Building Trust Before the Referral | EP 20

In this episode of Healthcare Marketing Edge, Tim Bouchard interviews Alex Wallace from Haven Home Health & Hospice on why healthcare marketing must be built on trust rather than visibility, especially in home health, hospice, and home care where families make decisions during the most stressful moments of their lives. Alex shares how community education, consistent referral relationships, and alignment between marketing and care delivery earn the confidence that drives referrals. The episode demonstrates how trust-based, relationship-driven marketing transforms a practice from afterthought to top referral partner.

Tim Bouchard (00:02.555)
Welcome to Healthcare Marketing Edge, where we share stories and strategies to grow your practice. I’m Tim Bouchard from Luminous, a healthcare marketing agency specializing in helping practices acquire patients and grow their practice. Today we’re talking about something that matters more in healthcare than almost any other industry, and that is building trust before someone ever really needs you. Our guest, Alex Wallace, Director of Marketing at Haven Home Health and Hospice, is going to dig into why visibility alone doesn’t just win in healthcare and how community education, relationship building,

can really turn practices into trusted referral partners. If you’re trying to grow through referrals and community trust, this episode will definitely help you out. Alex, welcome. Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Alex Wallace (00:44.94)
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show today. my name’s Alex Wallace. I work for Haven Home Health and Hospice. We’re the last locally owned company in all of Missouri that does home health, home care, and hospice. We’re also owned by two clinicians. John was a physical therapist and Bethany, his wife was a speech pathologist. so though they had worked in healthcare for years and decided to start their own practice about 15 years ago now. and basically their focus is

taking care of their employees and taking care of the families and the people that need the help the most. by being locally owned we’re able to provide a little bit more care with our agency. I’ve been with Haven for almost two years now. I started off as our hospice marketer and I’ve worked my way up to be the marketing director here.

Tim Bouchard (01:35.217)
Cool. H health and hospice are like super unique angles to the healthcare space. You know, a lot of times, you know, on on the typical like medical practice side, people you get hurt or you might be sick or you’re looking for a primary or something like that. But hospice and home health care are a lot more touchy because of the the needs that are associated with that, the the situations that people find themselves in.

I just like real quick before we get into some of the other stuff, how does that like help shape what you approach the market as from your marketing strategy?

Alex Wallace (02:12.181)
Yeah, so our healthcare marketing is very unique in the patients that we serve and the populations we serve. for home care, we do anything from private duty to VA to pediatrics as well as we do standard Medicaid. So we’ve got a

wide ranging opportunity of people that we can help and their needs are way different from one another based on the service lines they fall in. So you have low income people to high income people. Then for home health you’re dealing with anyone that is needing either skilled nursing, PT, OT, or speech therapy, and then hospices that end a life care.

Tim Bouchard (02:50.246)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s really a lot of times, especially on the hospice side, it’s high stress situations. And I mean, it’s not always out of nowhere, but it almost feels like it’s it’s more personal and more guidance driven. And there’s a lot of trust building that comes with that, especially since especially if it’s someone’s first time seeking out a service like that. And a lot of times I think sometimes

practices think, well, if people know that we exist, then they’ll just reach out to us. But that’s not always the case. You have to do a little bit more upfront to sort of become the choice. And that that also applies on the referral side too, but even just from the general patient or consumer population side.

Alex Wallace (03:34.988)
Yeah, and a lot of that honestly comes from a lot of word of mouth. so we have a lot of repeat customers. So, hey, my wife had hospice, I want to go with hospice with you. my neighbor used you for hospice, I want to use you for hospice because they raved about the care that was provided. Same within within facilities, like when you’re talking about working with facilities, it’s all about okay, did we show up and did we become a good partner for that facility? Did we show the proper care? Did we do what we say w we were gonna do? Do we show up on time when there’s a need in place? Are we arriving

Quickly to take care of that emergency. So there’s a lot of stepping stones that have to go into place to really build that strong referral partnership as well as just providing the proper care for people, and it allows for people to know that you actually care and they trust that, yeah, you’re a good company that actually cares about people and not just cares about a number on a spreadsheet.

Tim Bouchard (04:27.566)
Yeah. What what does actually building that upfront trust and equity in the market look like? what are some of the things that you do to get out there to I mean, obviously you’re you’re getting word of mouth and referrals through those types of things. That’s through your operations and processes and fulfillment strategies that you have and your quality of care. what other things around that are you doing to introduce this organization out into the public too?

