you that we researched a lot of different hosting providers and it came down to a level of customer service. Because for us as an agency, there is nothing worse than getting a call on a Saturday afternoon from a client telling you that their website is down or something’s wrong. And when that does happen, you need a provider and a partner that you can contact. And we haven’t been in that issue where someone has called us on a Saturday with our HIPAA Vault sites. But I have been in those issues where we had to reach out to a hosting provider and there was no one there on a Saturday afternoon or the person was talking to was A, B, or C-level tech person. 

Marc
That was the main thing, Adam. It was just first, the customer service and knowing that HIPAA Vault was going to be there if something happened. The second thing, too, is the resources. So even just being on this webinar, which I appreciate you having me on, but the other resources that HIPAA Vault offers so that we can pass that on to our clients, to let them know why we’re recommending where their site should be and why? The question we always get is, well, why do I have to pay that so much? Why is it HIPAA compliant? What does that mean? We’re not asking any questions. We’re not doing this, we’re not doing that. The level of knowledge that healthcare providers have regarding whether it’s HIPAA, they’re usually very well versed, hopefully, about what happens in the official papers that are being signed, the computer systems, and similar to not knowing about how to do their marketing, the website and where it goes just sort of falls into that bucket. 

So back to what I was saying the resources that HIPAA Vault provides is a value to us because then we don’t have to preach it to our clients. We can say we have a trusted partner here who we recommend, and we can bring them to HIPAA Vault and then let HIPAA Vault do the talking. And we’re confident that it’s the same thing we’re going to say too. 

Adam
That’s fantastic. And Gail, I was wondering if you had any recommendations for small healthcare companies that are looking to maybe work through Marcwhen it comes to hosting and what to look for on the HIPAA compliance side, and what to pay attention to when it comes to selecting a hosting vendor. 

Gil
Sure. Well, there are a lot of factors, and I think Marcprobably struck the nail on the head when he said that you need someone that is accessible. Because I’ve had customers that for one reason or another, their project ended and they left and then they came back later. And I always ask customers that return, why’d you come back? And the number one reason I hear is that when I went over to hosting companies B or C or D, they were no longer responsive. There was nobody there. The email could take 24, 48 hours to respond to, or nobody is picking up the phone. And I’m an older guy, but back in the day, we’d always answer the phone. And so we’ve decided to continue that. Instead of hiding behind a form somewhere, we answer the phone and we’re like, hey, we can help you right now. 

What do you need? And I think that seems trivial, but that’s one of the main things these days that you need. So that’s from a customer service point of view, from a technical point of view, one key question that the medical practitioners can ask when they’re looking for a HIPAA-compliant host is just simply, hey, I’d like to talk to your compliance manager. That’s a great question because a couple of things will happen. One is the host might say, we don’t have one of those. And that’s a big red flag. It’s like, well, wait a minute, you don’t have a compliance manager. Or they may say, well, we have one, but he’s not available for you to talk to. So you want accessibility and you want to be able to say number one, do they have a compliance manager? Is he going to keep an eye on my website to make sure it’s compliant? 

I’d like to talk to him about it. And that’ll weed out a whole bunch of companies that just put HIPAA on their website but didn’t change anything in their operations to support HIPAA compliance. So that would be my suggestion. Adam. 

Adam
Yeah, thanks for sharing that insight, Gil. And for listeners and viewers that are interested in asking any questions concerning their HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting, feel free to visit us@hipaavault.com. We’ve got a live chat function there. You can reach out and ask any questions or just drop us a form and we’ll get back to you on that. So, when it comes to forward, push, Marc, I think forwardpush.com is your website, is that correct? Correct. Yeah. And what would be the best place for listeners and viewers to reach out to you if they have any marketing-specific questions? 

Marc
So, our website Forwardpush.com, you mentioned, and you also mentioned on LinkedIn, that’s another great place to find me and learn more about me. And my profile is easy to find. All you do is search Mark, M-A-R-C apple, A-P-P-L-E. I’ll come right up and I answer all my messages that come into my inbox personally, so you’ll be talking to me and I’m happy to answer any questions. 

Adam
Fantastic. And, yeah, please do reach out to Marc. He puts the Marcon marketing. 

Marc
I’m now going to trademark that and buy that. 

Adam
Fantastic. All right, well, thank you, Marc. Thank you, Gil, for being such good sports today. For the viewers and listeners, please, like, share, and subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell for the latest in HIPAA cloud tips and security. And that’s your lot for today, folks.