How Can You Get More Patients For Your Practice?

Steven Rogers

Oct 8, 2020 • 4 min read

Compared to being a medical professional in a hospital or clinic setting, people who have their own practice need to juggle quality of care with business acumen. As a result, one of the things that should always be at the back of your mind is how exactly to recruit more patients for your practice. People are always going to have medical needs in any specialty, but what you need to do is figure out how you can make your practice stand apart when they do need care. There are a lot of different approaches that you can take here. Let’s go over some of the standouts when it comes to care options.

Set A Target Audience

A classic tenet of marketing is that it’s impossible to be all things to all people. Even in the medical world, this applies. Chances are that if you are a specialist or general practitioner, you are going to have clients that fall into specific categories. This can range from demographics to income to many other options.

One good way to narrow down this ideal customer is by creating a buyer persona, or client persona. This basic concept of marketing is an idealized version of a possible customer. For example, a pediatrician may be looking out for young families who want a medical professional they can easily use through a child’s whole development. Making this decision will inform a lot of your future patient recruitment efforts.

Build Loyalty With Existing Patients

Your average person is inundated with marketing materials on a daily basis, even for medical practices and similar services. This means there’s a diminishing return on even the best marketing. However, a side effect of this is that your average would-be patient is going to place a higher premium on referrals than normal. This means that you want to make sure that you are focusing on making your existing patients happy as well as trying to bring on new ones. Those happy current patients may be inclined to refer people they know to you. In addition, by leaving reviews on platforms like Yelp, they may be able to help bolster your digital presence.

Find Ways To Solicit Feedback

Another important role that your existing patients will play is helping you find ways to improve your current services. While you can naturally perform competitor analysis to some degree, that’s going to be different than what patients suggest. They have different perspectives on what makes quality service, and you want to find ways to get information from them on how you can improve. This generally means putting together some sort of survey that they can fill out in order to get information. What format of survey you decide to use can vary, from a phone survey to an online form. Just think about the format that will work best for your average patients. If you survey mainly elderly patients, a Google Form may not be the best option.

Some people may be reluctant to create a social media presence due to the sensitive nature of medical data. However, creating a page on places like Instagram or Facebook allows you to interact with current and prospective patients in a whole new way as well as showcase your business to a new audience. The key here is creating content that these audiences will want to see. Basic health tips or news about your practice are good starting points.

Create A Community Presence

This probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people, and to an extent, COVID-19 has put a halt on a lot of community events. However, one way to get local supporters in the community is to support the community itself. There are a few ways you can do this. Traditionally, making appearances at community events to introduce yourself and perhaps provide some sort of service were good options. In a COVID-19 world, though, you may want to take this virtual. Another thing to consider is networking with emergency physicians in your area. Most hospitals will refer someone to a local practice after they are ready to be discharged. This could be a way for you to be introduced to new patients.

Consider Expanding Your Offerings

This last option is probably one of the more difficult to weigh. Yes, introducing a new piece of equipment or service is a great way for you to become appealing to more patients. However, you need to make sure that you are going to get a return on investment, which isn’t always easy. In addition, if you have a poor marketing plan, you probably won’t see much impact. After all, what good is a new service if no one outside of your existing patients knows about it? As a result, it’s a better idea to try and lay a foundation with some of the other options on this list before going this route.

Improve General Efficiency

At this point, we’ve mainly been talking about active measures that you can make to improve your patient recruitment efforts. However, all of these require some form of investment, whether we are talking time or in some other area. As a result, it’s important that you’re finding ways to be more efficient in your efforts not directly related to patient procurement. The more time you save there, the more you can focus on the efforts we’ve been detailing above.

A good example of something that you should be looking at here is medical certification. This is necessary for you and your staff to remain compliant and keep track of the latest best practices for areas like PALS, BLS, or ACLS. Traditionally, this was done through classroom instruction, which isn’t the easiest to fit into a busy schedule. Now, though, there is a better alternative: online medical certification with ProMed. We provide certification and recertification courses that meet all relevant AHA and ILCOR guidelines. We stand behind our quality with a 100% money-back guarantee.