Advanced Healthcare Partners (AHP), a full service healthcare management and consulting agency bringing strategic business operations to uniquely positioned healthcare organizations, is proud to partner as a member of the Medical Tourism Association® by bringing its business strategies to medical tourism organizations worldwide.
While comprehensively describing AHP’s integrative model requires much more than a single sentence, the simplest picture that can be painted about the organization is that AHP is a business support system for healthcare services, products, and companies. AHP, however, it is much more than that. AHP is a team of comprehensive and collaborative healthcare business experts in marketing, sales, operations, management, and finance.
Through utilizing and leveraging their experiences in superior healthcare business strategies, access to resources, and current partnerships, AHP is able to positively affect companies in the healthcare industry as well as their diverse range of needs.
Their clients vary tremendously from young startups aiming to disrupt the industry with game-changing healthcare technologies and services to seasoned organizations seeking to improve efficiency, thereby maximizing profitability and increasing the number of patients for whom they have the ability to provide exceptional care.
Most recently, AHP has targeted first class medical tourism organizations with the goal of expanding their proven business model worldwide while introducing the organization to effective, direct to consumer strategies.
AHP’s integrated business model is the force driving change in the healthcare landscape. “The AHP Advantage,” as coined by AHP’s clients, is a model that leverages three core components, and several subcomponents, to create superior financial results for their clients.
Business Model Visualized
“We are proud to deliver a first class, one of a kind business model to healthcare operations all over the world. The fact that we are selective with whom we work with, and committed to our clients growth truly separates this model from others.” – Jimmy St. Louis, AHP CEO
- AHP’s multi-channel lead generation platform is the first component of their business model and it is comprised of multiple facets. To implement and manage an effective marketing campaign, AHP typically builds brand equity for their clients as the initial step, leveraging the expertise of their in-house brand development and design team to create consistency among the organization.
Following brand creation, the first piece of the multi-channel platform is online marketing, or more specifically, search engine optimization, pay per click strategies, social media strategies, and website optimization, all tailored to increase patient volume for their clients. Additionally, AHP provides website development and optimization services prior to launching online campaigns in order to first improve the customer acquisition experience.
The second piece of AHP’s lead generation platform is the efficient utilization of proven offline marketing channels that integrate with the online lead generation platform. This consists of brand equivalent combinations of television advertisements, newspaper, radio, and seminar strategies. The proven lead generating expertise of AHP’s marketing team ranges from direct to consumer to business to business, or direct to physician targeting.
- While lead generation is a key component of AHP’s model, converting those leads to new treatment options is the second step of the AHP Advantage. Utilizing their proven patient coordination approach as an integral part of the equation, AHP hires and trains industry-specific, expert patient coordinators, also known as medical concierge representatives, who nurture patients from the beginning of the medical process to the end, which extends well beyond the last procedure or treatment date.
Consider this to the alternative of a multi-tasking office coordinator, this patient coordinator is dedicated to increasing the volume of the practice, all while leveraging AHP’s proprietary tracking systems to ensure optimal performance of the marketing channels and campaigns, as well as the patient coordination system.
AHP’s patient coordinators are trained to make patients feel comfortable in the typically unnerving world of medicine, educating them on every aspect of the care provision and financial transaction, creating scheduling efficiencies, and following up with them multiple times after the procedure or treatment to ensure satisfaction.
Every aspect of the lead conversion process is precisely measured by AHP to ensure their efforts are successful. In addition, tracking and visibility is a priority for AHP and its clients; every metric they track internally for their clients is displayed to them in a customized proprietary dashboard. Implementation of a dashboard system into their clients’ practices illustrates the ROI created by the marketing and sales efforts in an intuitive and comprehensive display.
These dashboards are designed to track both quantitative and qualitative metrics and are customized depending on clients’ specific needs, allowing them to see a live snapshot of their entire practice, thereby operating more efficiently.
- Marketing Dashboard Overview Example
The third and final component of AHP’s business model is the customer service delivery and operational efficiency model, which is considered the point of integration into their sales and marketing strategy. Most consumers are all too familiar with the typical inefficient model in healthcare where the patients are not treated like customers.
In their model, properly titled, “customer service meets healthcare,” the patient is the true customer and is communicated with during every step of the patient experience. The main goal is for each decision that the business and medical staff makes to be based off of a streamlined and unique customer service program that AHP introduces to its clients.
AHP’s model may be unique to healthcare, but exactly why has it worked so well? It can be simply rationalized by the current healthcare system, which is fragmented with an array of specialty groups competing for finite resources and patients. In the current system, referral networks between different specialty groups don’t allow access to new, innovative treatments. With the introduction of their approach, AHP has instituted a focused, centralized system that is already shaking the foundation of current healthcare standards.
The numbers speak for themselves as AHP’s average client profitability and conversion rate increase is 295 percent, while their marketing spend per procedure decrease is 210 percent. Over just the last year of business, AHP has acquired two companies, launched four, and maximized the potential of nearly twenty healthcare partners, all while growing client revenue by nearly 400 percent across the board.
Client Case Study
Client spotlight:
Henghao Consulting Limited
The medical tourism industry is well aligned with AHP’s vision to change the business of healthcare. Education, clarity, and high level of service are key factors driving a patient’s choice to travel for innovative, elective treatments and our client, Henghao Consulting Limited, is a glowing example,” commented Ann Sells Miller, COO.
AHP is currently working with Henghao Consulting Limited, a newly formed medical tourism company with a focus on cardiovascular surgery that will attract prospective patients primarily from China and Russia traveling to the world-renowned Konkuk University Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea.
AHP first engaged with the company in March 2012, tasked to effectively build business, marketing, sales and operational strategies, and are on track to successfully implement the innovate strategies at the beginning of 2013.
Healthcare’s future will inevitably welcome opportunities, dictated by countless variables, including the changing political landscape. From day one, AHP has capitalized on opportunities presented by innovation and emerging markets.
One particular focus has been medical tourism, an emerging industry segment capturing AHP’s attention because of its potentially global impact. By inspiring progression, AHP is changing the business of healthcare.
About the Author
Jimmy St. Louis, CEO of Advanced Healthcare Partners and Former COO of Laser Spine Institute, is an expert in healthcare administration, policy and procedure. With an MBA and Master’s degrees in both Finance and Telecommunications, Jimmy has managed the medical operations and corporate administration for Laser Spine Institute, known as the leader in endoscopic spine surgery.
During his tenure, Jimmy’s leadership has guided Laser Spine Institute through immense growth from one surgery center with one OR to now four surgical centers with a total of 15 ORs. Jimmy and the executive team manage over 400 employees which consists’ of over 200 esteemed surgeons and medical professionals. The surgical team performs over 400 surgeries per month with over 20,000 surgeries performed since the organization’s inception in 2005.
