Most doctors, dentists, and physio-therapists ask why they should care about the business side of their clinics. Isn’t the 7 to 15 years of study and practice enough to get them the reward for their hard work? 

Unfortunately, this is no longer enough. Here’s why:

1- It is becoming more and more competitive.

It is not enough to just provide your medical services.

If a patient is not satisfied, they get to choose from a large list of other doctors in your area. If you have just your expertise as a selling point, 100 other doctors do as well.

2-You are losing money

The running costs of your clinic are growing every year. Why? Medical device costs are going up because of technological improvements and the rise in employees' wages due to inflation. You have to adapt to the new circumstances or you will be losing out on profits.

3- Patient expectations are rising

The days of blind trust in doctors are gone. Patients expect more. 

If you don’t satisfy those expectations, your patients might not tell you explicitly about their disappointment, they will just not come back for the next session. 

This is one of the most silent and costly things happening in your clinic. Bringing in new patients costs you more than having patients back. And if someone bad-mouths you, you will be losing more than just 1 patient.

So what to do?

One of the easiest things you can do is to leverage technology to maximise getting new patients, booking more sessions, and making more revenue.

Below are 6 strategies you can apply today.

Strategy 1: Grow your online reputation to get more patients.

The number one way to get more patients to your clinic is through referrals. Not paid ads, not that billboard on the street, and not the three papers you wrote. 

Referrals.

6 out of 10 patients come from referrals.

You should do everything in your power to leave every patient saying to themselves: “wow this was amazing”.

One of the best books that explains how to maximise the value you give to your patients and then convey that in your marketing is this book. 

There are ways to influence patients to get them to tell people to come with incentives. Nonetheless, the best way will always be to give an exceptional service that makes them want to tell other people naturally.

But what you can do is the following:

Most patients just search online when they can’t find someone to give them a good reference. And the one thing they look for is testimonials. When choosing between a doctor that has 2 testimonials and another that has 78 with 5 stars, no one will think about it twice. 

What is an efficient way to get those? 

When a patient leaves, you could automate an email with your customer management software, asking to leave a review on google maps or your website.

Now when people will search your specialty on google, your clinic will be the one with lots of new reviews making it that much closer for the patient to book an appointment with you.

Strategy 2: Maximise your time in the clinic

One sure thing is that the 6 to 12 hours in your clinic should not be spent waiting with slots of empty time. It’s time you could be helping your patients and making more revenue.

One easy way to solve this is to be a scheduling ninja. Here are some tips you and your team can implement:

1. Get good customer relations software that allows you to have a clear calendar view of your sessions. When you see a gap you could schedule patients until you have a single block of sessions. No more waiting between sessions
2. Create a waiting list. No matter what you do, you will always have a last-minute cancelation. If you have a waiting list of patients you could send to this list that there is an empty spot. 
3. Have a screening process to evaluate how long a certain service or consultation will take. By doing this you will avoid the other thing that patients truly dislike: long waiting time. Allocate the right amount of time for the specific need of your patients.
4. Use online patient self-appointment. By putting your availability, patients will choose when to come. Empty slots will get filled and as a bonus, you will waste less time scheduling.

Strategy 3: Remind, remind, remind

Reminders in the form of phone calls, emails, WhatsApp, and SMS are one of the most powerful tools you can use for your clinic. Here’s how 

1- Reminders reduce massively no-shows.

Most people miss their appointment because they got busy and forgot. By reminding them, the probability of that goes down by a lot. Try it today. 

2- Remind your existing patients to come back and boost revenue

Let’s be honest, we all know patients should come back for a bi-yearly or yearly checkup, but most patients don’t do it. By just reminding them they will come back. This is also the easiest revenue you can get, recurrent clients. They are patients that already got treated and already trust you.

3-Remind people to do what you asked them to do for a higher probability of treatment success.

You just treated a patient and now he has to follow certain treatment assigned. But again, most people won’t do those properly. By reminding them you raise the probability of success.

What kind of reminder?

It doesn’t have to be complicated, something simple like the example below will work great.

“This is a quick reminder of your appointment with clinic X, on Friday XX at 3:00 PM”.

Strategy 4: How to train your staff to grow your revenue.

One of the most common reasons a clinic loses money is poor staff training. A front desk receptionist that doesn’t smile or an assistant that doesn’t take the time to explain the procedure. 

Here are some tips to train them properly and grow your clinic beyond yourself to be able to cater to more patients:

A- Don’t simply give them the task-based procedure, teach them to take decisions based on the mission, vision, and values you chose for your clinic.

B-Incentivize properly, by rewarding them and proposing a career plan, they will be more motivated to the extra details that matter most.

C- Develop a training protocol and follow it. Have a new employee check off on all of the skills necessary to function in their role. 

D- Cross-train your staff. They will be able to cater to more tasks which will allow more flexibility to cater to the patients. (Obviously, it highly depends on the role and the need for licenses.)

Strategy 5: Solve all the problems in your clinic with this method

Understanding why things are going well or not is absolutely non-negotiable.

It’s the end of the month and for some reason, revenue is lower than usual and patients are not coming back. 

Something is wrong. 

But you were running everything as usual, why is there a problem? 

The reason could be lots of different things. And to find the solution you shouldn’t use guesswork.

Here’s how to find the solution:

Data.

Having data that measures:

-patient satisfaction

-qualitative feedback

-patient recurrence

-number of sessions per doctor

-number of a reminder sent

-time per sessions

-waiting time 

-number of new patients

-Cash on hand

Etc

The more information you have the better you could find the potential issue. The faster you get your clinic back on track.

How to get the data:

You could check every report manually. But hopefully, you find good client relations software that includes reports, statistics, and an automated feedback system.

Strategy 6: Find an affordable all-in-one patient management software.

You would probably think if I get a good customer software that allows you to do all the things you would want which includes

- Appointment management

- Permission management for multiple users

- Custom bilan and questionaires assignable to sessions and patients

- Statistics

- Accounting

- Transactions and reports

- Sms and Email reminders

- Fully customizable and modular

- Supports multiple languages

That would cost way too much. It doesn’t have to be that way. There is software that doesn’t have a ridiculous initiation fee and a large monthly fee. There are many you can check out here. Not all of them will have everything you need. Some focus on a different aspect of the clinic.

One of them is the HBtech platform where we work every day to include all the features you will need to make more revenue.

If you wish to see for yourself, get a month free trial today.