"It’s not because you aren’t intelligent, don’t have
great medical skills, or don’t have passion enough
to make it in the Medical profession, but it's because
you were never provided with the universal business
tools all other businesses know how to use, and you don’t."
To get into the mood for making some judgments and maybe some decisions about your private medical practice situation, I want you to sit down and ask yourself a few very common questions that I hear over and over from physicians.
1. Why is it so difficult for me to earn enough money in my practice to pay for the things I need to do for my family and with my medical practice business?
2. What can I do when I see my medical practice income steadily decreasing and I have no idea how to prevent it from happening or reverse the trend, especially when I work harder, see more patients, and it doesn’t help much?
3. I have a strong desire to remain in private medical practice and not have to become an employed doctor to survive in medicine, so how can I make that happen?
You’ll notice that all three serious questions have to do primarily with your ability to earn enough income to remain in control of your career. And that issue is at the core of the over 65% of doctors who admit that they are frustrated and disappointed with their practice and career.
Obviously, if you were able to earn the level of income that would compensate you comfortably well, enable for you to pay for all your family needs and your medical practice needs, you certainly wouldn’t have much to worry about or struggle for.
You never signed up for professional poverty when you were accepted into medical school, right? Your expectations for your career were no different than mine. But now you find that all those expectations need to be lowered, a lot. All those goals have to be modified downward. Your future in medical practice seems bleak. It's like being in quicksand, no easy way out.
Over half of the medical profession in private medical practice today are experiencing the same thing. You likely don’t see much chance of the medical profession offering you anything better than what you are seeing today and probably over time, even less.
Those medical school educators and professors must have figured that your passion for practicing medicine would overcome all of these problems and barriers--such as never being able to make an income commensurate with your educational value and skills that few have.
None of them ever mentioned the importance of having a business education because they were too busy stuffing medical information into your brain to even mention it to you—half of which you will never use in practice. That’s a sore point too.
There are surveys today that reveal over 50% of medical doctors are employed by one entity or another. A large number of those are physicians that were financially failing in medical practice, saw the future for their practice disintegrating before their eyes, and made the only choice they could make and stay in the profession.
They sold their practices to the local hospitals or closed their doors, after they found a job somewhere in the HMO industry or hospital environment.
From there on employed physicians are no longer in control of their medical careers. They aren’t in control of their income or what they are allowed to do in medicine. The employers dictate what is best for their employed doctors that will increase employer revenue. I know about that after my over 2 years employment at Kaiser Permanente.
These rather harsh examples of what is happening in medical practice today, are things most don’t want to hear or think about.
Your medical future does not have to be dependent on employment, jumping ship, or putting your own spouse and kids to work...
The way up the ladder, not down, is well within your reach—please believe me. You simply need to do some digging into the business literature readily available today, much of it for free. You will find a majority of the business and marketing here on this website that you will find there.
Your intent should not be to become a guru of marketing or of business principles. You just need to pick out one or two business strategies that fit your practice situation and your determination to implement them and watch the impressive results.
The strategies and tactics are not difficult to learn or to do. I’m going to put up a page on my website that lists the business books I recommend you read, The copy of that list can be found in my recently published book titled, THE WOUNDED PHYSICIAN PROJECT.
My purpose for listing the business and marketing books that I learned from is to provide any physician who wants to implement their private medical practice income to remarkable levels and provide you with an off campus, and in home, college level of business education that will skyrocket not only your medical practice business management, but more importantly your ability to earn as much money as you want or need.
On your own time, you will provide yourself with the a $60,000 to $80,000 college business education at home for about $700 dollars if you buy all the books on the list noted above and keep them for frequent reference to.
And, the two formidable aspects about this knowledge on this page that is hard to recognize for most readers are...
- 1. This accumulation of medical practice business education is the only one in existence today for you to use for your economic benefit in private medical practice.
- 2. This list of business and marketing books for magnifying the results of your private medical practice business management is the only substitute available in the world today to take the place of what 174 accredited medical schools refuse to teach medical students--the knowledge of how to build, manage, and grow a highly successful medical practice business that they apparently don't want you to find out about.
If you are beginning to believe that you have become a medical practice warrior who has been sent out into the combat fields of private medical practice with no weapons to defend yourself--you're right!
Remember--If you are not adept to spending hours of reading a bunch of business education books that I have recommended about the best and proper ways to create, maintain, and grow your medical practice business, then you have an additional and even better option available to you that tells you not only what to do (like books tell you), but also how to do create and use each element of a successful medical practice business system (my medical business teaching website)
beginning to end. www.marketingamedicalpractice.com
Doesn't it seem strange that this old medical doctor, of little repute, thinks he has a mission from God himself to provide you with a medical practice business rescue system that the whole hierarchy of medical practice education has left out of your medical career education for over a
hundred years?
