A writer posed an interesting question on the AARC Diagnostics forum several weeks ago and that was how to market their PFT Lab. I don’t think they got much of a response but I have been thinking about this since then.

I think that any good lab manager wants to see their lab succeed and grow. I’ve always felt that pulmonary function testing is an essential component of preventive care but that despite this PFT Labs are underutilized. In order to market your PFT Lab effectively you need to understand your customers and target your message accordingly. You also need to understand that you can’t get something for nothing. Marketing requires that you expend resources, whether it is just your time or includes lab budget money, in order to get any payback.

There are three target audiences for your marketing; patients, physicians and administrators. Each audience has a different question you must be able to answer. For patients the question is going to be “why do I need pulmonary function testing?”. For physicians it is going to be “why should I send my patients to your lab?” and for administrators it is “why should I devote resources to your lab?”.

I think there are two specific ways in which you can market to patients. The first and most direct way is to perform spirometry at a health fair. This most definitely requires a commitment of budgeted lab resources. You will need a portable spirometer and a printer. You will need the time of one or more technicians. You will also need disposable filter mouthpieces and nose clips (this is not a place to get cheap since a health fair is not the place you want to be perceived as being un-hygeinic).

My experience with health fairs is that once you attract the first person the action and coaching involved in spirometry tends to attract other people rapidly. At a well-attended health fair you can quickly become overwhelmed so you may want to consider sending more than one technician to perform spirometry. Even if you only have one spirometer, the second person can get the name, height and date of birth of the next person in line and be ready to enter it into the spirometry system as soon as the report from the previous system is being printed out.

It is worth giving some thought to the spirometry report you use at a health fair. It should have your Lab’s address and phone number of course, but I have mixed feelings about including a computer diagnosis. Spirometry interpretation algorithms are still quite simplistic and the quality of spirometry at health fairs tends to be somewhat limited. Moreover, you may not want to be involved in a prolonged discussion with an individual when their results are abnormal. Despite this, a computer-generated interpretation can be an important talking point between a physician and a patient. Regardless of whether you do or do not include one, I think it is important that somewhere on the report, in a large and bold typeface is a disclaimer to the effect that “This test was performed for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon to diagnose any medical conditions”.

Another set of critical items that should brought to a health fair are informational brochures and this is the second way to market to patients. Your lab should have a variety of informational brochures about different lung diseases. At the very least you need to cover the most common lung diseases such as asthma, COPD, lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis as well as brochures about smoking and air pollution. There are a variety of organizations that you can get brochures from but be forewarned that almost all of them charge a fee for their brochures. In addition these brochures are also intended to market the organizations they come from, not your lab. If you use these kinds of brochures you should get a rubber stamp or a label with a “provided by” and your lab’s contact information and make sure this information is added to each brochure.

Should you create your own brochures? It is relatively easy to create tri-fold brochures using a standard word processor and photocopying is a lot less expensive than buying brochures would be (at least as long as it is just text or simple illustrations, color photocopying is still relatively expensive). Creating brochures can also be an interesting educational project for you and your staff and in addition they have the potential to be tailored to the needs your specific patient base (age, ethnicity, region or disease mix), but be careful about plagiarizing content. If you do “borrow” content, be sure to acknowledge it in a footnote somewhere on the brochure. Never take credit for content you did not create because this can come back to bite you in any number of ways.

Physicians are interested in quite different things than patients, and much of this interest has to do with how well your lab is run. Physicians deal frequently with a number of different medical professionals and so a large part of marketing to physicians will be establishing and maintaining a professional and consistently reliable laboratory.

First, physicians want to be able to schedule appointments promptly. I will agree that there is probably no such thing as an “emergency” PFT but if your lab is constantly booking several weeks out then how likely are physicians to send patients to you? On average at least 10 percent of my lab’s patients are same-day add-ons. Patients often come a distance (in time if not in miles) and if you cannot see them as part of their physician visit, then you are unlikely to get them otherwise. For this reason, when our schedule was tight, which has happened mostly when resources (equipment or technicians) were scarce for one reason or another, no matter how much it “hurt” we always kept at least one and usually two appointment slots open and only filled them with same-day patients. We’ve found that these slots usually get filled and because they usually get filled with “extra” patients this always helps the bottom line for the lab.

