Many healthcare providers struggle with the petiteness of the gap between what comes into the practice income-wise and what goes back out again in rent/mortgage, staff salaries, expenses, licensing fees, and so on. You yourself may have even wondered whether you should just close the door and go work for someone else and take home a living that way. Other solutions may occur to you like getting cheaper, less qualified staff or cutting back on the number of staff, etc.
The question is: Are those really the ideal solutions or are there other ways to increase your net income?
The answer is: Yes, there are solutions!
What causes profit loss?
- If you are not marketing your practice and attracting enough new patients, you may be experiencing some times in your day where there is no one booked and your staff and you are having sit-around time with fairly high wages. Solution: Get going on your marketing until you have a load of new patients coming in the front door and then not stop marketing. (Get help on this if you don’t know how … there are hundreds of ways of marketing healthcare practices that we help our clients with every day.)
- Are you losing patients due to the poor quality of service? This does not necessarily mean your actual treatments, but rather, how the phone is answered, how the patients are greeted, how effectively their treatment plan is presented, how they are followed up on for their next service, and much more. Solution: Really work with your staff to create a “WOW” factor about the service that you give to each and every patient.
- Are you giving discounts and/or free service more than the occasional charity case (which is good for your soul)? Are you always working on presenting IDEAL CARE to each patient as opposed to pre-judging what you think they will “go for”? Solution: Think to yourself, “If this was your wife, husband or child’s mouth, what would you do in an ideal world?” and present that to the patient and help them overcome their barriers to going ahead. (We have a fantastic Canadian-style Sales Workshop available. Hint hint!)
- Is your marketing geared to the wrong public? Some practitioners have done mailings that tend to attract too many of the lower socio-economic patients or clients. Solution: Everyone should take of some of those folks too, but you want to keep the percentage under control.
- Not enough patient referrals? Solution: (see #2 above) Also, work out with your team who could discuss the concept of referring with each patient (but only the patients you like as they will refer more people to you who are like them).
There are probably a lot of other ways to increase your net profit, but start with those and you should see a difference.
(Our management training and consulting services increase most practices more than $10,000 per month, so gaining management tools and ideas is definitely a viable option to consider.)
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