Why Creating an Addiction Recovery Marketplace is All About Marketing

I had a lightbulb moment in 2015 when someone I love survived an overdose from prescription opioids. At the time I was a marketing executive in the healthcare space. I figured finding help would be a simple process, I was a savvy college-educated professional working in the healthcare industry and my person had excellent insurance coverage. Within a few hours of seeking rehabilitative care for my loved one I was beating my head against the wall of an unwieldy, multi-headed, murky, information hydra that served as a “marketplace” in the rehab community.

I quickly realized that many of the problems I encountered while trying to find care were basic marketing issues of awareness, sales enablement and lead generation to match demand to supply. The problem consumed me, and eventually, I left my job and founded a marketing agency to address the unique marketing issues specific to the rehab industry. It is my greatest hope that my experience and efforts will help expedite care to those in crisis. .

The rehabilitation space is a $42 billion-dollar industry. Roughly eight and a half percent of those dollars ($5 billion) are spent on marketing by rehab centers trying to fill their empty beds. With roughly 21 million Americans battling substance use disorders and only about 1.5 million beds in the treatment ecosystem, why are there empty beds? Even with that $5 billion spent on marketing most rehab centers still sit at 50% occupancy. The empty beds represent a massive failure.

Focus groups and market research

“Understand the marketplace and know your customer,” that’s the sound advice any marketing professional will give you before you embark on any business. I spent 5 years and a considerable amount of personal funds getting into the mindset of rehabs, and learning the ins and outs of the rehab ecosystem. I spoke to everyone I knew that had been touched by addiction; addicts, caregivers, social workers, hospital staff. I spent hundreds of hours having conversations with addicts about how many times they’d been in and out of rehab, what if anything had worked, where the current system had failed them, and how and why they had started using. I listened to their stories, and after a while I saw similarities and patterns coming to light. These key intersections and data pain points were my way into understanding how to fix the system. I interviewed social workers, hospital workers and those on the front lines. Use cases emerged, more data, more patterns, and through that, I discovered a solution for the entire tangled nightmare.

Know your Customer

It’s a complicated ecosystem with many players.

• Hospitals are controlled by their payers, the insurance companies and rather than looking at long-term solutions are driven by short term payouts and reactive vs. proactive care.
• Social workers have the best intentions but they are in a race with the onset of their client’s painful withdrawal symptoms,overburdened with red tape, at the mercy of ineffective online search engines, heavy caseloads and a lack of tools to find the right care for their patients.
• Rehab centers have high cost overheads with fixed costs that don’t change with demand, they need their beds filled in order to be profitable enough to stay open.
• Addicts don’t have the wherewithal or ability to suffer through a painful detox while navigating care options so they turn to the easiest solution and go back to using.

Ineffective Rehab Marketing

In general, the primary marketing strategy for most rehab facilities is to employ outreach coordinators, usually individuals in recovery from their own addictions. These dedicated professionals are in the direct line of fire, witnessing addicts engage in active use. They routinely participate in interventions that are a page out of their own addiction diary. Their marketing efforts rely on meager materials provided to them by the rehab, usually a business card and a brochure. Rehab outreach coordinators build support groups and there is a lot of love, genuine concern and desire to give second chances to addicts. But even with the best of intentions, there are ample opportunities for patients to slip through the cracks.

I realized that I could assist these treatment centers with developing their outreach efforts. I saw missed opportunities for focused programming. They weren’t highlighting their differentiated offerings such as dual diagnosis needs like eating disorders, rape trauma, first responders, former gang members and alternative sentencing. I initially started helping rehab centers with their marketing for free, using my nights and weekends to update their website copy to be more SEO friendly, create marketing materials and brochures, and develop patient acquisition strategies.

This free work eventually evolved into a boutique marketing agency servicing the needs of rehab centers. Along the way, I learned a lot about this industry, honing in on pain points and also delving into the unique world of niche rehab marketing.

The Dirty Secrets of Rehab Marketing

Google it. Just type in “find a rehab near me” or some verbiage like that. I promise you there will be endless pages and ads for rehabs. Endless. For a person in crisis, this is an overwhelming experience. If you systematically go through these “options’’ one by one you will find yourself getting sucked into a black hole of evasive and strategically vague websites that neither clarify the cost nor confirm whether the rehab will take your insurance. SEO is a major driver for rehab patient acquisition and all rehabs compete for the top search result. There are many effective ethical ways to do this. However, this tactic is challenged by black hat SEO practices that push the most ethical rehab practices to the back of the search results.

Decoy Websites

One of the first questions I would ask rehab centers when discussing their marketing was how many websites they actually have. Many rehabs have multiple websites for the same 6-bed facility, a black-hat practice that tricks search engines into artificially ranking the same website multiple times on one search result page.

You can start a google search and find hundreds of rehabs in a certain geographic area only to find that the first few results are all the same treatment facility. As an advocate, not only does this cause confusion because you are trying to track your calls and understand the differences in care among the centers, for rehabs it becomes a never ending battle for top placement, while driving up the cost of keywords.

