Medical doctors and their staff spend a lot of time running and growing their medical practice. Running and growing a business is challenging and stressful. However, the reward for success can be fruitful beyond imagination.
Here are the best tips to succeed in your practice:
1. Set a Daily Treatment Goal and Stick to It
It is always better if you can set how many patients you want to treat daily. If your schedule allows, you should aim for more than five patients per day.
If this is not possible, try to achieve an average of three or more new patients every day. More often than not, making sure you’ve seen enough people each day results in increased referrals.
Try to avoid setting a quota as much as possible, though. It will cause some medical providers to rush through their examinations and miss important findings because they are trying too hard to keep up with demand.
This kind of work style also prevents providers from spending the necessary time needed with any patient who may be struggling to complete their course of treatment.
2. Make Sure You Don’t Get Overwhelmed with Referrals
One thing that can make or break a new clinic is the number of referrals from the other medical facilities it serves. In most cases, a larger referral base is always better since you can cover more patients when your practice becomes well-known in an area.
Unfortunately, these days, not all doctors have achieved this kind of success with medical providers in their region. This is because doctors tend to overbook themselves to accommodate as many patients as possible during regular office hours. In turn, it causes some patients to miss out on being seen by a doctor altogether.
Another potential downside of being so focused on your workload is that you might not have enough time to personally follow up with every patient whose case you’ve referred out.
Ensuring that all your referrals are completed properly will help ensure the success of any practice, but it can be challenging if you don’t have enough time or staff members to see everyone who needs to be seen.
Sometimes, however, time isn’t on your side. In cases when referrals are increasing and you’re handling a growing number of patients, you can consider virtual medical assistant services to handle routine tasks like a general follow-up.
3. Offer Special Promotional Pricing for New Patients
Potential new patients are always grateful when doctors offer them a break on their initial treatment price, especially if they are paying out-of-pocket or using insurance to pay for their visits.
Offering promotional pricing for new patients is often a good marketing strategy because it can help you quickly increase your patient load without spending much on advertising.
4. Develop a Detailed Treatment Plan Before Seeing Patients
Many doctors find that one of the most important things they can do to help keep any practice running smoothly is to create a schedule for how each patient’s case should be handled from start to finish. This ensures that all patients receive the same standard of care while also preventing some providers from feeling overwhelmed with their cases since everything has been laid out ahead of time.
You shouldn’t feel like you have to go through every single step to get your point across, either. But simply giving your staff members an outline of what needs to happen will make it easier for them to provide good customer service and improve the consistency of how each patient is treated by everyone who works at your clinic.
5. Establish a Policy on How to Handle Patients Who Cancel or Miss Appointments
It’s never fun for your staff members to spend time interacting with patients only for them to schedule an appointment and then call back later to reschedule it. As a practice owner, you can make sure that everyone who works at your clinic agrees on what to do during no-shows or cancellations.
Depending on how often missing and canceled appointments happen, this issue might need some special attention from you since some cases require more follow-up than others. Having regular meetings with your staff about their problems will help you develop good solutions, such as using reminder phone calls to help you stay on top of these issues as they happen.
Although most people probably say that delivering good patient care is the most important part of running any business, making sure patients and practice owners are happy is just as valuable for your clinic’s future.
Even if it doesn’t seem like anything bad could happen if you allow some problems to slip through the cracks at your medical center, small mistakes can quickly snowball into much bigger problems if they aren’t addressed properly. With this in mind, we hope you now have a better idea about what steps you should take to avoid these issues from happening in the first place. This way, everyone walking through your doors will feel more comfortable with each interaction they have with your staff members.
