We Are The Centers - Maximizing a Powerful Brand
When we officially launched as The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics in January of 2013, prudently, we all realized the need to focus first and foremost on building a solid foundation for our promising organization. Over the last three and a half years, thanks to the hard work of so many dedicated physicians, administrators and staff, we have executed strongly on this goal. With our foundation in place, we are now ready to take an important next step, embracing The Centers’ brand in all that we do.
My location, Prince William Orthopaedics, along with my fellow Virginia locations, is excited to lead this charge as the pilot group converting completely over to The Centers. While at first it can seem hard to give up the individual brands we have cultivated for decades, we can’t let nostalgia get in the way of progress. The risks inherent with inaction are staggering, and the benefits and opportunities presented to us as a unified, powerful organization are far too great.
Among the Virginia locations, our goal is to create a cohesive and excellent patient experience across all consumer touchpoints – in the office, online and via our marketing collateral. We are developing the ideal CAO office. That way, no matter what location a patient visits, they will be confident in their decision to entrust their care to The Centers.
It all starts with branding. However, how we market ourselves must be aligned with the actual patient experience. That’s why the patient experience training, led by SullivanLuallin, is such a critical part of this process, ensuring we develop best practices for customer service and relentlessly live by these principles. It was exciting to see how well-received the recent training sessions were by all members of our organization.
The days of ignoring online reviews and still seeing our lobbies packed with patients are rapidly coming to a close. In fact, research shows 71 percent of Millennials, who represent the largest generation in American history, and 45 percent of all patients now use online reviews to choose a healthcare provider. This is a trend that will only continue to grow, making customer service often the biggest brand differentiator.
While poor reviews can immediately impact the bottom line through fewer appointments, in the future, it could also directly impact our reimbursements. For example, when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CCJR) initiative on April 1, 2016, it included provisions to penalize physician fees by as much as 1.5 percent, based on input received via Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers (HCAHPS) surveys.
As the next step in the evolution of our company, the Virginia locations will be the first pioneers to place our individual identities subservient to the corporate logo, and you will soon see this reflected throughout all of our branding, with CAO’s logo prominent and our location names listed as a strapline underneath.
We are in the process of reskinning our websites to reflect CAO’s brand standards and patient-focused messaging, and are ordering new lab coats and stationary to highlight the corporate identity. In parallel, we are investing in new signage at all of our locations to reflect the brand change. As a result, we are already having patients ask us questions about what The Centers is all about. We have a great story to tell and it resonates within our community.
As a truly unified group, both in branding and mission, the Virginia locations will provide an excellent case study for the rest of our organization. With a singular identity, we can harness our collective strength and buying power to start a robust SEO program to drive new patient leads and begin thinking about an advertising campaign to raise awareness for The Centers across Virginia. It also opens the door for many other forward-thinking initiatives.
With Fairfax Orthopaedics in the onboarding process to join CAO, we are already seeing private practice groups gravitating towards us. By raising our profile throughout Virginia, this momentum will only build. Equally important, it affords us opportunities to be creative with real estate ventures, exploring combining resources to build new state-of-the-art facilities, and even looking at establishing joint ventures with mega groups representing complementary medical disciplines. The future is bright.
It has been mentioned before, but can’t be emphasized enough – in this new healthcare landscape, data is king. As small private practice groups, it would be impossible to amass the quantity of patient data we enjoy and would be too expensive to fund the technology and manpower needed to mine, aggregate and analyze the data to yield actionable insights. With our collective buying power and prominence, we have been able to move forward with Healthjump, our data aggregation partner, and sign a letter of intent with Remedy Partners, the largest risk-bearing entity in the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative pilot program, to develop our own bundles.
Soon, we will be able to start proving – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that we are the high-quality, low cost provider of orthopaedic care. Armed with this data, we will be in a formidable position to work with companies such as Privia Health, the nation’s largest network of primary care physicians, and many others as the optimal referral source. This data will also allow us to gain better insights into our processes, identifying areas of improvement and building clinical pathways to enhance the quality of our care.
It won’t be easy and will require CAO physicians to embrace their new role as care managers overseeing the entire episode of care. Even if we don’t want this new responsibility, we must commit to it or bring in specialists to manage nonsurgical aspects of the care episode.
The pace of change we are experiencing in healthcare is unprecedented and only accelerating. To fully leverage our combined potential, as an organization, we need to be nimble to take charge of this change. I’m proud of the Virginia locations for stepping up to the plate, and I’m hopeful other locations will soon follow suit. We have worked so hard together – now is the time to start realizing the power of The Centers’ brand.