Barlow/McCarthy Blog
Check back often to hear from our talented team of consultants. Topics covered include: Physician Relations, Physician Recruitment, Practice Marketing, Medical Staff Development, Community Health Needs Assessments, etc.
Physician Relations: Liaisons as Strategic Message Channels
By: Jeff Cowart, MAH A strong hospital physician liaison field outreach program achieves results precisely because it develops meaningful connectivity with an important audience of high influential voices. But, rarely is this channel of connectivity considered when a...
Healthy Writing: Framing the Story
By: Jeff Cowart, MAH A key to success in writing, and reader or listener understanding, is always thinking in terms of creating a storytelling framework. Every story that we tell should have a beginning, middle, and end. Otherwise, we present snippets of information...
Physician Relations: What’s Really Important?
By: Kriss Barlow, RN, MBA With a new year off to a running start I suspect many of us have some great resolutions (hopefully a few are still standing)! I admit to some whoppers over the years. In the recent past, my resolutions are much more about grounding,...
Physician Recruitment: Making our Case
By: Allison McCarthy, MBA Think of your favorite crime TV show. Whether it’s Law & Order, CSI or Criminal Minds, there is a recurring theme – finding the right people and asking the right questions to “make a case.” We have a similar obligation in physician...
Healthy Writing: Beware of Verbing Nouns
By: Jeff Cowart, MAH The television commercial dazzled us with the attributes of the SUV and proclaimed it as the “most awarded” vehicle in its class. The prominent headline on the front of the direct mail piece for the cruise line said it was the “most awarded.” As...
Chronic Operational Issues Getting You Down? Get Creative!
By: Betsy Finkelmeier, RN, MBA "Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted." – George...
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone: Rethink Your Field Strategy
By: Susan Boydell For all of us who have been doing physician relations field work for a while (it’s good for the newbies too) routineness is a reality! In spite of all the pressure to...
Big Data is Here, Now it is Time to Apply It!
By: David F. Zirkle, PhD Big data is a broad term for information sets so large or complex that traditional analytical techniques are inadequate. While big...
Physician Relations: Don’t Overlook the Basics
By: Kriss Barlow RN, MBA Finding the best channel to earn the right referrals for your program is more challenging than ever. Even with better data, better talent and better focus, earning new referrals is challenging work! Many markets are now tightly aligned, so...
Healthy Writing: Embracing Punctuation as a Storytelling Tool
By: Jeff Cowart, MAH One day the newspaper editor received copy from a young journalist that was filled with long and rambling run-on sentences. Exasperated, the editor typed a page filled with dots, printed it, walked over and handed it to the budding writer. “These...