Author: Chandresh Shah

When someone – a potential referring physician – asks “What is your address?” your immediate response is perhaps a street address, name of town, or general area. Rarely do you blurt out a .com address. You are not alone. You may think digital address does not matter. But you must make that mind shift, paradigm shift now.

Make the Shift – Be a Leader

This way of thinking will work in your favor. Your practice may be in a prime desirable location in your city or town. Of course, you are not an ‘online business’ and patients have to physically come to your practice, and yet, so many more existing and prospective patients will visit you online every day. If you are not present online, the same patients will visit the next specialist that is just ‘one click away’.

It is this new-age thinking that matters; it is the virtual web address that counts. This is where your efforts to ‘market’ your practice must begin – with your website.

How do you create a website that is primed to inform, and educate both patients and referring providers?

You have to begin by spending some time defining, refining, and differentiating your ‘Brand’ as a Specialist. Your Brand building begins by translating your strength as a caring Physician who is ahead of the curve in treating patients.

• Define your Practice in 160 characters or less, leaving medical terminology behind, and speak in layman’s terms.
• Identify your practice’s three greatest strengths.
• List the keywords that patients are most likely going to use when searching for the types of services you provide, focusing on the symptoms and ailments they encounter.
• Describe how you will portray various symptoms and diagnoses in words, images, and videos.
• Get your patients to describe their experiences on your website.
• Identify why your patients love you.

What is your Special Sauce?

What makes your practice unique? What makes you unique? Why do patients prefer you versus another Specialist in town? You and your team of clinicians must hash out what makes your practice special. Involve your entire team including the front desk that speaks and connects with patients at a personal level every day. Factors can include:

• Providers’ deep experience and special education
• Awards and accolades
• Staff that builds close, interpersonal relationships with patients
• References and testimonials from patients as well as referring physicians.
• Affiliations with Universities, Hospitals, research institutions
• Media coverage

Videos

Practice Videos and provider videos that show a ‘personal’ and human face to your Clinic are vital in building long-lasting trust and relationships.

You should also put together a plan to get as many patient testimonials as possible – get them on a video if possible.

Finally – don’t ignore Social Media

Social media is sometimes considered a taboo in the healthcare industry. There are reasons for that, and we won’t go into the pros and cons in this blog (I’ll cover that in a future blog), but suffice it to say, executed properly, it becomes a powerful connector with your patients – existing and future.

Patient outstanding balances are on the rise. Patient A/R is at its highest ever. I am not talking about self-pay patients. Sometimes self-pay patients can be good at paying.
One of the main reasons why patients owe you money is because of healthcare plans in force.

There are two main reasons why this situation arises. Both have to do with insurance plans that may be provided by employers.

1. Increasing deductibles and
2. Increasing ‘per-visit’ co-pay amounts

You would think practices have a collection plan in place, but you will be surprised. I have seen established practices that just ‘wing’ it and leave it to the whims of staff and providers to tackle patient balance receivables.

In a recent conversation with a provider whose patient A/R over 90 days was 46% of all outstanding, he was afraid of pursuing ‘collections’ for the fear of losing patients.

It does not have to be an all-or-nothing approach. You need a well-thought-out and effective collections plan and process in place that involves your entire staff.

Here are 5 effective steps you can consider.

1. At the time of scheduling appointments for patients on the phone, make it a practice to check that patient’s outstanding balance. Of course, this task becomes easy if your integrated EHR/Billing systems allow you to quickly look it up. If patients owe money, they should be politely reminded to pay at that time with a credit card or bring payment at the time of the visit.
2. When patients check in, check for outstanding balances again and try to collect past balances along with the co-pay for that visit.
3. If available, take advantage of an automated system of sending patient statements. Good systems allow you to set up ‘rules’ for sending statements. For example, send statements to patients with a balance of $25 or more. Send statements on a monthly basis automatically and monitor how many statements have been sent.
4. If you have a very large over 90-day A/R, set up a plan including making phone calls to collect the money. This can be a short-term focused campaign to bring down the aging.
5. Send patients to external collections. This is one of the toughest decisions for a provider. One reason why it is difficult is because there is no plan and system in place. A well-thought-out plan removes subjectivity.

