The Star Tribune featured ilos Videos, our client, on September 7th:

Ilos Videos, a start-up in St. Paul, looks to build on early success

By Neal St. Anthony

Nick Stokman and Sean Higgins, co-founders of ilos Videos.

Nick Stokman and Sean Higgins are a couple of 24-year-old accounting graduates of the University of St. Thomas who concluded early that they didn’t want to be accountants.

Stokman, who won an academic accounting award for his prowess while a student, recalls a painful internship at Travelers in St. Paul. He was working on corporate tax returns.

“It’s a conservative insurance company and totally different from my personality,” said Stokman, who can be irreverent and off the wall. “And I had to learn this accounting software. And clicking on the ‘help’ thing to learn this or that was totally useless. Things that can be super simple to understand can be really complicated in text.

“And I’d go to my manager, and he said that the hardest part of bringing on new people was answering the same questions.”

Stokman had an idea for a company in 2012 that, after two years of development with client companies and collaborators, launched commercial operations in January as Ilos Videos.

Ilos makes software and provides support to a growing list of 30 companies in North America and the United Kingdom who want customized videos demonstrating routine tasks such as how to put a new record in or add a personal contact into Salesforce.com, how to change account information or pay bills, or how to use the software used by ResDiary on priority seating for customers in 3,000 restaurants.

Ilos employs 12 full- and part-time employees and will post revenue under $500,000 this year, Higgins said.

“We have 20,000 users, including some free users, and people use Ilos to create short videos of ‘frequently asked questions,’ ” he said. “We make software that enables clients to communicate the things they know to employees to vendors and users of their products.

“One of our customers is Atterro [Human Capital Group]. They use ilos software for bringing on new employees. Lots of employees. And each person needs to know about timecards, expense reports, how to file for time off.”

Stokman, also a software jockey, is a self-described ADHD kid, who also was dyslexic and couldn’t read until he was 12.

He also is a genial guy who can be obsessive about work. His greatest joy, he said, is helping people, including spending weeks with his physician dad on medical-volunteer missions when he was young. Stokman was a youth entrepreneur who earned college tuition working obsessively on his own lawn service, starting when he was in high school.

And he also spearheaded a $100,000 fundraiser for a skateboard park in his hometown of Crosby, Minn. That helped settle friction between kids who wanted a place to practice and authorities who didn’t want them on private property or in the street.

“Nick is brilliant and all over the walls, the ceiling, everywhere,” said Higgins, who earned an MBA and is the calm, plain-talking face of this outfit. “He’s come to me with entrepreneurial ideas over the years. I’ve shot some down. Nick has lots of ideas. Ilos was a good one. My goal is to harness the power of Nick.”

Higgins said when Stokman told him about his idea for Ilos, he headed to Google to look for companies doing the same thing.

“We saw a lot of gaps. We didn’t see one player doing specifically what we wanted to do. It’s not YouTube, and it’s not editing software. We thought we could develop a ‘lightweight video functionality’ without big production costs in a corporate studio. But software that could enable you to communicate tasks and processes faster than anything available.”

Ilos, a Greek word Stokman and Higgins interpret as “search” as a definition, was born in their apartments.

In recent years, they would rent short-term space at cooperative-workspace Coco in downtown to impress prospective partners and clients for meetings. Several months ago the company, with revenue starting to flow, leased unfinished space in a refurbished St. Paul Lowertown warehouse. The employees work from folding chairs and tables. Frisbees and Nerf balls often sail through the air.

“We don’t have a lot of overhead,” said Higgins, including minuscule salaries so far. “We’re reinvesting in the business, and we won’t break even until next year.”

The company has raised about $500,000 in equity and is owned largely by employees, individual “angel” investors who take stakes in promising upstarts, and the Norris Institute at the University of St. Thomas. Mike Moore, who runs the Norris Institute, which invests in young, innovative concerns said Norris has a stake of about $100,000 in ilos.

Moore said he found that ilos customers “saw this as away to cut training time and reduce expenses.

“It applies to any kind of organization,” Moore said. “We have faculty who use it for courses for students they know will have problems with certain parts of the curriculum. Rather than talking them through again and again … here’s the software.”

