Boosting patient satisfaction and garnering patient referrals are two of the best ways to boost your practice revenue. But then, even the most elite doctors had to wait years before they can establish their reputation. The good news is, leveraging today’s innovations can help you achieve such a goal.
We live in the digital world where most of today’s consumers rely on technology. They require fast, convenient, and efficient healthcare services. If you fail to make consistent good impressions, then you can already lose clients.
If your goal is to grow your business, the key is to unlock a better patient experience. Since you are now catering to modern-day consumers, your marketing strategies should follow suit. Here are four modern ways you can attract better revenue and more referrals.
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Invest in a Reliable Portal for Your Patients
Patient portal solutions offer numerous features that aids in a better patient experience. This helps improve the quality of care by allowing better communication between patients and doctors. When you invest in the right portal, your patients can enjoy the following perks.
- Secure messaging between the patient and healthcare provider.
- Reduce patients’ waiting time.
- Give patients access to their records like visits, test results, prescriptions, billing information.
- Allow non-urgent online appointments.
- Enable online bill payment and prescription renewals.
- Request referrals.
- View patient-education articles.
- Update patient information like contact data or insurance information.
Patients only need to set up their accounts in the portal. Once the account is up and running, patients can enjoy self-help tools. This way, you can keep your patients happy and entice them to refer your practice to their loved ones.
Collect Five Star Reviews Online
More patients are spending more time online. They do online research to look for the best local doctors to seek medical advice. But then, online users are no longer choosing the first doctor that comes up with their search results.
Patients now dig a little deeper before choosing their next doctors. They now want doctors who already raked numerous five-star reviews online to be their healthcare providers. This is since they treat online reviews as great recommendations.
If you want better results, put your focus on Google and Yelp reviews. This is since these are the sites most trusted by online consumers. The good news is, there are many ways you can ask patients to leave online reviews, like the following.
- Send your customer your doctor’s review profile link where they can leave a review.
- Ask for online reviews from your website.
- Send texts or emails containing your link within minutes after their appointment asking them to rate their experience.
- Send a link to your review profile containing a simple star rating.
- Have someone monitor your reviews and get them to address patient concerns ASAP.
Improve Patient Payment Collections
May doctors don’t rely much on patient copays. This is the fixed amount collected by doctors before rendering a service. Since many patients these days are having a hard time paying for the healthcare services they receive.
But then, educating your patients about why you require copays can help you collect more copayments each day. It pays to make patients understand that they have a financial obligation to fulfill in exchange for the care they will be receiving. To entice patients to pay for your services before you see them, you can try the following tactics:
- Enable billing and online payment on your portal.
- Make a payment or unpaid balance part of your appointment reminders.
- Be as transparent as possible when telling them about upfront fees.
- Check patient information before their schedule. Remind those with deductible plans that they need to pay for their own consultation and procedure costs.
- Streamline your collections process with a billing management software system.
Consider After-hours Virtual Visits
Some patients have a messy schedule that they can’t come for a doctor’s appointment during your clinic hours. How can you cater to such patients? After-hours virtual visits can be your perfect solution.
These days, more people are into virtual visits. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, many are afraid to take their loved ones to clinics and hospitals for non-urgent medical care. By offering after-hours virtual visits, you can cater to more patients and recapture revenue due to missed and after-hour appointments.
Now, your patients sheltering in place or can’t make it due to conflict in schedule can receive adequate care. You, on the other hand, can boost your earnings by recollecting missed appointments. You get to keep more patients happy while boosting your practice revenue.
It may take time before you can boost your revenue. But with today’s technology, this is never impossible. All you have to do is to adapt tactics you haven’t tried yet to improve your practice. As you cater to more patients and maintain patient satisfaction, you will soon experience better practice success.