Alex Wallace (04:56.267)
Yeah, so for a lot of places it’s just getting someone to give you a shot. So say you’re not a top referral partner for whatever clinic, hospital, skilled nursing facility, wherever you go to market. Really it’s just giving getting them to give you a shot. ‘Cause once they give you a shot, you’re able to actually show that the the care that you provide as well as, Hey, we’re good at communication, we meet all the your pain points that you’re having with other agencies.

There’s a lot of times where we’ll step into a facility or a clinic and we’re asking right away, Hey, what pain points are you guys having with other agencies or

What are things that you struggle to get from other agencies? And we’re like, hey, I know that that agency had an issue last week. We’d love to step in and help you where we can. And sometimes it’s just them giving you that opportunity becomes something that’s so much greater than you ever expected it to be. and a lot of the times, like for us, like if we have a very successful patient that we get a referral from either a doctor or a clinic, we’ll go straight back to that doctor and clinic and be like, hey, here’s the success story we had with your patient.

I hope they’re also relaying this information on to you. But here’s some testimonial from that patient on how much they love using Haven as their provider. So those are great ways to start building that trust because they’re they’re like, hey, I don’t know anything about you, but why should I trust you? And then providing that, hey, this is what actually happened. Like you sent them for PTOT and speech, and within the time frame of their episode, we’ve allowed them to start walking better. They’re able to do stuff around the house, they’re able to speak.

speak again and learned how to swallow. So like there’s a lot of different ways you can run that testimonial through those doctors and facilities and build that trust without actually having a thorough pipeline in place at the moment.

Tim Bouchard (06:45.666)
I there’s two things I wanted to pull out of that that were great. I mean we at my agency we talk a lot about patient centric marketing. So always going after what the the situation, the viewpoint and the needs of the patient are as a way to connect with them. You actually brought up a ton on the referral side, which I think everyone kind of forgets about, is it’s not just a business outreach that you’re doing. You are also earning those people’s trust. And the two things you brought up that I think are useful to reiterate. One was you went in with a question about them.

And not a point about you. You know, what are the things, what are the gaps that you see in your service that we can help fill? That’s great. Now you have them talking about themselves. They’re not just listening to you, you know, blah, blah, blah. We do this, we do that, blah, blah, blah. so that really flips it. But then you follow up with how you did it with the success story, with your approach and how you reach that success story, which now brings them into your world after you’ve been given that shot. So I just wanted to reiterate those because I think everyone

on the health in healthcare cares about patients, obviously. We care about helping people. We care about providing great services. and sometimes that connection isn’t also made for the people that you work alongside to provide those services. So that was that was really good, good answer. and do you see like education as part of that too, is working alongside them to I I’m not sure, you know, how that factors into what you’re doing as well.

Alex Wallace (08:12.423)
yeah, we definitely like anytime we’re going into a new place or somewhere we’ve been trying to like assist and get more referrals from them, we always try and set up lunch and learns with those different locations of hey, let us come in, let’s provide you lunch, let’s talk about our services, let’s talk about how we’re different than the other agencies in this area. and then just sometimes just setting down with those doctors. And once again, we ask what are your pain points? What are the things you’ve seen from other agencies that you like or dislike? because sometimes getting insight

Of what others are doing well and what others aren’t doing well can actually shape our practices as well because sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing wrong, or I didn’t even think about doing something of that nature. so getting good insight from doctors and facilities on like what everyone else has good strengths on is great. And marketing is not a short-term fix, like you can’t expect to go into a facility or a clinic or a hospital and expect to get a bunch of referrals within 30 to 60 days.

not just realistic. it’s a six to eight month to year long kind of consistency in your marketing, showing that you care, showing that you’re taking good care of their patients.

Providing good communication, providing good education. There’s a lot that goes into just building pipelines and getting good referrals and building that trust from the community as well, because all it takes is one bad time or one bad experience from somebody in the community, whether the they’re inside a a skilled nursing facility, in a clinic, in a hospital, or just some nurse that had a problem with you at the facility can ruin all the progress you’ve made. So you have to learn how to, you know.

Tim Bouchard (09:56.805)
Yeah, so we’ve we’ve touched a lot on the referral side, which is super important for small and and medium independent practices too, because it’s one of the the most consistent ways that you could start to drum up patient activity at your practice. You are also appealing to the general market too. So you have this balance and messaging and trust building between providers as being a reliable source to co-treat and co-help the patient population, but also

becoming the primary choice for someone in the market too. How do you balance those two sides of the messaging? Cause they’re slightly different.