Challenges, Opportunities in Store for ASCs in 2015

Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs) face unique opportunities and challenges among healthcare providers in the coming year. For a healthcare system focused on controlling costs and improving quality, ASCs offer a high-quality, cost-effective alternative to surgical procedures conducted in the hospital. However, ASCs face significant challenges – including a maturing market, reimbursement issues and evolving regulatory policies – that can impact their bottom lines and continue to force them to play on an uneven competitive field.

On The Bright Side
The good news for ASCs is that volume growth is expected to continue as Medicare and private payers favor the lower costs of ASCs when compared to hospitals. In an investment report issued this month by Standard & Poor’s on AmSurg Corporation, a large, publicly held operator of ASCs, S&P cited strong demand stemming from an aging population and increasing use of outpatient services. This growth outlook was echoed in a report on ASCs by Moody’s Investor Services.

ASCs face challenges and opportunities in 2015.

Medicare and Medicare beneficiaries currently share in more than $2.6 billion in annual savings for procedures performed at ASCs when compared to what those procedures would cost in the hospital outpatient department (HOPD), reports the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association (ASCA). These savings are realized in what Medicare pays for a procedure and also in lower co-pays by the beneficiaries. The ASCA notes that if just half of the eligible procedures were moved from hospital outpatient departments to ASCs, an additional $2.5 billion dollars could be saved annually.

New payment models may also come to benefit ASCs. While Moody’s expressed concern that the shift to bundled payments may not be positive for ASCs, Jameson Pearlman, VP of Managed Care at Meridian Surgical Partners, says ASCs are well positioned to participate in accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes and population management initiatives.

“Payers are moving more and more towards shared savings models, which are ideal for ASCs because we can better control anesthesia, implant, supply, and labor costs and still deliver high quality within a single episode of care,” says Pearlman in an interview with Becker’s ASC Review. “Bundled payments are a great opportunity for ASCs to align incentives with payers to ensure greater patient access and participation within evolving narrow networks focused on greater efficiency and accountability.”

Maturing ASC Market Means Changes
Many ASCs, especially independent ASCs, face challenges as the ASC market matures, competition increases in their market area and more hospitals open or purchase ASCs. Moody’s points out that larger players, with economies of scale and joint ventures with hospitals and physician groups, are best positioned to benefit. High performing ASCs will also be those that concentrate on procedures that generate higher revenues per treatment, such as pain management and orthopedics, according to Moody’s.

Pearlman reports excessive competition for procedure volume is depressing private reimbursement rates. “There are some ASCs in saturated markets that are accepting rates well below market and in turn payers use those lower rates as a baseline when comparing other ASCs,” says Mr. Pearlman. “Then our rates are undercut and it’s difficult to show payers why we need the higher fees to cover our expenses.”

Low reimbursement rates from Medicare are also a major issue for ASCs, even with the increase contained in Medicare’s final 2015 ASC payment rule, issued on October 31, 2014. CMS adopted an overall payment rate adjustment of 1.4 percent for ambulatory surgical centers, up from the proposed increase of 1.2 percent. But HOPDs received a larger increase, widening the gap between what Medicare pays ASCs versus HOPDs for the same procedure.

According to the ASCA, Medicare pays hospitals 81 percent more than ASCs for the same procedure. As recently as 2003 Medicare paid hospitals about 16 percent more. As a result, says the ASCA, hospitals are purchasing ASCs, converting them to hospital outpatient facilities and charging the higher outpatient rates.

On the plus side, the final rule adds 10 spine codes to the ASC-payable list and defines ASC device-intensive procedures in a way that makes it more economically feasible for ASC to offer more procedures with high device costs. However, ASCA CEO Bill Prentice notes that despite the gains there are still numerous procedures that ASCs are permitted to perform but cannot because of inadequate Medicare reimbursement for the device.

The Misfit of Meaningful Use
Another challenge for ASCs is the “50-percent rule” contained in the Meaningful Use (MU) regulations. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, passed as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (PL 211-5), authorized incentive payments to eligible professionals (EP) and eligible hospitals to promote the “adoption and meaningful use of certified electronic health record technology (CEHRT).” The 50-percent rule requires that for EPs to qualify for EHR incentives, at least half of their patient encounters must be documented in a certified EHR. For ASCs, this creates a challenge since their doctors often practice at multiple locations and need to ensure that reports are sent to the location with the CEHRT.