Physicians want reports to be prompt as well. I realize that many aspects of reports (in particular the interpretation and physician signature) are outside the PFT Lab’s ability to control. This doesn’t mean that you can’t offer to email or fax preliminary results to the ordering physician, or to print a report for the patient to take with them to their next appointment. My lab does this automatically for all oncology and neurology patients, and we offer it to all other physician offices when a patient’s appointment is made. This is something that is easy to do and helps demonstrate both your lab’s flexibility and that you understand the physician’s needs.

How well your staff treats patients will matter to physicians, too. The baseline assumption is going to be that patients are treated well. Physicians will understand that patients may not like having to perform pulmonary function tests but if patients also consistently report that your staff were rude, condescending or unpleasant this will reflect negatively on your lab’s professional image.

For direct physician marketing the most I would suggest would be to create a standard “Dear Doctor” letter with your lab’s contact information (phone number for scheduling, manager’s name, phone number and email address), your lab’s location (mailing address, physical location, nearest parking lot) the tests you perform (highlighting anything out of the ordinary such as supine spirometry, methacholine challenges, HAST) and any special services (emailing or faxing preliminary reports, providing oxygen to patients during testing). I would send this letter to any new physicians in your service area that have the potential to refer patients to your lab.

You should be keeping an email and/or a snail-mail address list of the physicians you serve. You can send an update about your services (new equipment, new tests, new locations, changes in hours etc) to all the physicians you serve but only when you have a real update. Sending updates too frequently with inconsequential information is a good way to get ignored.

Although administrators are responsible for many things, the most important interaction with the PFT lab is going to be the budget. Any hospital or clinic has limited resources and an administrator is going to be under constant pressure to allocate these resources effectively. The PFT Lab must compete with other departments for these resources so marketing the PFT Lab to an administrator has to start by showing you are able to speak their language. That means you must know your expenses and your revenue, and you should be able to perform a cost analysis on any service you provide. Since this is an area where your administrator has access to the same information you do you will not be able to hide problems but the more you understand your lab’s finances the more likely you will be able to put a positive spin on events.

Regularly marketing your PFT Lab to your administrator is necessary to maintain support for the lab, but it becomes critical when you are considering expanding services, increasing staffing or looking to acquire capital equipment. The capital budget is often a very idiosyncratic (and political) process and your administrator can often help – or hurt – your ability to navigate through the minefields. Keep in mind that you have several things in your favor:

• PFT Labs almost always primarily serve outpatients, and outpatient revenue is quite different (and better!) than inpatient revenue.
• As a testing facility, PFT Labs tend to have a relatively high revenue to expense ratio.
• Hospitals and clinics are being rewarded for keeping patients out of the hospital and a PFT Lab is a cost effective use of resources in the management of patients with lung disease. 

Use these facts when marketing your administrator and don’t forget to mention any of the marketing efforts you are making towards patients and physicians.

A final thought about marketing is to ask what kind of a presence your PFT Lab has on the internet. Everyone is more and more reliant on the internet to find the information they are looking for. My lab has its contact information (lab and manager), hospital location (building and room numbers) and a listing of the tests it performs on the hospital website. It can be reached both through a straightforward menu structure (departments → Pulmonary → PFT Lab) and through a search function. The same cannot be said of many other hospitals. There are several PFT Labs that I personally know to exist but even after a diligent search I have been unable to find any listing whatsoever on their hospital’s website. Part of marketing is making it easy for customers (patients and physicians) to find you so don’t ignore your place on the internet as part of this.

Marketing is an essential cornerstone of business. A Pulmonary Function lab is not exactly a business but there are enough similarities that marketing is important to not only maintain the health of your lab but to see that its services are available to all who need them. Part of marketing your lab is going to be outreach, part is going to be maintaining a professional, high-quality service and part is going to be talking the right language. Marketing is something you will need to devote your (limited and valuable) time and your lab’s (limited and valuable) resources to but the payback for doing this will be seeing your lab thrive.

PFT Blog by Richard Johnston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.