A good internal process coupled with an integrated EHR / Practice Management system can make it seamless to pursue patient collections and reduce A/R.

I lived most of my life with this simple saying. He further said you should have all the skills to be in control. I endeavored to live up to this and excel at what I did. I strove to excel not only in doing everything myself but even in finding my weaknesses and trying to overcome and excel at them.

Just over two years ago I realized I was wrong. Not my Dad, I was wrong. In my interpretation of the words ‘job well done’.

I thought of ‘Job’ as each task, each activity, and each detail. So wrong I was. I have excelled when it came to Strategy and Processes – seeing the big picture and finding solutions that are most apt. My weakness has been details – micro-managing.

I wanted to improve. I Read books, and took coaching classes. Time management and details management.

It hit me when I turned 50. 3 words = 1 simple word. The words ‘job well done’ meant just one word – Goal. My focus was on individual tasks rather than the Goal or big picture.

What did I do about it?

Once I realized this, I decided to take action. I did two simple things:

1. I hired a Personal Assistant
2. I outsourced simple tasks that I used to do including my own bookkeeping, accounting, etc.

That changed my life in two ways:

1. My quality of life improved. I now have more time for myself and I am happy and stress-free.
2. My revenue has actually increased by 45% in the last two years. This is something that came as a bonus because I am able to focus on and amplify my strengths. (see my previous blog post on ‘amplification of strengths‘)

If you think letting go and outsourcing tasks is expensive, think again. I am a living example of this false thinking.

Dr. Lawrence Gordon, an ENT Surgeon in NY provided a unique perspective on why EHR dissatisfaction pervades among Providers.

Theory of Amplification

Dr. Gordon talks about EHR as a tool that can be used to amplify the intrinsic talent that Doctors possess. It can be likened to the explanation Archimedes gave to the principle of Lever. While Archimedes did not invent the lever, he gave an explanation of the principle involved in his work On the Equilibrium of Planes. The principle of lever was used to design block-and-tackle pulley systems. The goal was to lift objects that would otherwise have been too heavy to move.

In today’s terms, we see increasing use of Robotics in the manufacturing sector that does the ‘heavy lifting’, allowing people to be creative.

In both instances, these are tools that amplify intrinsic talent.

What are you trying to amplify?

Doctors and Clinical Providers want to amplify their experience and empathy. Unfortunately, they seek out EHR to directly amplify these. This is precisely where it breaks down.

The goal must be to use the lever of EHR to create processes and an environment that allows amplification of inherent talent.

To be precise, we must use EHR to:

• Visualize data that allows better clinical decision-making
• Automate health maintenance rules for better patient care and interaction
• Provide focused educational content based on diagnosis and assessment

In other words, strengthen the processes outside of the exam room so that Providers can Amplify their experience and empathy using the data provided by surrounding systems, inside the exam room.

The goal should not be to ‘master’ a tool, but to use tools to help providers function at high efficiency. Efficiency does not mean clicking buttons and a mouse, it means amplifying strengths.

When I was in Dr. Gordon’s clinic on a Monday during his lunch break, it suddenly became obvious why his practice looked calm on his busiest day when he typically saw 45 patients.

We all love bargains. Now we can look for them from the comfort and privacy of our home or office. Comparative websites allow us to do that. Competition makes it good for us (bad for vendors).

We want everything in short steps. A quick way to lose weight, lotteries, an easy and fast way to make money and even looking for systems and tools that can help with our practice such as EHR. Sometimes one of these shortcuts pays off and it reinforces our belief that there is always a shortcut.

The problem is, that these shortcuts don’t always pay off. We spend too much time looking for money-saving shortcuts.

But when it comes to EHR / EMR software, there are no shortcuts. This is one reason why so many providers are looking to switch. They made a decision initially in haste, looking for shortcuts; soon to realize that there is a lot of effort needed by all stakeholders.

By all stakeholders, I mean all members of your staff as well as your vendors. Vendors are really partners in your success. If either stakeholder does not come into this as a partner, pause and question why.

Strive to fix it – internally or externally. Change staff, or change vendor, sometimes both.