1. Community Acknowledgment: Simply put –the less your presence in the community the less your business with the community. There are many ways to make your name known in the community. Join your local chamber of commerce. Also, join a community service group (i.e. Lions, Elks, Rotary, etc.). People tend to do more business with people they are familiar with. Give more people a reason to know you; it will increase your business!
2. Expanding Online: Make pertinent information about your medical practice easily accessible for your patients by creating a website for it. More and more people rely on the internet for researching doctors and medical practices. A website would allow your patients to learn more about your medical practice and learn more about a variety of different services that your medical practice offers. Also, it will make it easier for them to share information about your medical practice with friends and family.
3. News Letters: If you do not already send out news letters for your medical practice then you should certainly consider doing so. News letters are great for several reasons. The most important advantage of mailing out newsletters to your patients is contact. They allow you to stay in constant contact with your patients and create a sense of caring for your patients that will in turn help gain their loyalty.
4. Paid Advertising: This is the unthinkable for many and even thought of as tacky for some medical practices. However, paid advertising should be considered for every practice. Paid advertising can be done in a very tasteful manner and can bring in additional revenue if done properly. It allows you to reach the majority of your target patient group. Statistics show that a television is on for at least seven hours in the average United States home. Seize the opportunity!
5. Articles: Identify the magazines, newsletters, and web sites that serve your target patient group. Then write articles and submit them for publication to these various news outlets. The people who read these will be more attentive and interested in what you have to say. This will help in spreading your practice name and what it has to offer. Also, make sure your patients and prospects know of your achievements and benchmarks by placing acknowledgments and congratulations in the local newspaper and definitely in your newsletter.
6. Physician Recognition: Would you prefer to go to a physician whom is not known for his great patient care or a physician who has been publicly recognized for his high quality of care and practice standards? Obviously you would go to the physician that is known for great patient care. Patients prefer to go to someone they think will take better care of them. So, show everyone that you will take great care of them! One way to obtain such recognition is through physician quality recognition programs like the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Texas Council on Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke. This would be a great promotional item for your practice in all aspects of your marketing campaign.
7. Networking: It can be a hassle some times but it is a great way to obtain high references. Other physicians and nurses will not refer patients to a practice that they do not know well or a practice that keeps to itself. So, develop and maintain business relationships with physicians and nurses in hospitals and other clinics. Your practice should benefit greatly from it.
May 29th, 2007
We are pleased to introduce a new feature to our online control panel.
Every time you upload a patient file, you now have the option to check if we received the file and if it is correct.
Just click on “Check Sent File” from the menu on the left. You will see a list of your latest uploaded files with date and time. You can even view the files by clicking on “Get File” from the last column of the table.
February 20th, 2007
One of the most difficult things for a medical practice to do is market itself to patients. More often then not, medical practices are not marketing something cool and trendy and they are not marketing something that is considerably low in cost. This can make it very tough to peak the interest of your target audience. So we have decided to post a list of some of the more obvious and often overlooked marketing tips that will certainly help in marketing your medical practice.
1. Simplicity: If the messages that you are trying to convey are too complicated, patients will not be able to comprehend your messages or they will misinterpret the messages. Statistics show that the average American reads at an eighth grade level. So, to ensure that a greater percentage of your patients will be able to read and understand the information that you present them, write your health messages at the 5th or 6th grade level. Use simple language and simple sentences.
2. Know Your Target Patients: You should research your ideal target patients. Once you have researched your ideal target patients then you can customize your marketing campaign in a manner that is specifically geared toward them. This will enable you to better convey your health messages to those who are within your ideal target patient group.
3. Accuracy: It is very important that your health messages accurately represent your medical practice. Patient loyalty and trust greatly decrease if they see any inaccuracy between what you are marketing and what they find when they come into your practice.
4. Involving Your Patients: Whether you are sending out newsletters, posting messages on your website, handing out brochures, or creating posters for patients always involve your patients. You can do this by using open-ended questions for them to ask themselves or for them to ask your employees. Open-ended questions make patients more attentive to what they are reading. These questions are great methods for making patients aware of problems they have that your medical practice can solve. This also increases patient interest and makes them better remember what they read.
February 6th, 2007
We have just launched our new online lab system. Your practice can now log on to our secure website from any computer and leave lab results for patients with a single click. There is absolutely no software or special phones to install. All you need is speakers and a microphone.
In addition, patients can login to www.checkyourlabresults.com and listen to their messages over the internet, instead of using a phone. Our initial tests showed that the system is more than 50% faster than using the phone. Several clients have already started using the website and everybody loves it. And the best thing about the system is: it’s absolutely FREE. We stand behind our promise to continually enhance our services for the benefit of our clients at no extra charge.
Give us a call at 877.244.9178 to receive information on how to get started.
