How to increase patients in a medical practice

If you are the owner or manager of a direct pay medical practice, you know the challenges you face when marketing the practice. One of the most important questions we receive is how to increase the number of patients in a medical practice.

There are a number of things to consider when taking on the challenge of increasing patient flow. Most doctors want to know how to increase patients in practice. What they really need to understand is the roadmap for increasing the number of patients in practice.

Step 1: Be Relentlessly Honest About Your Situation

Think of your practice as one of your patients. If a patient came to your office and complained of aches, chills, intestinal problems, he would send me for a particular medical course of action. If a patient walked into your office, gasping for air, having pain in his arm, aching his chest, and looking pale, it would take me on a much faster and more drastic path of treatment.

Your business (medical practice) is exactly the same. When a patient comes to the office or emergency room, they want to know vital signs. Blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, medications you are taking, symptoms. Then you start to develop a way to make the patient healthy.

In your business, you need to know the equivalent of a patient’s vital signs before you start making changes to your marketing. These vital signs are things like:

  • The cost of acquiring a patient

  • The lifetime value of a patient

  • Which advertising medium generates more calls, appointments, consultations and face-to-face procedures. (Hint: there is a big difference between all these numbers in many practices).

  • Average revenue per appointment

Only then will you be able to understand how to increase patients in a medical practice.

Step 2: who is who

You must be very clear about who your best patient is and who your best prospect is. There is a big difference between the two.

For many practices, they live in a patient echo chamber. They have a bias towards their patient base. Let me explain.

Our firm has a client that sells a stem cell procedure that has a national trend of 65% for men. However, in his practice, more than 80% of the procedures have been performed on women. Noticing an opportunity, we changed the marketing to target more men. The result; an increase in phone calls, appointments, and conversions to a procedure. If we had focused the marketing on women, the results would not have been so good.

Step 3: choosing the means to increase the number of patients in a medical practice

Consultation after consultation, our firm is surprised by the lack of planning and execution of clear marketing strategies in medical practices. Hey, it’s not your fault. You are qualified to be a doctor. If you are a practice manager, you are probably focused on staffing, schedules, protocols, and compliance. Marketing becomes an afterthought.

The biggest mistake we see is a random group of independent contractors marketing their practice. You have one person doing Facebook ads (if they already work for medicine), another doing some SEO (probably the wrong way), a girl at the front desk who works on social media, and a host of ad reps. that press the radio, tv or newspaper. This is what we call the Frankenstein Marketing Monster.

You want to develop a comprehensive marketing plan that includes tracking your overall marketing results. Many want to debate what they think works. Some say Facebook, Twitter, Social, TV, Radio, Lunch n Learns, etc.

The really important thing when it comes to how to increase patients in a medical practice is follow-up. You should keep track of the number of phone calls you receive by source if they are turning into appointments if they buy and how much. The list goes on and on.

Step 4: get a professional to help you make a plan

Many of the companies that say they can help you bring in more patients are just stunt ponies. They don’t really build a plan and a brand for their practice. They come up with a few ways to attract patients.

We create a personalized plan for you, based on the experience of owning 3 clinics for more than 4 years and working with medical offices today. If you want to talk to us, it’s great. If you find someone else, that’s great too. Just get a plan, execute it, and get metrics to track results.

Medical practice and direct payment practice will face increasing competition in the coming months and years. You need to be ready.

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