ASCs were not included in HITECH, so many do not have certified EHRs in place because HITECH has not subsidized their purchases of EHRs as it has for physician’s offices and hospitals. This creates a potential disincentive for surgeons to bring patients to an ASC. It also seems to run counter to the stated goals of the CMS EHR Incentive Program to “improve quality, safety, efficiency, and reduce health disparities” and “to improve care coordination, and population and public health.”

ASCA is working with CMS and Congress on immediate and long-term solutions to this issue. In the meantime, since ASCs already receive lower reimbursements than hospitals for most procedures, it is very important for them to improve clinical documentation and embrace automated coding in order to receive the appropriate reimbursement. Our next ASC blog post will take a closer look at reimbursement issues specific to ASCs.
Learn strategies for maximizing revenue. Download our white paper, Positioning an ASC for the Future of Reimbursement: Best Practices for Revenue Capture.

(This post was authored by Snow for the ProVation Medical blog.)

Creating strong content for healthcare content marketing requires three things:

1. Focus on relevant pains, drivers and trends in the market.

2. Lead, don’t follow.

3. Integrate with your overall healthcare PR and marketing strategy.

As a Minneapolis healthcare content marketing agency, we follow a wide range of regulatory, legislative, industry analyst and marketing issues on behalf of our clients. Our job is to identify emerging trends and develop appropriate strategies, including content marketing. The best content is timely, relevant content that directly interests your customers and prospects. It positions you as an opinion leader and cutting-edge company.

Focus on relevant pains, drivers and trends in the market

Obamacare means big changes. Are you addressing them?

Healthcare is driven by government regulation. Check websites for HHS, CMS,FDA, etc., or the specialized media and blogs that follow them. Or, follow the Tweets of folks who watch these agencies. Look not just at what’s happening now but what’s coming down next year or later. Your customers and prospects are interested in ways to respond to new laws or regulations, or soon will be. Also, follow the healthcare analysts at Gartner, IDC, The Advisory Board and KLAS Research. Even if you don’t subscribe to these services, the leading analysts like Judy Hanover of IDC or  Tom Handler of Gartner are quoted in report summaries and news accounts. Big trends and drivers, like the move to mobile or the cloud, are being p0inted to years ahead by these analysts. Your customers are interested in how to respond to these trends. Why is your solution or expertise relevant? Share that. Often.

Lead, don’t follow

Per above, get ahead of the competition with some key drivers, regulatory issues and/or trends, and keep reminding customer and prospects that you are focused on helping them adapt and thrive in changing conditions. The Affordable Care Act and other changes are continuing to become legal requirements according to a set schedule. Insurance companies need to attract and engage individual customers on an unprecedented scale. ICD-10 will become a requirement for all providers next year. Now’s the time to share a vision for how to meet these new challenges.

Integrate with your overall healthcare PR and marketing strategy

Every selection of content you disseminate should reflect your overall PR and marketing strategy, and be integrated with all your other marketing tactics, including case studies, web content, trade shows, media placements, other social media. Have a few, important objectives and focus on them in every communication, including all content marketing.

There are three keys to B2B content marketing for complex sales – corporate law firm marketing, healthcare information technology products and services, medical device, B2B food manufacturing and other B2B products and services. These are sales with longer sales lead times and higher price tags, and rely on direct meetings and contacts to build relationships and close the deal. As a Minneapolis B2B content marketing agency, we’ve always matched PR, marketing and other services to the actual sales process of our clients. With content marketing, the opportunities for engaging prospects and clients have become better – including social media and analytic methods. We’ve found that three keys to B2B content marketing for complex sales are:

1. Have a documented content marketing strategy.

2. Match content marketing to the sales process.

3. Measure and improve the strategy as needed.

Documented content marketing strategies are more successful

According to research sponsored by Brightcove, the marketers who reported having a documented content marketing plan were more likely to say they were effective – 66%, than those who did not have a documented content marketing plan – 11%. I’d make some allowance for selection bias here, as those who invest the time and resources in developing a documented strategy might be inclined to score their efforts higher, but the point is that serious marketing efforts generally stem from a fair amount of analysis and planning. Unfortunately, content marketing is too often the flavor of the month and done on a piecemeal basis, without a formal strategy or plan.

