CREATING A PRODUCTIVE REFERRAL SYSTEM FOR YOUR PRACTICE

Happy clients and word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective methods to fill your practice with new patients. An internal referral campaign to get your existing patients excited about telling their friends and families about your  the way to actively create new patients and is very important and very inexpensive.

This is one of the first things I start when working with a practice:


1. Encouraging referrals – when a new patient calls in, find out who referred them.  This of course is done by the receptionist over the phone.  Make a point to acknowledge the person whom referred the new patient.  For example, if Sally Smith referred the patient, the receptionist would say something such as “My, Sally Smith’s such a nice lady, isn’t she?  It was so kind of her to recommend our services to you!”  This if the first time the new patient hears about referrals.

 

The new patient then comes into the office and fills out a New Patient form on which it has a question, “Who may we thank for referring you?”  This is the second time the new patient’s attention has been directed to the idea of “referrals”.

 

Finally, the Doctor introduces himself to the new patient, looks at the forms, and notes who the patient has been referred by and says, “I see Sally Smith referred you.  We all really enjoy her.”  This is the third time the patient has thought about referrals.  This impresses upon the new patient the fact that referring new people to the practice is very much encouraged and is appreciated.

2. Put a tastefully bold sign you waiting area - "We would like to help as many people as possible with their health needs. Please feel free to tell your family and friends that we are accepting new patients!" or a similar wording.

3. Survey your employees and patients for an award or discount you can give them for getting new patients into the practice (obviously can't violate any local laws on referring patients). This can be a Starbucks card, gas card, or something similar for each new patient gotten from referrals and can increase with the number of referrals a patient or staff member gets.

4. Create simple referral cards with the practice's contact information and stating that your practice is accepting new patients. Offer a special for new patients. Something significant, but not at a loss for the practice.

5. Hand out two (2) referral cards to all patients as they leave. Tell them how many people don't take care of their dental needs and that you want to help provide needed dental care and that you would like them to tell as many of their friends and family as possible about your practice. Let them know what special the new patient will get and what award they get when someone comes in with a referral card.

6. The staff should initial the cards they hand out so they can be awarded too.

7. Also recommend drilling your staff on this so they are comfortable doing it.

I have had real success implementing the above steps in many practices, though I have found that for each practice they have different response times before they start seeing an improvement in new patient numbers, but it does work.

HOW IMPORTANT IS YOUR OFFICE MANAGER?

In most practices I've worked with, the Office Manager, is the most underrated and undervalued position in a medical practice.

The Office Manager (or Practice Manager) is regarded, in many cases by the Owner, associates and other medical staff, as a glorified receptionist or office assistant. Often, as a result, people who have minimal to no management experience or training are hired and assigned this position, which furthers the idea that the Office Manager isn't really the manager.

This is also evident in the low pay grade of most Office Managers, where they are paid slightly higher then the front desk staff and much lower than Technical staff.

But in truth the Office Manager is a profession related to office supervisory positions, responsible for coordinating work flow and hiring, training, and supervising office staff and should be looked at as a partner in the smooth operation and stable growth of a practice.

The Office Manager is the executive who should be responsible for the smooth running of the front office operations and back office operations.

He or she should work closely with the Owner in managing day-to-day operations to obtain the longer term goals set by the Owner. Ideally, with a competent Office Manager, the Owner of the practice is allowed to practice medicine (which is why the owner usually went to so many years of school anyway!) and the Office Manager manages the practice.

The owner would set short and long-term goals for the practice and the Office Manager would be responsible for seeing that these goals were met.

Here is a summary of some of the functions an ideal Office Manager:

- Supervise the production of the personnel.

- Ensuring the smooth operation of each area and stepping in when necessary.

- Statistically tracking the growth of the practice.

- Handling staff performance issues.

- Handling human resource functions.

- Working with the Owner to set and enforce office policies.

- Run the daily and weekly production meetings.

- Hiring and firing of personnel (with approval from the Owner).

