A Guide to Growing Your Medical Practice

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The healthcare industry is full of various types of professionals.

There are dentists, doctor, chiropractors, nurses, and many more to consider. All of these professionals go through tremendous amounts of training to get the careers they’ve always dreamt of—which is a process that you can more than likely relate to.

However, there are many occasions when healthcare professionals decide that they don’t want to work for a public institution (such as a hospital); instead, they would prefer to start their own private medical practice. It’s a brave route to take, but also a highly beneficial one.

Running your own medical practice is just like any other business. You need to provide excellent service, market yourself to patients, and develop all the skills needed to grow your practice.

However, when you’re at medical school, they don’t teach you how to grow your own private practice. Luckily, this guide is here to show you how.

Keep reading for some useful tips and hints that will help you to grow your medical practice over the coming months and years.

1. Choose High-Quality Medical Equipment and Supplies

Often, a healthcare professional is only as good as the tools in their hands.

Without the right equipment, such as medical diagnostic machines, you can’t provide the best possible service to patients: it’s a fact.

Therefore, it’s highly recommended that you tick all the boxes you need to, including:

  • PPE equipment
  • Treatment chairs
  • Healthcare practice furniture

Also, don’t forget to regularly inspect (and replace) your medical equipment. It’s also highly recommended that you don’t attempt to cut costs by reusing certain items, such as medical examination gloves.

2. Adopt a Positive Mindset

The mindset you adopt will dictate how successful your practice becomes. Moving forward, it’s essential that you embrace positive thinking. Generally, most problems within the healthcare industry can be resolved by applying this mindset in the solutions process. For example, many healthcare practices struggle to keep certain staff members over the long-term, such as receptionists. This can be discouraging, especially when the turnover rate leads to cost damages. However, these challenges should be viewed as opportunities for you to tackle—not problems to run away from. Remember, you have the added pressure of patients relying on you, which is even more reason to not give up!

3. Embrace Telemedicine

Thanks to telemedicine, the impact of the recent global pandemic wasn’t as bad as it originally would have been. This is because telemedicine allowed doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals to remain in contact with patients when they physically couldn’t visit surgeries due to social distancing restrictions (and other guidelines).

Therefore, if you want to become a modern healthcare practice that’s future-proof, you need to embrace telemedicine. This will involve allowing patients to book appointments with you online and speak to doctors over the phone or via video chat.

Remember, telemedicine is particularly appealing to younger generations and workers who live busy lives. Often, when they’re at university or in the office, they simply don’t have time to visit practices in-person. Fortunately, telemedicine eliminates this obstacle. Plus, if your doctor or nurse discovers that a patient needs urgent treatment, a request can be made for them to come in for a physical examination!

4. Allow Patients to Refer Friends and Family Members

Truthfully, a healthcare practice can’t grow as fast without referrals. So, where do referrals come from? Existing patients.

With this in mind, it’s important that you allow patients to refer friends and family members. Ideally, this can be done through a referrals program. For example, if you own a dental practice, you could create a program where (if a patient refers a friend or family member) they will receive discount on a cosmetic procedure such as teeth whitening.

The key is to give your patients good reason to refer people they know. If your service isn’t up to a good standard, then they won’t refer—simple.

5. Humanize Your Practice Through Marketing

Marketing is almost as important as the care you provide to clients.

When it comes to marketing, you need to be focused on the internet—specifically, social media and email marketing.

These two tools are key to building a healthcare practice. Social media in particular is useful for humanizing brands, as it gives people the opportunity to communicate with followers in an organic and genuine way.

For example, on Facebook, you will be able to post photos and videos of your practice that showcase how friendly and professional your staff are.

Plus, you could start creative marketing campaigns, such as a weekly “Doctor’s Q&A Session” in which your head doctor hops onto Facebook Live (or Instagram Live) and answer any questions that your followers have for them. Over time, this will attract more and more patients to your practice.

6. Keep a Low Staff Turnover

Last but not least, it’s important to keep a low staff turnover. This is important across all industries—but especially in healthcare.

The reason for this is because healthcare practices and their staff build relationships with clients. Trust is a huge part of all this—if you’re constantly turning over staff, whether it’s nurses or reception staff, your clients then have to re-build trust and a rapport with the new hires.

Therefore, keeping a low staff turnover should be one your primary goals moving forward. It’s good for morale and reassuring for your patients.