How Circle Health finds the physicians who work in nursing homes and books meetings before every conference

Circle Health runs chronic care management, remote patient monitoring, behavioral health integration and transitional care for its customers’ patients, with its own licensed nurses doing the work and no upfront cost to the practice. Its buyers sit where older patients with chronic conditions get care: physician practices and the nursing facilities those practices cover.

The first group is the leadership of physician groups that go into elder care: the groups whose doctors also work in skilled nursing facilities, assisted living and home care. The team writes to the CEO, president or medical director, and at some groups the person running the business is a nurse practitioner or an executive who is not a physician at all.

The second group is the people who run the facilities themselves: nursing home administrators and directors of nursing. Each group gets a different email, so each needs its own list.

In Dmand AI, 25.8K+ physicians currently work at a skilled nursing facility, and 8K+ of them work at two or more. Most also belong to a physician group. Circle Health looks for the small ones outside health systems, where the leaders can say yes on their own.

That market is 9.3K+ groups of 1 to 20 doctors with at least one physician who works in a skilled nursing facility: 6.7K+ with 1 to 5 doctors and 2.6K+ with 6 to 20. Together they employ 9.9K+ of those physicians.

The link that matters is the site of care, not the employer. A physician’s employer is the group; the nursing facility shows up as a separate site where they also work. Dmand AI ties each physician to every site where they currently practice, and Org Hierarchy Explorer shows the group, its parent and its sites, so “physicians who work in nursing homes” becomes a filter instead of a guess.

Circle Health’s team traveled to long-term care, home health and digital health conferences. They were worth the trip, but mostly for meeting people the team already knew, and the good leads took months to nurture.

Cold campaigns ran through a partner agency that also handled the replies, from mailboxes on Zoho. Dmand AI sequences send from Google and Microsoft mailboxes, so the team set up a separate domain on both instead of putting its main domain at risk.

Facility administrators and directors of nursing were the harder list to build. The team brings those lists in from conference rosters and its own research, and Dmand AI verifies each email before a sequence sends to it.

Every program runs the same five steps in one Dmand AI login, from the physicians who work in nursing facilities to a reply in the inbox.

Lists start from the physicians, not from a company name. The team searches physicians and HCPs in the specialties that carry chronic patients (internal medicine, geriatric medicine, family medicine, cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology and endocrinology), keeps those who work at a skilled nursing facility, and narrows by the size of their group: 1 to 5 doctors, or 6 to 20. Physicians who cover several facilities get their own list, because one group can open several buildings.

Each group opens to its people. On the executive side the team searches healthcare executives at physician organizations by title and management level: CEO, COO, medical director, founder and owner. That catches the nurse practitioner who runs the business as well as the managing physician.

Medicare claims show which physicians already bill chronic care management, the first 20 minutes of which is CPT 99490. Those practices know the program and its paperwork, so the conversation is about running it at scale with Circle Health’s nurses. The team filters for physicians who bill the code at post-acute and long-term care sites, in groups of up to 20 doctors.

For health systems, the team starts from a short list of regional systems and runs three executive searches against it, one for each problem care management solves. Each search becomes its own list and its own sequence, sent by the Circle Health leader who matches the reader: a clinical leader writes to clinical buyers, the CEO to the people who own the budget.

Lists from Dmand AI search and lists the team uploads, such as conference rosters and in-person meeting sheets, go through the same email verification, which marks each address deliverable, risky or undeliverable before a sequence sends. On a walkthrough with Dmand AI, the team moved from one-email sends to sequences of three steps.

Sequences go out from the team’s Google and Microsoft mailboxes, and every reply lands in one unified inbox. LinkedIn touches run in a separate tool, and email follows up with the people who did not answer there.

Circle Health has run outbound from Dmand AI every month since the first call. Cold sequences to physician groups and facility leaders keep the name in front of the market; the replies come fastest from the people the team is about to meet in person.

Before each conference, the team uploads the attendee or speaker list, verifies it and sends a short meeting request, then follows up with the people who did not answer on LinkedIn. Most replies to those sequences are a yes, a time and a place at the event, or a request for details.