What’s in an effective, documented content marketing strategy? At a minimum, it should set out clear goals, identify team members (including outside resources) and responsibilities, contain a SWOT analysis, and lay out basic tactics and timetable. Ideally, it should also include a description and analysis of your sales and marketing process and spell out how content marketing will support – and in some cases, lead – that process. In addition, it should identify prime topics to focus on – topics that of are interest to your prospects and customers in ways that help build a case for ultimately buying your product or service. For example, a company trying to sell software to drive efficiencies in the hospital emergency department might publish white papers, case studies, blog entries, etc. on revenue, margin, cost and quality issues for hospitals. A law firm selling intellectual property services might focus on content that explores the implication of new laws, rulings, treaties and technologies that present challenges and opportunities to their clients and prospects.

Match B2B content marketing to the sales process

Three keys to B2B content marketing for complex sales start with fuzzy funnel.

As Joel York illustrates with this graphic in his excellent blog, the B2B buyer enters a “fuzzy funnel” that is built on content marketing and social media. Much of the old “solution selling” has already occurred before a sales rep has spoken with the customer. As Brent Adamson, Mathew Dixon and Nicholas Toman point out in their Harvard Business Review article:

“A recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 B2B customers found that those customers completed, on average, nearly 60% of a typical purchasing decision—researching solutions, ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking pricing, and so on—before even having a conversation with a supplier. In this world the celebrated ‘solution sales rep’ can be more of an annoyance than an asset. Customers in an array of industries, from IT to insurance to business process outsourcing, are often way ahead of the salespeople who are ‘helping’ them.”

The good news here is that the right mix of content marketing, matched to the actual sales process, will support your sales effort and boost inbound marketing. Careful attention to relevant government or industry standard setting developments, major trade shows, LinkedIn discussion groups, pain points and other factors will provide guidance on the mix and timing of content marketing initiatives (set out in the the documented strategy, of course). We had a patent law firm client where we focused on a key change in an obscure part of IP law. Two weeks after publishing a document on the subject, a prospect contacted the author and signed up for more than $1,000,000 in legal services.

Measure and improve the strategy as needed

In the old days of marketing, you did your best analysis, conducted effectiveness research of varying value, and prayed a lot. Today, the analytics permit fine and real time measurement of everything you’re doing in content marketing. Are you not currently measuring? You’re not alone. Only 15% of attendees as a recent content marketing conference reported good measurement. Yet, the tools are there already, via Google, your website, Twitter, etc. By tracking page views, downloads, shares, guest postings, lead generation and impact on sales, you can measure impact and ROI and make adjustments in real time. The important thing is to measure things that are critical to your actual sales process, and that offer insights of value. There’s no cookie cutter approach here. Customize it.

In addition, listen to what prospects and customers are saying in their posts, Tweets, blogs and to your sales people. If Regulation “Q” is on everyone’s mind, it makes sense to address content to that concern. With good measurement tools, and a close ear to what prospects and customer are saying, your content marketing will be relevant, timely, and most importantly, effective.

Questions? Comments?

We’d love to hear you questions or comments. Please contact me directly. As a Minneapolis B2B content marketing agency, we’re eager to keep learning and carrying on a dialogue with like-minded professionals.

Can you trust clinical practice guidelines? Thank you, Gary Schwitzer of  HealthNewsReview.org for an excellent blog post on the BMJ (British Medical Journal) article about conflicts of interest on clinical practice panels. The BMJ article details some of the types of conflicts common on the clinical practice panels that issue treatment guidelines.

As a Minneapolis healthcare PR firm dedicated to promoting the transformation of healthcare to a patient-focused, outcomes-based model, we believe it is vitally important that engaged patients receive evidence-based, unbiased information.

British Medical Journal

For example, in the controversial area of PSA testing, the article notes that The American Urological Association’s best practice update in 2009 and its 2013 practice guidelines reflected potential conflicts of interest in the context of association sponsorship, committee chair conflicts and multiple panel member conflicts. The article contrasts this with the conflict-free status of the U S Preventive Services Task Force in 2012.