It's what I often ask myself every day and the longer I do it, the more true it becomes. I don't know where this rant came from--but there it is.
(continued topic)
Even if you quit medicine and start a shoe store, the information fits that too. At least then you don’t have to run around looking for someone to tell you what they read. I use the books and what I recommend you read myself, so I’m aware of their value to you.
My new book (updated and republished July 2021) THE WOUNDED PHYSICIAN PROJECT--encouraging medical schools to provide an academic business education for all medical students, would be a major shift for medical education and great value to medical students. But now I’m deciding how to help other doctors who are in private practice and suffering from the fee restrictions and mandates required by our government.
Up to this point private practice doctors have used only defensive strategies to combat those government intrusions. Why? Because doctors are left stranded in a business world that they have been left out of, for lack of business knowledge.
Can you believe that the medical education hierarchy has for a century left the business of medical practice out of the medical education, in spite of the fact that medical practice is half of the private practice of medicine practice business, as well as the primary source of your income?
Can you believe that these academics likely know what they’ve done all along and yet take no responsibility for offering or providing it to students? It’s a professional insult to every medical doctor and an outrageous mistake being made...and is my belief!
Would you send a soldier into combat with his rifle and no ammunition? That’s the way I think about this egregious stand of the medical school academics. What angers me the most is that business education can be added to the medical curriculum easily by simply using the digital media formats to learn about business and marketing and not interfere with the normal medical school curriculum.
I know that any medical doctor can promptly reach a point where they can do what’s necessary to increase or decrease their incomes at any time they please and for whatever reason they choose just by reading a few business/marketing books and follow the advice offered there. Hell, if you can’t read, then I can coach you through it. I’m dead serious.
Some important benefits I believe you need...
There’s always a few rules to follow, some understandings you must consider, and a bunch of things to be aware of while taking on the work of making a lot more money in your medical practice...and get yourself out of professional poverty even if you aren’t there yet.
1. It takes a good knowledge background of the business and marketing choices you intend to use before you start to implement them. So take a few weeks or months to do that. You might be a slow reader or have delayed synapses.
2. You must get rid of your “know it all” arrogance before doing anything about your practice. The greatest mistake I see being made by private physicians today is to disregard good business advice, and to a half-assed job with the advice—then expect wonderful results immediately, or quit.
You certainly didn’t go through medical school that way, so don’t do it here. Be convinced first that what you are advised to do, will work, and it will (supernatural mind function).
3. Nothing in business is done well without preparation and planning—so it’s a slow process. If you don’t have any patience, quit. Let other doctors get ahead of you. If you start a marketing campaign to get new patients, don’t expect to see results of it for 3 to 6 months.
In business you are selling something—your medical services. You have to get into patient’s minds and it takes 6 or so injections of information for them to come in your door or call to
make an appointment
4. You should never do more than one business project at a time. Mixing them will make you more frustrated than you are today. Once you are seeing good results, increase the pace
of that project.
If you send out a thousand postcards to potential patients in your area and get one new patient, change to another strategy. If you get 3 to 20 new patients, you have a gold mine to keep mining—send 5000 postcards to a new list of potential patients and confirm the success. There are always patients looking for a new doctor or to change doctors.
5. All business and marketing projects and strategies that are successful for you, you must continue for as long as you practice medicine. If you stop, you go back to professional poverty. Intermittent efforts of doing marketing are masochistic and unproductive.
By persistent efforts with working projects you will always have new patients coming into your office forever, and in increasing amounts over time. Otherwise, you have to rely on referrals for new patients, which means doing some professional interaction to make it work well enough.
6. It means that you not only have to maintain a cutting edge on medical education but also on business strategies.
The business principles never change, but the world of business strategies frequently change. If you send a thousand emails to all your lost patients to get them back, you are wasting your time
and money.
If you send a thousand postcards to those patients, you may get a few responses. If you send a thousand personal letters to those patients, hand-addressed envelopes, your real signature on the letter, you will get at least one-third of them to respond. Direct Mail is always the most effective and responsive method every time.
7. There are about 6-8 good methods of marketing, so you have to know what they are, try them out in your practice, find out which works the most productively for your medical practice.
These methods are just as useful and lucrative at any stage you are in medical practice. But if you want the maximum benefit from marketing you would have to begin marketing your medical practice whenever you begin your new medical practice. However, at that time, most don't have the income to afford it. Starting later on is OK.
8. You have to have a means of measuring how effective your marketing project is. It means you have to have a method of tracking the elements and results of the process. For example, if your intention is to obtain 10 new patients per month, you need to record who they are, how they found your practice, or who referred them to you.
