ABSTRACT
Even as you seek to position yourself in today's marketplace by providing a high quality of service and carefully choosing your managed care partners it makes sense to look to the future. There are three reasons for this:
Most marketing efforts take one to two years to produce good results.
Behavioral health care financing in general and managed care in particular are tied to corporate employer-M.C.O. contracts, which are transitory, usually lasting only one to three years. The time limits on these contracts can result in sudden reductions in the flow of referrals for any therapist who is on the receiving end of that referral pipeline. A substantial referral reduction can occur when most (or even a significant percentage) of the patients sent to you from any particular M.C.O. come from only one local employer. This entire employee group can then be prohibited from seeing you if the M.C.O.-corporate contract expires and the employer signs with a different managed care organization that does not include you as a preferred provider.
Probably the most important reason to market on a time-line basis for the near-term future is that the structure of behavioral health care delivery systems –especially managed care organizations–is changing rapidly. This structural change will result in some therapists positioning themselves for large, somewhat specialized flows of referrals and other therapists getting increasingly left with very few or no referrals.
