New Healthcare Industry Marketing Tool

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) June 6, 2011 -- A few years ago, US Department of Health and Human Services quietly began releasing its complete database of healthcare providers. Nearly 3 million physicians, hospitals, dentists -- pretty much every kind of healthcare provider.

Marketers who target the healthcare industry should have been delighted. They weren't.

There are a lot of things wrong with the monthly updated releases from CMS (the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). To start with, it is nearly impossible to get the nearly 4 gigabyte database to work on most normal computers. Forget trying to open it in any of the Microsoft Office software. The problem is simple; there are too many records (the May 2011 release contained more than 3,300,000 – too many rows for Microsoft Excel), and too many columns of data (314 – about 58 too many for Microsoft Access). All of that extremely valuable information is basically useless. And that’s just one of the databases that marketers and other researchers need to pull from.

And then, the CMS database (known as the NPPES – National Plan and Provider Enumeration System) is missing some pretty important information. For instance, NPPES offers no indication whether a healthcare provider is eligible to bill Medicare. There is no statistical information, such as urban/rural location, wealth/poverty and other rather important marketing information. Oh, and all of the data IS IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

Ugh. So let’s fast forward to the ingenious solution. Calling it aptly “Gold,” a clever Tulsa, Oklahoma company, CarePrecise.com, may have turned the business of healthcare marketing upside down with the quiet release last year of a software beta that contains all of that data and more gleaned from other federal databases, includes software for building targeted lists based on a vast array of criteria, including provider type, specialties and subspecialties, geographic location, geographic radius from a central point, gender, Medicare billing eligibility, etc., and exports intelligently proper-cased names and addresses, not to mention phone and fax numbers. It’s even got a “Warning” field to indicate providers who may have been barred for fraud or other infractions (that's not available anywhere else with the providers NPI number attached). And here’s the kicker: exports are unlimited, and it’s cheap.

The application is now in version 2, and is being rolled out across the healthcare industry. It’s too early to tell if Gold will achieve its marketing powerhouse promise, but a few indicators would suggest that it will. First of all, its price is, frankly, hard to believe. Clean, up-to-date marketing lists of this caliber cost several thousand, even tens of thousands—without the clever list-building software and with far fewer and less accurate records (healthcare providers are required by law to keep their records up-to-date, and there’s a strong incentive for them to do it: Medicare and private insurance companies use the data to process claims and pay them).

CarePrecise.com sells Gold for $599 (more for a subscription plan – the data is updated monthly). No, the product currently doesn’t contain email addresses, but it’s darn cheap for gold.

Maybe even more important than its price, Gold takes data from several disparate sources and puts it in a single normalized database. That means it’s easy to use, and some of this is stuff you can’t even do an online search for. Every month, CarePrecise.com crunches some 7 GB of information down to a few hundred megabytes, and downloads the whole thing to your hard drive so that even the most complex searches become not only possible, but routine. (One of the original uses of the product was for highly geeky healthcare industry research like developing clinical trial provider pools).

Marketers can run counts, build deeply tweaked lists, save and recall criteria sets, and pull fresh updates every month, shaving massive wasted effort and costs off direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. For companies who know what it’s like to work with conventional list sellers, having this new search-count-tweak-export capability right there on their own desks may be much more than a time- and money-saver, it might turn into that gotta-have-it marketing powerhouse CarePrecise.com is hoping for.

The company is looking at other ways it can apply its record-linking, bloat-shrinking thinking to other behemoth data troves. There’s plenty more gold in those hills.

More information can be found online at http://www.careprecise.com

healthcare marketing     hospital marketing     LEIE     medical marketing     NPPES     PECOS Warning     physician marketing     Provider Database