In order to run a medical practice, you need to get your priorities in order. You need to provide the highest possible level of healthcare but also make a profit while doing so, which is not always an easy thing. Estimating the value of professionals in your employ is also not a simple thing. It’s not like you can just take a look at the sheet and see how many sales each of them made last month. So, with all these complications and challenges in mind, how does one run a medical practice successfully? Well, here are some tips to help you out.
Handle Your Finances
A dental practice is a business. As such, its effectiveness depends on your ability to make money. Now, handling your income and your expenses may be a bit too much for the layman. This is why you need, at the very least, a good bookkeeper. Ideally, you would hire a proper accountant or an accounting company.
Remember that setting your price may determine your reputation, not just your immediate profit (we’ll discuss this a bit later on).
Today, it’s quite simple to hire a virtual assistant, online bookkeeper, or digital accountant to handle your finances. In other words, there’s no excuse for trying to handle this on your own or in-house and failing at it. While this is not that complex, the truth is that it takes so much of your time (that could have been more useful elsewhere).
Find the Right Approach to Marketing for Your Medical Practice
Handling your marketing as a medical practice takes some careful consideration. Everything is about brand and branding, but the key thing you need to handle is your reputation. For instance, the cost of your services may determine the level of respect that you’ll get as a first impression. Lower cost of services may hurt your authority.
The most efficient way to approach this topic is by relying on personal brands of doctors in your employ. Listing the school that they’ve finished, medical journals where they’re cited, and awards that they’ve received can be incredibly powerful. Regardless of what you may have heard, this is a talent-based industry.
Aside from this, there’s so much to be gained via blogging and vlogging. People google medical questions/topics all the time. By providing them with answers, you’re effectively driving your traffic and gaining some favors.
Also, keep in mind that when handling your marketing, you speak to specialists. For instance, if you’re running a dental practice, you have more to gain from talking to a dental consulting firm than to generalists.
Hire a Great Staff
Previously, we’ve mentioned that you can form your practice’s reputation around the personal brands of your employees. Well, this requires you to hire the right staff and treat them well enough that they stay for a prolonged period. Neither of the two is simple, even in the medical practice field.
Now, it’s not just your doctors that you need to worry about. You also need great nurses, assistants, and front desk staff. Keep in mind that it’s all about making lasting relationships with your patients, and the best way to get there is to have a professional and kind staff. Some may argue that the methodology of your staff could be the primary way of fighting high patient attrition.
Speaking of patient attrition, one of the ways to reduce it is to always keep about 98% of your patients scheduled. This is down to either your doctors or front desk staff. It’s their job to schedule a new appointment at the end of the current examination or follow up to confirm that the patient is coming back just before the next one. Finding the right person for the job will make all the difference in the world.
Get Top-Notch Equipment
Great equipment does more than just provide you with better outcomes. It’s also great for your reputation, talent retention, and even marketing.
First of all, top medical experts need to work with top-notch equipment. Not providing them with this equipment will make them feel like they are restricted in doing their job. They won’t see it just as if you were saving money on your patients but also as if they’re not important enough to get the tools that they deserve.
The equipment that you’re using is directly tied to the price of your services. Expected to be paid at the very top of the field while lacking some premium equipment or working with outdated instruments will be frowned upon. In other words, you need to show your clients why they’re paying more than someplace else (or why they’re getting more for the same cost).
Lastly, this brand-new equipment usually has a sleek appearance, which makes it great for promotional posters and images for the homepage of your website. Even people who know next to nothing about how this equipment is used will recognize their value (at least visually).
Focus on Patient Feedback
Patient feedback is essential for the following:
- Improving patient experience
- Benchmarking
- Improving revenue
- Reducing patient attrition
- Improving the quality of care
Now, the way in which you gather and document this feedback is important, as well. There are a lot of things you need to pay attention to but understand that a patient has an outsider’s understanding of your processes. Sometimes, the fields in which they want improvement are not as easily upgradable as they think.
In order to improve the feedback that you receive, you can just ask them in person, make a call, or link online listings from your website. You can also send them an email or ask them to do a social media poll. Every feedback form counts but not every form is as viable. Make sure that you keep track of this.
Wrap Up
All in all, running a medical practice requires more finesse than running a business in the majority of other fields. It’s not just an enterprise in the service industry. It’s also a healthcare provider. Therefore, it’s important to keep in mind that it may require you to pay more attention, put more focus on your staff, and be far more concerned with what your audience thinks. Remember that, in this field, reputation is everything, and no mistakes can be tolerated.
