Medical equipment, insurance credentialing, and marketing

10/11/09 -- The lease is now signed, and we are preparing to hit the ground running by December. In order to make this happen, we will need to obtain medical equipment for the new practice, accomplish credentialing with various insurance companies and market efficiently to make the clinic known to the general public and referring physicians. For our medical equipment, we surveyed several online companies which market themselves as medical equipment companies. We identified one that had nearly all of the items we were interested in purchasing and is a company that also offers an installment plan for payments in order to help contain up-front costs. Insurance credentialing can take several months depending on the company, but we have now contacted Aetna, Carefirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, Coventry, United, Humana and Medicare and submitted applications. This process requires that an online CAQH (Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare) Universal Provider Datasource application be submitted, from which the individual insurance companies can download data. This online application was completed several weeks ago, but the process of obtaining all necessary information took approximately 2 months. We are now waiting to hear back from insurance companies and will need to call frequently to verify that the application materials are all received and in processing. Marketing has already begun by word of mouth and using our clinic website. However, we will need to reach local referring physicians in the surrounding community and this will require knowledge of who these physicians are. A useful publication is "The Washington Physicians Directory". This thick paperback book contains names and addresses of local physicians in the Washington Metropolitan area and allows one to order address labels by region, zipcode and specialty, which will save us valuable time. We have also chosen to design and mail attractive postcards in lieu of more expensive pamphlets and envelopes in order to have the greatest efficiency in mail advertising. The postcards can be designed affordably yet creatively using Vistaprint.com.