How to get Media Coverage for your Direct Primary Care Practice

How to get Media Coverage for your Direct Primary Care Practice

Getting media coverage for your direct primary care practice is a challenge and an opportunity. You probably did NOT go to journalism school, and you probable have NOT worked at a public relations firm, so you probably don’t have an extensive list of media contacts.

That’s okay! We’re going to start building a list for you.

First thing, read your local publications and listen to your local public radio and watch your local television stations. Who is reporting on health care issues in your community? Can you reach out to them on Twitter or send them an email? If so, you can start to build a relationship with this journalist and become a trusted source for them.

Journalists need to quote experts when they write a news article, and you could be that go-to expert for their next piece on health care.

Reach Out to Journalists When You Have a Newsworthy Event

You might be launching your practice, or hosting a ribbon cutting ceremony at your office, or celebrating 5 years in business. If so, you should send an email or a text with a press release to all of the journalists on your media list. If they’ve worked with you in the past and you’ve helped them on a story in the past, they are more likely to help you with your news-worthy story.

This is where building relationships is helpful! The more relationships and the stronger relationships you have with folks in the media, the easier it will be for you to tell your stories about your practice.

An Example of Getting Media for our Direct Primary Care Practice

Last month, I was gearing up to speak at the Michigan Academy of Family Physicians annual conference on Mackinac Island. I looked through the speaker list and I reached out to everyone I wasn’t connected with. I wrote a quick “my name is Dr. Paul Thomas with Plum Health DPC in Detroit, and I’m looking forward to seeing you and meeting you on the Island.”

The moderator for the first session for the day was Robin Erb, a local journalist with Bridge Magazine in Detroit. She responded to my message on LinkedIn and she expressed interest in writing about our practice. I shared my schedule with her, and we had lunch together and talked about Plum Health. We also met up on Mackinac, I attended her session, she attended my presentation, and a few days later, she published the article about Direct Primary Care and our practice, as well as the broader DPC movement.

In short, if you want media coverage for your DPC practice, you have to connect with journalists via email or on social media, and give them something newsworthy to discuss in their article about you.

@plumhealthdpc Direct primary care is a relatively new practice model for health care delivery - we had a great write up in Bridge Michigan that goes deep on the topic and gets into the nuance and details #DirectPrimaryCare #PlumHealth #BridgeMichigan #RobinErb #HealthCare #HealthCareJournalism #DPCMovement #PrimaryCare #Michigan #Detroit ♬ original sound - plumhealthdpc

Best of luck! Here’s a little inspirational video on how you can get media coverage for your DPC practice:

@plumhealthdpc Getting media coverage for your direct primary care practice can be difficult, and in this short video I breakdown how we reached out to a local journalist to help them tell our story at Plum Health DPC! #directprimarycare #plumhealth #familymedicine #bridgemichigan #detroit #healthcare ♬ Music Instrument - Gerhard Siagian

-Paul Thomas, MD with Startup DPC

How to Get Media Coverage for Your Direct Primary Care Practice

A big question that I get from Direct Primary Care doctors is how to get media coverage for their Direct Primary Care Practices. This is a huge topic and I’m going to bite off a small piece here. The big idea is to be media ready. Like the old saying, where preparation meets luck, you have opportunity.

How to Be Media Ready

Being media ready can take many forms, but it looks like practicing in the medium in which you want to be featured. For example, you want to be on TV? Why not have a weekly YouTube show? You’ll learn how to look into the camera, remember your talking points, and engage with your audience. You’ll learn about posture and effective communication. Some people in the Direct Primary Care community do this very well.

If you want to be featured on the radio, start by being featured on local or regional podcasts. Again, you’ll learn how to focus on your talking points, annunciate, and get to the point. There’s an art to being interviewed and it takes practice to get good at it.

For example, because of my activities on Social Media, I’m often asked to appear on Podcasts. I will participate in virtually any podcast because I love to talk about Direct Primary Care, I like to help people build their audience for their podcasts, it’s a great piece of content for me and my business, and it boosts my Search Engine Optimization.

Here’s my latest podcast interview: https://primarycarecures.com/2019/07/18/episode-25-dr-paul-thomas/

Reach Out To Journalists

A little secret: journalists are people too! They have deadlines and things that they need to accomplish. They have social media channels, and followers, and egos just like everyone else. One way to get onto the radar of a journalist is to follow them on social media. You can like and retweet their content, and overtime, you can respond to their content and start a genuine conversation around mutual interests.

Is there a health care reporter in your town? Do you follow them? Do you contribute thoughtful comments to their stories? Do you like/share their content on your social media channels? These are easy actions to take to communicate with journalists - and they cost nothing other than some of your time.

Once you’re on their radar, how can you package the work that you do so that they’re likely to write about it? And that can be accomplished via a Press Release. You’re basically packaging a blog post or a short article about yourself in to the language of a Journalist.

Sometimes You Just Get Lucky

I took a course at the Build Institute called Co-Starters. It was a cohort of about 12 people in Detroit, all starting unique businesses. We’d meet up every week and review the curriculum - marketing, identifying potential customers, leveraging capital, etc… As a part of the Build Institute’s 10 year anniversary, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion with the Media present.

After the panel discussion, I talked to a few different reporters and one of them came to our office to learn more about our practice. That turned into one of the biggest pieces of content and biggest magnets for new patients: our interview on Detroit’s NBC Affiliate aka Channel 4 News.

This is what I mean about when Preparation meets Luck, you have Opportunity. If I had said “no” to the panel discussion, I would have missed this opportunity and I probably would not be nearly as successful as I am today.

Thanks for reading and best of luck with your Direct Primary Care practice!

This will become a longer-form course shortly as it is one of my most common asks - “how were you able to have your Direct Primary Care practice featured on TV/Radio/Newspaper?”

-Dr. Paul Thomas with StartUpDPC