So if you see that you are getting only 3 new patients per month and you want to get 10, then you must increase the marketing method covering more of the population of potential patients, accept the 3 as being good enough, or add a second and different marketing method
at the same time.
9. If you do nothing else in marketing your practice, you should at least be keeping a log of how many new patients you bring in to your practice from any source...and the number of patients who leave your practice each month (do it every time you transfer your patient records to
another physician).
About 98% of private medical practice doctors never do this. This process must be a logbook used to record the results... you can’t remember these things and your staff is responsible to do this.
10. You must have your medical office staff...all members...trained to participate in your marketing process because you don’t have time to do it all effectively. That's where their paychecks are
derived from.
The receptionist is the most important for help in keeping logs of marketing results because they are the first to log in all patients normally. They just have to ask the right questions to the patients who are checking in, “Is this your first visit with us?”, etc.
In addition, the receptionist is the primary person for answering the phone and has the first opportunity to screen the new patients when they call for an appointment.
11. Remember, your knowledge of how to manage your medical practice business determines the effectiveness of your marketing. If you have no personal or other means of tracking patients, you will never really know the validity of the marketing results you are relying on.
It’s troublesome and takes time to train your staff on what to do if they happen to be greeting patients or taking phone calls of new patients and how to record the data needed.
Also, if you lack the ability to properly manage a business or people you hire, you need to read books on how to do that or obtain a business mentor.
If you are reasonably competent in managing people, then you must know the most beneficial
ways to get the best productivity out of them, get them to cooperate, get them to work as a team, and make them feel like they are important to your practice, not afraid of you or being
fired every day.
12. Last, for now, don’t even try to increase the efficiency of your practice or income from your medical practice if you have not made an honest personal commitment to do so... no matter what.
----Professional Probe----
"Doing 'town calls' is one way to keep your
family with you as you continue your
medical practice." (1920s)
Please remember: You have absolutely no reason to believe that you need to do anything different with your private medical practice than you are already doing.
You can accept and continue doing what you now have functioning for you in your practice. At least you won't have to worry about the extra work it would take to improve your circumstances.
Nobody is pushing you. Nobody in medicine really cares if you choose to lag behind other doctors who earn lots more income than you. You can relax your mind and live in the 1920s, travel with your kids in your old car to and from church or the grocery.
"What would you rather be in life,
a meaningful specific or a wandering generality?"
---Zig Ziglar
What you do with your medical education and medical career is your own business. Medical practice is a business as you know. But you don't have any obligation to learn business principles, strategies, tactics, efficiency, productivity, and growth parameters.
As long as you understand that without a business education you likely will not get much further than you are today no matter how hard you work seeing patients, hours you spend in seeing patients, and how much you think you know about managing a business like medical practice.
All this happens while the world around you moves rapidly upwards and onwards.
No one expects that suddenly you will begin to see the light and teach yourself some business stuff and that suddenly you'll get a burst of ambition and passion for improving your medical practice status in the one field you know much about...medicine. Those sudden surges of inspiration are rarely much help to you because they are short-lived.
However, if you think in terms of a slow actionable transition up from your lower-middle-class lifestyle, you just might be someone who once makes a less than dramatic start, will discover as you move along that path of improvement, your need and passion for more business knowledge escalates. Why? Because you only see the value it has if you see the results of it.
You won't find support from your family or others until you make your move to improve. People never seem to mind helping a struggling person on a mission. But, boy does that change when they "see" your goals and passions begin to show.
Just suppose you started reading a recommended book on business or marketing and then you start connecting what the author advises with things in your medical practice.
You begin to understand how just one idea from one book can resolve a problem you didn't think you had, and now find a good solution. Just one idea from each book added up will propel your practice growth slowly over a year's time.
You will learn that you actually have far more capabilities than you ever imagined, once you begin, take action, or intentionally expose yourself to how capable you really are.
This fact can be found in every single medical doctor today...problem is that most all of them never seem to release all those self-imposed restrictions they have adopted in life. You may have been told in the past that you will never amount to more than a "fart in a whirlwind." You may have listened to the idiot that said that to you, unfortunately.
Everything known in the psychology of behavior tells us that the "comfort zone" destroys people and their capabilities. What all people need to understand is that your mind does not open up until you step out of your comfort zone. Then your mind presents you with the tools you need to expand your passions.
Whatever that force is, it exists only for those who move into new and strange areas of intentions. What happens when you finally decide to start skydiving? After the first jump, you can't wait to try it again and never quit. Suddenly all those fears are eliminated. Somebody put those fears there... maybe you?
You don't have to believe me. Just ask around and hear what others have to say. How many people have to say it to you before you believe what I'm telling you? Yes, I've been there and done that. And, it is a sad thing to think about, to see a smart physician lose his or her medical practice for lack of enough income.
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #58, 3-16-22