Alex Wallace (10:36.353)
Yeah. So when it comes to like

Marketing to the community. That’s a whole different way you have to do that. so we go out into senior centers. we go on our local TV stations and we educate the public on different things. So like we’ve had whole sections of topics of like what is hospice, what is home care, what is home health, what does it look like when you’re in these services? How do you take care of a loved one? How do you know when it’s time to start asking those questions? and then on top of that, we also do we

created a podcast ourselves called the Inca In Good Company podcast and our it our focus is to age better. so we work with local individuals that are in clinics. So we got doctors, we’ve got nurses, we’ve had people from Elder Law, we’ve had people that do financial education

Like exercise experts, eating healthy experts. We wanted to provide that free educational opportunity for the public.

so they can have the resources they need because sometimes people don’t know where to look or where what questions to ask people. So we created that podcast to be an educational opportunity for the community to show that hey, we’re not in it for just the money or the numbers like large corporations are. We’re in it to help you all age better, to help us age better. Cause like myself and Spencer and John who also work on the podcast, we we all learn stuff every time we bring in a new guest on, wow, this is huge. Like and we’ve created great

Tim Bouchard (12:07.301)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Wallace (12:09.751)
Partnerships with different people we brought onto the podcast, and it’s allowed us to become more trustworthy within the community of just doctors and other experts in different fields across the community, and they’re able to see who we are as like a company and what we stand for and what matters most to us. so that’s been a unique way for us to educate the community as well as like build good partnerships and build that awareness in the community. Because let’s be honest, when we’ve reached out to some of these people to do the podcast, they’re like

Who are you? What do you do? How can you help me? And then once you get on the same foot and and you’re just like, wow, we help the same people just in different ways. Let’s work alongside one another. So that’s been great for us.

Tim Bouchard (12:52.58)
Yeah, I can’t relate.

Alex Wallace (12:55.044)
Yeah.

Tim Bouchard (12:57.358)
So do you w I always bring this up on this podcast too because it it has so many different legs on it. one thing I like to say is if you can reach someone in an educational and helpful way, it starts to build that con mental connection of they help people. They’re already helping me and I haven’t even talked to them yet. they’ve made me feel comfortable about something. I’m sure if I went with them I would also feel comfortable in their process and their approach to care.

So it’s all these little build trust by minuscule touch points that just add to the perception of the brand that it is helpful, it’s reliable, and it’s trustworthy. And then that sort of leads itself into when doctors are having referral consults or if you’re actually going after providers, that might move you up to the priority in the market, the preferred choice. It’s really be about becoming the preferred choice.

Especially on the hospice side where you don’t know when or how you’re going to need it. And especially if it’s the first time it comes up, you know, and it’s not everyone likes talking about that either. So if you’re giving a comfortable platform for someone to learn about, talk about, or approach, it makes it so much easier for them to want to talk to you about it.

Alex Wallace (14:18.923)
Yeah, and we our owner, John

His father had not a great time with like the hospice experience. So in his own company, he created a quality of life program. so we have a quality of life educator that goes out and talks to anyone that’s on service with us, whether they’re on home health, home care, and we meet the people where they’re at, wherever their medical situation is, and we communicate, hey, here’s where you are, here’s where’s this disease progresses,

This is where you’re gonna end up at some point. And we kind of describe hospice to them and we set them up to understand what hospice is, that it’s not like this end-of-life sentence where you’re gonna die in a day or two. Like hospice is meant to be a six-month program. so we’re very delicate with the families, with the individuals on like

helping them understand that at some point this is where the disease is gonna progress. And then we also provide them resources with what they need in that moment. Because sometimes some people are on home health and it’s like, you need extra help in the home. Let’s get you some home care in the home. Or hey you’re on home care, but we actually know you need some physical therapy or occupational therapy. So let’s get some home health in the the home for you to help you, you know, with whatever your disease progression is. Our quality of life program has helped us a lot build that trust within the

community because a lot of people are like, hey, we love talking to Anton, who’s our quality of life educator. She’s came into the house. She checks in on us every month or two and she does those good touch points to see where people are at, how she can help them, and then they trust us. By the time they’re ready to make that decision for hospice, they’re like, yeah, I’m just gonna call Anton because I know I trust her. She’s helped me along the way. She’s helped with our disease progression. She’s educated me. She’s provided me these great community resources. So we it’s basically

Alex Wallace (16:08.661)
a palliative care program from within is what we created and then we just launched our own palliative care program for the community as well to like help extend our reach and like help educate people and get them ready for hospice when they actually need it.

