Background:

Atlanta-based Jackson Healthcare serves more than two million patients in nearly one thousand hospitals each year. The Jackson consortium, which includes 12 operating entities, provides clinician staffing, anesthesia management, hospital management and healthcare information technology solutions proven to improve clinical and financial outcomes, as well as increase operational efficiency. Jackson is committed to transforming the way healthcare is delivered. By providing the necessary people, resources and technology, Jackson serves as a trusted partner to physicians, advanced practice professionals, nurses and other allied health professionals across the country.

Challenges and Solutions:

Jackson Healthcare - customer of the Hospital Blue Book since 1995 - was in need of healthcare marketing data to provide more qualified leads to its surgery software business when it first began using Billian's HealthDATA's electronic database in 2000. Its sales and marketing team specifically needed to know their potential prospects' number of surgical suites and number of surgeries in order to better segment their markets and target sales campaigns. Thus, Jackson Healthcare leased the Billian's HealthDATA electronic hospital database, which proved to be of such an advantage that the company invested in plans to collect Surgical IT System data while it was still in the research phase. Pleased with the final outcome, BHD provided Jackson Healthcare with additional data such as surgical vendors, software versions and replacement plans before offering that same information to the wider market, giving Jackson Healthcare a strong competitive advantage.

Several years later, Jackson Healthcare migrated from using BHD's annual Hospital database feeds to using the BHD Portal - an online version of the database that offers the added benefits of daily updates, broader Hospital data coverage, and prospect filtering, report customization and data export tools.  Jackson Healthcare's sales and marketing team had been using a competing analytics product to segment their sales territories, profile ideal customers and determine what information systems were used at each hospital. They decided to make the switch to the Portal because that product did not offer contact information for key personnel targets, such as directors of surgical services - essential to the sales team's needs.

Billian's HealthDATA gathered this information and added it to the Portal at Jackson Healthcare's request over the next contract year.

The Portal proved advantageous to Jackson Healthcare's successful prospecting, playing a small part in its corporate growth via various acquisitions and development of new affiliates.

Jackson Healthcare Staffing (a VHA-Preferred Provider of Clinical Staffing Services)
- AdvancedPractice.com
- Jackson & Coker
- Jackson Pharmacy Professionals
- Jackson Surgical Assistants
- Jackson Therapy Partners
- LocumTenens.com
- Parker HealthcareIT
- Premier Anesthesia
- Travel Nurse Solutions

Jackson Healthcare Technology
- Patient Placement Systems
- CareLogistics (previously known as StatCom)

Jackson Healthcare Hospital Operations
- Jackson Hospital Affiliates

Benefits

The company uses the Portal across many of its operating divisions, with the value of the data being different to each company. Overall, the number of surgeries and operating budgets is important to Jackson Healthcare's staffing and managed services companies, and all find it beneficial to access this data via a single portal, since sales targets are typically rural and secondary markets.

Its software company finds data such as hospital occupancy rates, operating expenses and IT systems installed to be extremely useful in developing sales territories, as well as to segment the market within those territories and develop sales strategies.

Its physician recruiting team uses the Portal to gather information about potential hospital prospects; and its technology company, CareLogistics (previously known as StatCom), also uses the integration feature with Salesforce.com. CareLogisitics also uses it to pull specific lists of various types of hospitals and general spot-checking of Salesforce information. Its sales team most values the Portal's hospital demographic and c-suite contact data, as well as its quality.

For a more in-depth look at how Jackson Healthcare and its sales and marketing team use the Portal, see " Jackson Healthcare: a Profile in HealthDATA Success."