"Important issues you must consider first, before
wasting your time and money hoping that increased
patient numbers will save your private
medical practice… financially!"
Any physician or professional healthcare provider can increase their income by seeing more
medical patients each and every day as you well know... just common sense... more patients =
more income. It's temporary... burnout ends it all!
Likely, medical doctors in private medical practice in today’s lousy economy are already doing that, at least to some degree, as their response to fee restrictions and competition for patients. However, there are several additional profitable approaches you can use to ease the stress on yourself as well as stress on your office personnel.
The idea is to see increasingly more patients over years without killing yourself in the process. Is that even possible? But, if you’re willing to take a beating and work under continuous unrelenting stress, you may need to use these tools for self-preservation.
The only reason medical doctors choose to do this is out of desperation and for financial reasons. However, the most important reason is that medical doctors lack the business knowledge to do anything else... or they would be doing it… right?
| Fact: Every smart doctor should be using business and marketing strategies instead of beating a dead horse (working harder). But then, we all make our choices... even when we are forced to accept what we know is not the best choice (dictated by our circumstances) or is the only option left that our uninformed minds lets us see. |
Several factors must be considered that make it easier to increase your patient load, work harder, and hope the income justifies the effort...
1. Good office communication
By this time in your medical practice troublesome times you are already aware of the drop in your practice income and the threats it presents to you. It’s important to gain employee support and agreement to work as a team towards an increased practice income project or their jobs may disappear. You must inform your office staff what your intentions are and what their role in the project will be… and repeat it often.
As part of the effort, employees must be told about what you expect of them. Some of those factors are that they...
- Must improve their efficiency of patient and medical practice management
- Must accept extra work hours and a variable work hour schedule
- Are expected to maintain their friendly and professional attitudes even if in a rush
- May need to work over lunchtime or even into the evenings (no overtime $)---compensate for that in other payback tactics.
- Must arrive early to work to accomplish preparations for the day
- Their extra efforts will be compensated for, but no promises given about overtime pay or increase in salaries
- If any staff member refuses or is unable to comply, they are replaced... period!
Hire only those who are agreeable with, willing to comply with, the business rules you present to them for the accomplishment of your goals for your practice and how you choose to have your medical practice run.
Your employees must be convinced it is critical to the financial stability of your practice and their paychecks to readjust their personal agendas to fit your requirements regardless of their family and personal situation. Never assume that they all will bend to your wishes.
You should start a couple of months early to inform your present employees of the changes you intend to make. It permits them to find another job if they can’t or won’t fit into your plans. It permits you to recruit a more suitable employee to replace the ones who leave.
Your employees must be convinced it is critical to the financial stability of your practice and their paychecks to readjust their personal agendas to fit your requirements regardless of their family and personal situation. Never assume that they all will bend to your wishes.
You should start a couple of months early to inform your present employees of the changes you intend to make. It permits them to find another job if they can’t or won’t fit into your plans. It permits you to recruit a more suitable employee to replace the ones who leave.
This process actually is a perfect screening procedure for learning which employees are loyal to you, understand why you are doing what you have told them, and are anxious to participate actively in this new venture. These employees also are those who trust you when you promise to compensate them for their extra hard work on your behalf.
Although it may be hard to accept, you have to be comfortable at replacing employees because your whole career and medical practice business is your life and livelihood. No employee should be allowed to interfere with your decisions. I personally had great difficulty with this situation. You don’t have to be liked… just respected.
2. There’s the issue of where all these new patients are going to be coming from and how to encourage old patients to come back more often...
- Increase the results of your medical doctor referral system, if you have one.
- Entice your old patients to refer new medical patients to you.
- Promote your medical practice marketing by being a joiner, participant, in your medical community.
- Become socially known... charity work, speaking to community groups, teaching
various groups about healthcare business management.
- Start a patient medical newsletter on topics your patients want to know about.
- Do things in your practice for patients that no other medical doctors locally are doing.
- Start a local newspaper column on medical topics.
- Use press releases or newsletters to promote your new skills, treatments you’ve learned, and changes to your practice focus... all about how you have increased your patient’s benefits
Comments:
When you do these things, you are doing medical practice marketing, often without even recognizing it as medical practice marketing and medical practice management processes.
Any medical doctor who has made the decision to increase their practice income by seeing more patients is faced with figuring out how to get all those new patients. Meaning, it will be necessary to go far beyond their present and already-being-used efforts, if any, to recruit new patients.
Very few medical doctors today are significantly involved in such an important activity. Most doct have no idea how to set up and use a medical doctor referral system or how to entice other doctors to send patients to you.