November 3rd, 2006
Last few months at ClientTell have been very hectic. We are at the final stage of testing our new online lab reporting system and it looks great. Our clients will soon be able to send messages to their patients by just using our website and a simple microphone. This is the first “completely online” lab reporting system ever created. There is absolutely no software or special phones to install. We are very proud to be on the frontier of technology and we believe that this system will change the way lab results are reported. Stay tuned for official launch date.
October 11th, 2006
I was having dinner with a friend of mine yesterday, and she expressed the following frustration. Her urologist did a lab test on her and asked her to come back to the clinic to get her test result. She is a very busy woman and being confident that the test result is normal, she called the clinic and asked if they could give her the test results over the phone. No, they wouldn’t do it. They require her to make another trip and pay for another appointment for two minutes just to get her test. Does making extra few dollars really worth the loss of loyalty of your patients? Is that really an efficient way to run a small practice? There is always an urologist down the street who will gladly leave your result on a secure voicemail for you to access at any time. Just because you’ve always done things the same way, doesn’t mean that they work right. Listen to your patients, give them satisfaction surveys, ask for their feedback, and stay on top of new technologies in practice management. Be the kind of business, people want to switch to.
September 22nd, 2006
This new feature allows patients to see your clinic’s caller ID when they receive an appointment reminder call. This will be especially useful for your new patients, who are not used to seeing ClientTell and are less likely to screen a call when they see that it is coming from your clinic.
For more information on this feature and availability please call our office at 1.877.244.9178.
July 27th, 2006
Following are the top 10 visited medical sites according to Alexa ranking (www.alexa.com). A great place to start searching for medical information.
1. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
www.nih.gov
2. Entrez-PubMed
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
3. WebMD
www.webmd.com
4. MedlinePlus
www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
www.cdc.gov
6. AIDS Patent Database
patents.uspto.gov
7. WeightWatchers.com
www.weightwatchers.com
8. Walgreens
www.walgreens.com
9. Food and Drug Administration
www.fda.gov
10. Metadot Portal Server
www.who.int
July 18th, 2006
No-shows are expensive; there’s no doubt about it. Cutting down on those will increase your office’s profit incredibly (and keep the doctors and staff happy!). You could be losing up to $144,000 a year simply because of ten no-shows per day, at $60 per visit (that’s $600 per day). What’s the solution? Adequately reminding each patient of their appointment—close to their appointment date.
When a patient has several appointments to juggle, they do realize they’re important, but they may also slip a time or two, forgetting when each appointment is. The appointment card you gave them at the office is easy to misplace. That’s why you’ll need to call them one, two, or even three days in advance to remind them of their appointment verbally. This will be the quickest way to get a response on who is able to make their appointment and who, regrettably, is not.
Calling each patient from your practice can be a drain on time and employee energy. In reality, you’re paying an employee to do something a reminder service can do, and other areas of office function may need more immediate attention. If you do have an employee make the calls, you may be paying him or her more per call (based on their hourly rate) than you would if you used a reminder service like ClientTell (www.clienttell.net).You can increase employee productivity and office efficiency by handing off reminder calls to someone else.
ClientTell appointment reminders run between noon and 8:30 PM—later than most doctors’ offices are open—to reach as many patients as possible, decreasing your no-shows by up to 70%. Messages will be left on answering machines if no one picks up, enabling patients to listen to them again and again to make sure they have the time, date, location, and doctor’s name correct.
A few other tips for decreasing no-shows:
When a patient makes an appointment in your office, you’ll want to make sure they know exactly when their appointment is. Say it out loud and confirm that that day and time is okay with them. Point out your phone number on the card when you hand it to them so they’ll know where to call if they need to cancel or reschedule.
You also will need to inform them of WHY the appointment is necessary. If they realize how important it is for their health, they’ll be less likely to dismiss it mentally.
Send a letter in the mail. Make the font size large enough for your elderly patients to read. Keep in mind that since mailing a letter costs at least $.37, it will be cheaper to call them in most cases.
Simply taking the time to remind your patients of their appointments will cut down your no-shows and, in turn, increase your practice’s profit. The least expensive way of doing that is to utilize a reminder service. Calling at least two days before the appointment gives patients time to arrange for time off from work to make it to your office at the scheduled time, or cancel in time for you to fill the empty appointment slots again. Try it out and watch your no-show rates fall over the course of just a few weeks.
June 29th, 2006
To ensure accuracy and make sure we don’t miss making any calls for your office, please try to send your files in early in the day. If at all possible, submitting your files by 10:00 a.m. will allow us enough time to troubleshoot if there are any problems with your files. We can then get them imported with enough time to make all the calls. We normally start the systems between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. and let them run until 8:00 p.m.
It is a joy working with every one of you. Thank you for your business.
June 12th, 2006
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