- The financial well being of the practice and planning of how monies will be used to grow the practice (in coordination with the Owner).

- Overseeing the promotion and marketing of the practice and its services.

- Ensuring the bookkeeping for the practice is in order.

- Ensuring that actions are being taken to create a steady flow of new and returning patients to the practice.

- Seeing that proper treatment plan presentation is being done by the medical staff.

- Proper scheduling of patients.

These are just a handful of the actions the Office Manager should be responsible for, which makes it clear that the Office Manager has to be regarded as more than a glorified office administrator.

To make this work the person hired as the Office Manager has to be qualified as a manager and has to be someone that can competently execute the above actions.

The position must be given its due importance.

On top of this, there needs to be a delineation of duties between the Office Manager and Owner (which I will cover in my next blog) and a regular meeting period between the Office Manager and the Owner to coordinate on practice production and goals.

Give your Office Manager position the proper value and assign that position the duties above. Then fill that position will a qualified person and you will have a steadily growing practice.

A Quick Way to Increase Your Practice's Production

In any practice, and on any given day, there are hundreds of parts all running simultaneously.

In practices I've worked with I've observed this to be confusing and most often, not planned for properly, which can result in lost production, poor service and internal upset. All of which can have the potential of lost patients and lost income.

I've also worked with practices that weren't regularly going over the practice growth goals and did not go over the necessary daily production goals with the staff. As a result, in each practice, potential production was lost.   

For any Practice Manager (or owner of a practice) this is a major concern and can take up a great deal of time and personal energy from the manager and owner trying to either prevent or resolve the resulting losses.

There is a solution implemented in a number of practices - the daily huddle or production meeting. It is a simple tool that can have immediate results and improve production and service to your patients.

Implementation is simple:

a) Schedule the daily huddle at the start of the day.

b) Ideally all staff attend, including the Owner, Practice Manager, associate doctors and staff. (If all of your staff can't attend, work to have have as many as possible attend as it will still be very productive.)

c) The Practice Manager runs the huddle.

d) All patients for the day are discussed, with any specific details gone over to ensure great service, like scheduling, coordination on additional coverage, etc.

e) Production targets are set for the day (e.g. how much of a specific service to be delivered, how much in treatment plans to be sold, how many reactivated patients, etc). I will discuss in a later blog how to set production targets and the value this will have in increasing your practice's overall viability.

All of this can be done in about 10 to 15 minutes and will definitely increase staff productivity and service to your clients.

It also results in improved morale and your practice staff working as a team.

Now it may take a bit to get this fully organized, but if you do, you will immediately increase the quality and amount of service to your patients, resulting in a growing practice! 

THE VALUE OF KNOWING HOW TO SELL YOUR TREATMENT PLANS

Training your staff on presentation and teaching basic sales techniques is important in getting patients to accept their treatment plans. I'm not talking about being a used car salesman, but using honest sales techniques that really help a patient see the importance of the treatment.

This also does not replace the quality of the services you've provided and the actual value of the treatment plans you offer.

When training staff on sales, a good technique, is to help the patient understand what might happen if they don't move forward with the treatment plan. Don't do this as a scare technique, but be honest so that the patient understands why you feel they need the treatment.

For those that don't close and don't decide to move forward with the treatment plan and need "some time to think about it" try to schedule them for another appointment so you can see them again and get another chance to tell the patient about their treatment plan and its value to the patient.

Also doing regular calls to past clients that have not been back to the office after a year is a very productive way to finish treatment plans. More then likely they've gotten caught up and forgot about their treatment plan and a reminder might get them back in to actually do the treatment. I call this reactivation calling.

When you do call your patients that haven't been in for a while you should have a dialog that makes it important for the patient to respond and get back in touch with your office or makes them want to come back in to see the doctor. I've worked out a fairly good "reactivation" dialog for this and if you are interested please feel free to contact me.

I would also be interested in any successful "reactivation" call dialogs that you might have. Please share them with me!