Who do you believe?

While the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force found harm from routine PSA testing and no evidence of net benefit, the American Urological Association 2009 guidelines promoted routine PSA testing. In 2013, the Association revised its guidelines to reflect a more conservative approach to PSA testing.

As noted elsewhere, studies have found troubling patterns of conflicts of interest in practice guideline panels, and or lack of full disclosure of those conflicts. Part of the answer is the new Physician Sunshine Act, which we’ve written about previously, that requires the reporting of financial payments to physicians by pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

Avoiding Red Flags

The BMJ authors recommend that professional journals avoid the following red flags:

• *Includes a panelist with either or both a financial relationship with a proprietary healthcare company and/or whose clinical practice/specialty depends on tests or interventions covered by the guideline.

Please take note, healthcare PR professionals, healthcare marketing professionals and journalists. And for full disclosure, this Minneapolis healthcare PR firm works for the parent company of an online source of unbiased medical reference and clinical recommendations. The client had nothing to do with the writing of this blog post, and I take full responsibility for its contents.

Healthcare transformation refers to the fundamental change going on in the healthcare industry, especially the ongoing transformation from a fee-for-services to an outcomes-based model. Transformation is being driven by meaningful use, value-based purchasing, accountable care organizations (ACO’s), the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and advanced clinical decision support. Summed up, these changes are about aligning incentives and using advanced technology to improve outcomes. For a Minneapolis healthcare content marketing firm, there is much to communicate about, and we’re excited to be part of this transformation.

The first step is to understand the bigger issues. As a Minneapolis industry analyst relations firm, we work closely with a number of the top research firms, including Gartner, IDC and The Advisory Board. Each of these organizations has written extensively about healthcare transformation. In addition, some of the better sources of information about healthcare transformation are The Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation, The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, and The Institute for Health Technology Transformation.

It’s important to follow the law-making and rule-making processes in government. As a Minneapolis government relations firm, we develop and implement effective government relations strategies. We keep clients up to speed on legislative and regulatory trends and developments, and represent our clients before Congress and Federal agencies. Snow has worked with the FDA, HHS, OMB and other agencies. Snow prepares comment letters to Federal and state agencies, meets with Congressional staff to share perspective and seek assistance, sets up meetings with policy makers, produces testimony and whitepapers, and arranges for legislation to be introduced.

Based on well grounded, current knowledge, we provide strategy development and implementation. Suppliers to the healthcare market must communicate how their products and services will help providers meet the new challenges and opportunities in healthcare. Providers must reach out to patients in new ways, emphasizing better outcomes and patient engagement.

For a Minneapolis healthcare PR firm like ourselves, we understand the need to help clients create strategies for thought leadership through content marketing, PR, SEO and SEM and other, integrated approaches. Working with our clients, we help them create original content to drive aggressive content marketing that builds recognition for our client’s solutions, products, people and perspective, while also driving improved SEO and social media.

Like many Minneapolis B2B PR firms, Snow Communications uses Google analytics, SEO strategies, and related digital marketing technologies; but we understand that content is everything. We know a good story when we see it. Maybe that comes from having been a reporter and writer for The New York Times, The Star Tribune, Radio Sweden and other news organizations. Having been an editor, I have a good idea of what editors want, and don’t want. Good B2B PR firms figure out how take a story that is not fundamentally glamorous – and often far from it, and turn it into something a publication’s subscribers want to read.

In addition, we’ve launched dozens of new companies successfully.

Content Marketing: The Gift That Kept Giving

Zepol logo

When we launched new company Zepol, we realized right away that this was a content marketing play – even before that term was in wide use. Zepol publishes trade data – data about the movement of goods from country to country, and that data is of great interest to a lot of people at companies and other organizations.

We made successful pitches about Zepol, its rapid growth, its value to its customers and related themes. But the gift that kept giving was where we offered recognized publications the opportunity to provide Zepol trade data in their publication and on their website. This became a recurring source of promotion for Zepol long after our work with them was complete.

Please read our case study

See details in our Zepol case study.