Tim Bouchard (16:23.022)
Yeah. And think about the stress that takes off someone too. You know, it’s it’s so naturally transitional to be able to to work through those steps and and for you to have the opportunity to identify what someone else might need too in the moment, which, you know, th that may still solve a problem they didn’t even know they had, right? have you ever seen I mean, you you’ve been doing this for two years at this organization. Have you ever seen a referral relationship build from

from nothing or or even maybe one that needed to be rescued or l like a good story about, you know, we weren’t quite getting as many referrals from this type of organization, but we did XYZ and it, you know, popped us up to a pretty regularly partner with them now.

Alex Wallace (17:06.229)
Yeah, so when I started, I was assigned a pretty good sized skilled nursing facility around here in in town. I just started going out there. First thing I did was I asked them, okay, what are your pain points? Who do you guys use? have you used us before? What’s your experience been like with us before? we were like the last referral source that they would send things to for hospice and home health wasn’t getting a ton of referrals either. So I really had to ask them, okay, what are we doing wrong?

What are the other competitors doing that we’re not doing? and then I just slowly started building trust with those people. I was like, hey, give us another shot. Like, let’s work out this and hey, I know it went wrong this time, but we have new nurses here. We have better nurses that are in this situation and helping with you all now. And then we started consistently well, I went there two times a week, every week, for almost like three and a half months. And I started slowing it back to about once a week. but that constant communication with the staff.

actually getting to know everyone inside the facility, not just the social workers, but the admission counselors, their head

social services, I got to know the DON, the ADON, the administrator. I made sure that I was in contact with everybody and anytime there was an issue that came up in that facility, I was there within 30 minutes to an hour at that facility taking care of that problem myself. I didn’t let things fester because that’s what that’s where a lot of problems come from is a lot of marketers or even companies j just let things fester and they don’t actually solve the issue. So like going to the facility fixing the issue immediately

apologizing for what happened, making amends on, hey, this is what we’re gonna do better next time, or hey, next time just call me if you have this issue. And eventually they just started calling me with any time they had an issue or hey, we need some help or hey, we need an immediate admissions. And we were just out there within a couple hours, like getting in, getting people on hospice, taking care of them. And we went from the last one that they used to now we’re the top provider for both services, home health and hospice.

Alex Wallace (19:13.159)
so it’s an incredible like journey that we had. Like we had almost 30 referrals from them last year for hospice and we had over 70 home health referrals from them and we were before that only averaging about three to five hospice referrals and only around 20 home health referrals. So we saw a huge uptick in like our referrals and we just do everything together. We partner with them on all kinds of different things now.

Tim Bouchard (19:41.009)
But not to discount your effort, ’cause the effort definitely went in there. But it seems like operations and fulfillment have to come along for that ride to be able to do that. You can open up as many communication lines as you want in your role, but if you can’t back that up with the brand promise actually fulfilling it, you run into a communications versus fulfillment issue. So did you have to collaborate a little bit more with operations to to make this actually come to fruition or

you know, just encourage them to come along for the ride and be a part of this like transition to flip that relationship. I think that’s important. Sometimes marketing can make promises that operations isn’t ready to fulfill. how do you see those two things working together just to make sure we don’t give people a lot of advice to go say one thing and not be able to back it up?

Alex Wallace (20:32.161)
Yeah, you’re exactly right on that. Like if operations, your nursing and your marketing team are not all on the same page, it can cause a lot of issues for you because like we I’ve seen it before with other agencies where they promise the moon and they can’t deliver on anything and you’re just like, Well, what’s the point of you making that promise if you can’t deliver on it?

With us, we’re unique since we have home health, home care and hospice. We definitely all have to be in line on like what our messaging is, what are service areas that we can cover, what are the lines that we can actually cover at this point in time. Like all that communication is happening constantly within us. yeah, there were a lot of times where I’d find issues and especially with this facility and other facilities where I’d have to go to my specific team in hospice or home health and be like, Hey, these are the issues we’re having with this facility. We need to change out this nurse, we need to get

Tim Bouchard (20:54.832)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Wallace (21:22.535)
the best nurse we have in this facility. They’re gonna send us a lot of referrals if we provide the correct care. And I mean sometimes all it takes is just putting in a different nurse or a different CNA.

making sure that we’re delivering on time. Anytime there’s an issue, I’m reaching out to the different teams that it affects and being like, hey, this is what happened. This is the nurse that it affected or the CNA that it affected. And then we’re fixing it as we’re going and making sure that we’re delivering on our promises. so yeah, you’re exactly right. If everything doesn’t work together, it’s just like you’re putting cogs in the wheel and making sure you’re tripping over yourself and eventually they’ll stop trusting you if you can’t deliver on anything you promise.

