Ever ask a friend to set you up on a blind date? How did that work out? Yet that’s often how we choose a doctor: We ask a friend. There must be a better way.

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

If you’ve ever moved, you know how hard it is to find a new physician. Or maybe you already have a doctor, but it’s never been a match made in heaven — for either of you. You can change doctors, or switch to a different healthcare organization. Either way, the big question is: How do you choose?

Jim Brown, partner and chief executive officer at MBB Agency

A large Midwestern health system has succeeded in helping new and existing patients choose using MD MatchUp, a provider matching solution developed by MBB, an advertising and marketing agency in Kansas. “With our experience working in healthcare and our approach to consumerism, we always saw it as two sides of a relationship between the patient and the provider, and really one side was getting served and the other one wasn’t,” says Jim Brown, partner and CEO at MBB.

MD MatchUp, launched as a separate company in 2019, matches patients and providers based on personality segmentation information gathered through quizzes and questionnaires.

Note: We interviewed the large Midwestern health system’s division vice president of marketing and communications, who requested that we not use her name or her organization’s name in this article in accordance with organization practices. We will refer to her as “the VP,” and the organization as “the Midwestern health system” or “the health system.”

The VP says, “We’ve always been trying to solve the same problem, which is, how do you get new, unduplicated patients to come and choose your primary care? So when MD MatchUp came to us, we really wanted to sign up quickly because this was a way for us to bridge that gap.”

MD MatchUp enables the health system to retain patients, too. “They’ve moved from one provider to another after doing the quiz,” the VP says. “And that’s exactly what we’re trying to solve — keep people who maybe aren’t connecting with their provider within our system by finding them someone who’s the right person for them.”

In this article, we share how MD Matchup augments or in some cases replaces Find a Doctor tools, helping health systems attract new patients and retain existing patients while achieving impressive financial results.

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