After all, over 60% of new patients you get are medical doctor referred patients (Practice Surveys). Wouldn’t that be an important resource to kiss up to?
The terrible mistake most medical doctors make is that they totally neglect their old and loyal patients, while courting new patients. Marketing statistics have demonstrated over and over again that a present patient is far more valuable to your business than new patients... and cost a lot less to keep than trying to get a new medical patient in the door.
Another important consideration is that everyone is looking for knowledge about something today... none more so than medical patients. The fact that medical doctors are now spending less time with patients is the primary reason a doctor should create a newsletter for his or her patients.
It may be that a newsletter specifically for your patients may be far more important to them, impact them more, than their annual checkup exam or an office visit just for medical advice. Your newsletter feeds your patients a constant stream of medical information all year long, while repeatedly reminding them that you respect their needs for health advice...it keeps you
in their minds.
Newsletters often are much more personal and relationship-building than a 20 minute office visit once a year. In effect, you would be doing some marketing for your practice without even paying them to have it done.
In coordination with your keeping your patients informed about medical issues, you should keep them informed about any new skills you have learned and how that can help your patients in new ways. This boosts your patient's desire to refer friends, family members, church buddies, and others to your practice--because you are showing them that you are a medical doctor that keeps up with the newest treatments and skills for their benefit.
In the same manner, after you open yourself up to the local community interactions such as volunteering to speak at gatherings, potential new patients in the audience get a unique personal impression of you that they might never get otherwise. This prompts them to join your practice.
This is all about medical practice marketing! I’m telling you, that even when you create your increased patient flow to earn more, it directly involves the use of marketing your practice to make it happen and to make it persistent. So, if you can’t seem to get away from the idea of marketing your medical practice, why not make it a commitment to learn how to market your practice the right way, using the right tools for the right reasons.
If your desire is to get good patients, this is the most efficient way to accomplish that. If actual medical practice marketing seems like an impossible task for you, then call it something else instead, like, “patient recruitment” or “drilling for income medical prospects” (kind of a dental term I should think).
Fact: You can’t increase your patient flow without using one or
more of the common medical practice marketing strategies.
3. Judging the limits you and your office staff can tolerate and still persistently perform at a top-level...
- How many hours a day can you work and avoid making big mistakes?
- How much work can be pushed onto your staff without all of them moving elsewhere?
- How much time will it take (not whether it will happen) for your burnout to occur?
- Are you willing to compromise your family life for the sake of increasing your workload,
practice income, and patient flow?
- Working beyond your personal mental and physical limitations will result in errors
and worse.
Comments:
You can work hard for a prolonged time but there will be a point in the near future where you will begin backsliding, which leads to burnout. To prevent that you not only have to be aware of your own vulnerabilities but also those of your employees who are even more susceptible to burnout.
Employee burnout means they up and quit suddenly one day. To avoid that, you have obligated yourself to yet another workload of spending the time and effort to keep them motivated and passionate about your goals for your practice. Do you know how to inspire people? You need to
use Tony Robbins tactics.
You don’t really believe that your employees have the same inspirational mindset as you do…
right? Or... do you?
You can be a martyr for your career, but your employees who are pushed to work harder and longer each day, aren’t. Present-day work attitudes should tell you that even raising their salaries would never keep them around long in this circumstance.
Constantly keeping employees happy in their work, inspired to function at high levels, and willing to work hard for you for long periods, takes a special rare employee and a boss that has the capacity to do what it takes to reach medical practice business goals. Your pressure to constantly learn and improve didn’t end when you finished your training.
In my experience and memories of medical doctors running a “patient mill,” working harder rather than smarter, rarely if ever reach their desired income levels. If they do, they have sacrificed their family life, health, and future productivity. They bring on their own catastrophes that ultimately leave them alone and isolated from the medical community in one way or another.
(In the second half of this topic I’ll provide you with the three most reliable and profitable methods to insure that your “work harder” philosophy can be made to elevate your medical practice profits to satisfactory levels. Part 2
----Professional Probe----
"Ultimate frustration and burnout in medical practice
could end up with a job in alcohol research"
"If you intend to or are thinking about dropping out of clinical medical practice today,
give yourself one last chance to fend off the causes of your frustration.
Most private practices that fail today are caused by financial deficiencies. Any doctor
facing this problem can eliminate this disappointing problem rather quickly by using
the advantages and tools found in the process of marketing your medical
practice business.
It doesn't require years of education nor millions of dollars you can't afford. Not only
can you do it yourself (with some minimal help), but also offers minimal cost strategies
that a 12-year-old can do. It does require you to gain some reliable business
and marketing knowledge and advice...which can be found on this website.
What you don't know can harm you greatly."
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #35, 3-16-22