Tim Bouchard (22:02.158)
Yeah, or worse yet, it’ll self-sabotage and you’ll end up with like public reviews that are bad or something that might actually stick for a longer time, right? Like you can sometimes salvage direct relationships with course correction, but it’s really hard to course correct public perception if it gets too far down the rabbit hole, right? let’s say someone’s listening to this, a little bit of actionable, maybe first steps types of advice. Where where could

Alex Wallace (22:07.393)
Mm-hmm.

Tim Bouchard (22:29.262)
a practice start and maybe it’s not always saving a relationship, but making the first step to actually developing the right relationship, let’s say on the referral side, because that seems to be a very common need and desire for a lot of people that listen to this podcast. where could someone start with that? maybe identifying the right one or how to approach, what might you suggest?

Alex Wallace (22:50.443)
Yeah, so if you’re struggling with anybody on trying to get any kind of referrals, the the thing that’s worked best for myself and my team is first just develop that relationship with your referral source. Don’t look at as you’re just gonna send me referrals. Like who are you as a person? What do you do? Get to know them, become good friends with them, because a lot of times like people

That are in these referral sources and the ones that are sending out the referrals, if they don’t trust you as a person, why should they trust your company? And a lot of times you’re that first line of people. So you have to be trustworthy to that institution that you’re servicing. And once they trust you, a lot of times the referrals just start coming because they’re like, I trust you. Like if a company trusts you and you’re good at doing what you do.

and you’re trustworthy enough that the company only hires good people and they trust that the company’s only hiring good people, they’re gonna send you more referrals. So like building that trust

As a person is the greatest thing I’ve ever done with my referral sources. Just getting to know the people, they know that they can trust me. They know when they call I’m gonna answer, I’ll call them back within thirty minutes to an hour. Just the small little things make a huge difference in like what your referral sources are looking for and what they’re wanting to do with you.

Tim Bouchard (24:10.99)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s a good reminder too that the trust isn’t just built at the organization level, it’s also built with you as the initial outreach too. So having not to go on a tangent ’cause it’s a completely separate episode, but having your own little personal brand and approach to how you want to operate in the space is just as important as how you’re shaping the communications and strategy for the organization too. is there anything I haven’t asked you yet that you want to make sure we brought up before we wrapped up the episode?

Alex Wallace (24:41.579)
No, I think we’ve covered a lot of great stuff on like how to build those solid referral pipelines. just be patient with what you’re doing. Like it takes time, you’re gonna hear no a lot before you ever hear yes. But in healthcare, like making a difference in people’s lives is what really matters the most.

A lot of times we’ll hear no, and then once we have a great success story, or a family that we’ve worked really hard on, like helping get them the services they needed, and them coming to thank you makes it all worth it. So like just don’t give up. It’s hard. Mm healthcare marketing is probably one of the hardest industries to work in because it’s just so unique to what we do and we’re not like every other marketing out there. So just be patient, be kind to yourself, find good mentors out in the community.

community. sometimes mentors of facilities or other agencies can give you a good boost in your education and help you understand things better and also builds a better relationship with those places as well.

Tim Bouchard (25:43.202)
Awesome. Well, this has been a super valuable episode. Anyone that’s on the home health side, maybe hospice, maybe just referral driven practice people probably got a lot out of this. So thanks for explaining how that trust aspect of this can really build up the growth aspect. Would you like to tell everyone where they could find more about you and the organization?

Alex Wallace (26:06.251)
Yeah, so if you just go to www dot havenhome dot us, that’ll take you to our website. and then we’re on TikTok, YouTube,

Spotify, Apple, wherever you find podcasts for the In Good Company, Age Better podcast. and then you can listen to any of our episodes. We have a lot of great free resources for the community on just aging better as well as elder care. so those are great places to reach and find us.

Tim Bouchard (26:38.136)
Awesome. listeners, if you want to build trust-based marketing that turns you into a top referral partner, feel free to check out our patient pipeline blueprint session offer at Luminous. It’s a workshop to uncover how you can attract new patients and convert more inquiries into appointments for your practice. Learn more at luminus.agency/blueprint/ And don’t forget to subscribe to Healthcare Marketing Edge on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube for more insights like this. Thank you, Alex. We’ll see everyone on the next episode.