Are you finding that whilst you’ve brought new clinicians on board, they’re not as busy as you (and they!) are looking for them to be? While this might be due to seasonal forces, it might also be that your marketing strategy needs revisiting.
There are several actions you can add to your marketing strategy to increase the number of bookings, which don’t involve cold calling potential patients or spending lots of money. In this article, we’ve focused on capturing and disseminating information about the new clinician, where they fit into your team and what makes them different. You might also like to review our article 10 Ways to Promote Your Healthcare Practice (Without Spending a Fortune!).
Before you start promoting them and filling their appointment book, you and your admin team will need to understand how they like to see patients. The more information you have, the better you can communicate this to your patients.
Setting up their schedule
Some things to consider and discuss with your new clinician to get them set up with your practice and team are:
The service/s they offer, the types of patients/clients, and conditions they like to see.
How do their services compare with those offered by other practice clinicians? Is there scope to cross-refer and benefit your patients?
How many patients/clients do they want to see each session, or would they like on their caseload? Some prefer a large caseload and seeing a variety of patients, whereas others seek a smaller caseload of people they see regularly.
How they like to structure their day, including things like:
o Start and finish times.
o Appointment duration for initials and reviews.
o Breaks and catch-up times.
o How they like to see patients - face-to-face, telehealth or a mix, in which case, what blend?
Are they interested in working hours to cover gaps or high-demand times, such as some evenings or Saturday mornings?
Would they like to set aside time at the end of each day for things like:
o Urgent appointments.
o Brief telehealth consultations – repeat scripts, referrals, providing results.
o Catching up with notes, results received, correspondence, etc.
Generating their profile
After collecting this information, you can create their ‘profile’ and ‘blurb’. As well as some of the above, you might like to personalise it further by including:
Their photo.
Their qualifications and where they obtained them.
Their experience to date.
What made them decide to be a healthcare clinician, and what they’re passionate about.
Their hobbies and things they like to do in their free time.
As well as helping your team get to know them and be able to talk about them to patients; sometimes, it’s such small details that cause a patient to book into your clinic over others.
Get promoting!
With their profile complete, you can use it to:
Add to your reception/practice manual.
Share it with all team members - admin and clinicians.
Create flyers to go up in the practice or to give directly to patients.
Populate your website and online booking platform.
Generate content for social media platforms and newsletters.
Provide information to referrers and neighbouring clinics with complementary services so their teams know the services available when they need to refer.
These strategies can help your clinicians target the patients they’d like to see and help patients find the care they’re seeking! They’ll also show your new clinician how invested you are in helping them! build their practice.
An added benefit is how quickly your team will get to know the new clinician and feel comfortable and confident when recommending them. You might also like to share information with the new clinician about your admin team members – even better, have a welcome morning/afternoon tea or evening nibbles – we all know how much our teams love to share food!
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in many key areas such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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