Transforming Your Organization
Business/Practice Development
Do you have a clear understanding of what you are offering your future patients, or of what the patients value most? Most doctors do not. Typically, you have spent so much time and effort in becoming a great doctor that you lose sight of what it’s like to be a patient. That's where business consulting comes in.
Most patients don't have a good way to know about the technical aspects of what you have to offer, but they do know what it’s like to receive your services as a consumer. Is your office welcoming? Clean? Simple to get started? Do you know how to answer patient concerns in your spoken conversations and on your website?
Overall strategy is critical and is usually ignored in the marketing of a professional practice. Your mission and your stand gives the context to all of your actions on a clinical and a business level. This must be developed and coherent. It’s the basis for what you will and will not do, and it's also the basis for your local reputation.
- Developing a clearly articulated and published mission and value set is critical to effective team building, staff management, and, eventually, patient management.Clinic Vision
- Branding concepts and methods: brands are a shorthand in the consumers’ mind for what you will do and what you will not do. This is a critical area also, as there can be confusion in the mind of the public about what you are about.
- Reputation and relationships: foundation of all successful professional marketing programs. Reputation within the medical primary care community is a critical long term foundation for a modern successful practice.
- All effective health care marketing is based on relationships and referrals. Understanding how relationships of this type are formed in the modern world is crucial.
- Regulatory compliance; complex, emerging and growing area. HIPPA, identity preservation, insurance contracts and payment requirements
Once you have decided what your overall strategy is, you can move forward into tactics. Tactics is a written marketing plan about how to execute your strategy. Tactics without a plan or without a coherent strategy will probably be a costly failure.
- Basics about marketing: messaging must be clear, must be repetitious, must be internally consistent, must be targeted
- Branding, logo and look development, clinic naming, tagline or identification line
- Internal marketing to existing customers: communication about menu of services, conditions treated, other providers/methods within your facility.
We explore and use both electronic and paper marketing options.
- External marketing to new referral partners. Two types: referral sources and new customers. Referral sources include local medical primary care providers (MD’s and DO’s) and other health care professionals (LMP’s, ACU’s, PT’s, DPM’s,)
- External new customers: must be by permission, otherwise it will be viewed as spam. Must have permission to e-mail and links to your website. Methods of gaining permission: e-letters through your website, blogging on your website, public speaking on your area of expertise