1–800-Not-Helpful

We’ve all seen the billboards on the road, 1–800-REHAB NOW or whatever version of an 800 number that gets set up. These call centers take your information and are usually staffed by highly underpaid people that often will take additional kickbacks from rehab centers to give them leads. This makes it even harder for addicts to find care as these kickbacks lead to unqualified admission connections that rarely end in a successful care placement. Billboards and newspaper ads and the other marketing needed to get patients to funnel through their “service” are expensive. These hotlines are not altruistic 501 c-3’s staffed with bleeding heart volunteers. Many charge fees to the rehabs for referring them patients, charge fees to the patients for helping them find a rehab and some even reach out directly to industry support organizations like unions, trade associations, peer support agencies and counseling groups and charge consulting fees to them for helping them match their clients to rehabs.

Patient Acquisition Through Body Brokering

Perhaps the most despicable practice is body brokering. Body brokers “find” addicts with great insurance and approach rehabs struggling to fill their beds with a hard to turn down offer. Pay the broker a “finders fee” for a patient with premium insurance and a need to to recover. Patients with good insurance can be lucrative for rehab centers, with a value of $30 to $70 thousand for 30 days service depending on their insurance options. Body brokers will approach a rehab with a fully insured patient and unabashedly demand anywhere from $3 to $7 thousand cash for bringing them that referral. Body brokers use disgusting underhanded methods to prey on an addicts vulnerability: their chemical dependence.

The reason this practice exists is fundamentally a marketing problem and inability of demand to meet supply. Regardless of how many beds are taken at each center, operational costs are the same. Rehab centers still have to keep the same number of people on staff even with less patients, those costs don’t go down. Most centers are just trying to keep doors open, but taking patients from body brokers encourages and subsidizes the black market for well-insured addicts.

Marketing Challenges with Hospitals

Hospitals are consumed by liability concerns. That is fair, given their vulnerability to medical malpractice claims. As a result, hospitals are quite strict in opening their doors to marketers or persons representing recovery services. It’s no wonder they are suspicious with body brokers looming just outside that may be difficult to distinguish from a well intended outreach coordinator with cookies and brochures.

Hospitals must also be careful about giving access to any external medical product or service to protect their patients and their own liabilities. Rehabilitation services are a gray area for hospitals. When addicts reach the hospital, they are already in a life or death situation and represent a huge potential liability If they commit to quitting drugs an unsupervised detox can have deadly consequences and if an addict decides to walk out of the hospital and continue drug use, they may overdose and die. In both of these scenarios the patient’s costly hospital visit will result in unpaid bills. Additionally there is always the chance that a loved one of the deceased may find fault with the way the patient was handled and file a lawsuit with the hospital. Yet, hospitals also benefit when patients access effective recovery options because patients who recover are more likely to pay their bills and do not return frequently to drain costly hospital resources.

In promoting their services to hospitals, the best a rehab can hope for is that somehow their marketing material will make its way to the emergency room where it will be seen by front line staff. It is up to the staff there to vet the rehab and take their chances by offering that rehab as an option to the patient. Of course hospitals are interacting with people in life or death situations so being measured and careful is appropriate, but when hospitals have no process or procedure in place to vet and build relationships with rehabilitation centers, staff are left to make “off the record” suggestions procured from the Google black hole of independent rehab research.

A Broken Marketplace that Needs a Fix

The rehabilitation market needs a fix, a straight one. One that reduces rehab dependence on body brokers, unethical hotline operators and competition for online visibility. We need to offer an effective tool to rehab outreach coordinators, admissions managers and rehab owners that connect them directly to patient advocates who are equally lacking in reliable resources for giving their patients access to viable treatment options. It is in the sea of uncertainty between the crisis of a life or death moment and the lifesaving rehabilitation treatment where body brokers and addiction thrive.

The US healthcare system is broken and not set up to take care of the people that need it to work the most, those suffering from addictionand the families and loved ones that are so often sucked into a web of bureaucracy and frustration that leads nowhere. Each of the stakeholders within this ecosystem come with their own set of problems and challenges. Hospitals are controlled by their payers, the insurance companies and do not focus on preventative measures. Social workers are overburdened with heavy caseloads and a lack of resources to find care for their patients. Rehabilitation centers in spite of their significant marketing spend are not able to fill their beds. They have high cost overheads that don’t change with demand, they need their beds filled in order to be profitable enough to stay open. Addicts are struggling with their addictions and unable to make decisions in their best interests.

With so many stakeholders in the mix, a complicated cumbersome system to navigate, there are people dying because of a lack of accessible care. This fix can not come soon enough.

I’ve studied this problem in depth, fueled by my own frustrating experience and recognizing this is in fact a marketing challenge to be overcome. By modeling all of the stakeholders and developing a thorough understanding of the ecosystem, the best solution is a bottom up market entry. Using social workers as a key access point to care by arming them with the tools they need to to quickly source the options available to their patients.

TMRI is the solution, a marketplace for the addiction treatment industry that uses technology to create direct access for patients in crisis to verified treatment facilities. Just like AirBnB is the platform for vacation rentals, TMRI will match Need-to-Support in less than one hour and rather than just providing a place to stay, TMRI will be instrumental in saving lives and reducing the cost of this human tragedy.

About Amee Gray

Amee Gray is Founder and CMO of TMRI, an automated marketplace that expertly matches patients with substance use disorders to verified treatment centers that can service their specific treatment needs. Amee has an extensive healthcare marketing background as a strategist, providing marketing and business development solutions for products and services related to healthcare including addiction and mental health. Amee is passionate about creating a full support care continuum for families suffering with mental health and addiction disorders.