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Dan Clements and Tara Gignac, ND
A practitioner once asked us, “What do you wish you would have done a lot sooner in practice?”
It is a great question. So much of practice is just that: practice. We learn many things through the school of hard knocks, but given the chance to do it all over, what would make the biggest difference to do more of? What knowledge would have changed things had we learned it sooner?
Here are 4 shifts you can make in your practice right now that will help you grow faster, stay balanced, and reach more patients than ever.
Perhaps the single biggest benefit most practitioners miss out on is that they can almost always generate the same revenue in less time.
Spreading 15 or 20 billable hours over a 30-hour clinic week, for example, creates a cascade of problems in your practice. Your costs increase, and your time tends to be less productive because your schedule is ineffectively booked. The erratic gaps between patients force you out of the rhythm of care but often are not long enough to allow you enough time to focus effectively on other tasks. The result? Instead of doing productive work with those unfilled hours, you find yourself checking e-mail and doing busywork.
The same applies to the administrative and management work of your practice. That work, too, has a habit of expanding to fit whatever time you make available for it. Just as 15 patient hours can somehow consume a 25-hour schedule, 3 hours of administrative work can eat up a whole day if you let it.
The key here is to shift your focus from total clinic hours to percentage booked. If you are not already booked solid, cut your available hours back until you reach at least 75% to 80% booked, and do not increase them until you can consistently stay at that level. Apply the same rule to the management of your practice: set limits on your administrative time and do not give yourself a day if 3 hours will work.
To see more patients in less time, though, you will have to minimize the hours you lose to cancellations, no-shows, and other schedule changes. One of the best ways to fill those gaps is to use a waiting list.
A common mistake, however, is to start a waiting list only when your appointment book is completely full. Even the smallest practice should develop a habit early on of trying to fill the small gaps that crop up in every schedule.
One of the keys to a waiting list that works is to expand the contact information you collect from your patients. For a waiting list to be effective, you need to reach people quickly, and that means collecting not only their home telephone number but also the best way to reach them. That could be a work or cell number, a text message, or even an e-mail.
Armed with great contact information, you can start tracking patients who do not get their ideal appointment times. You do not need anything extravagant: a simple paper-and-pencil system works just fine. When the schedule shifts, you will have patients waiting who can fill the gaps, and that lets you do more of No. 1: work less.
There are objective tests available for almost every aspect of health you can imagine. From blood work and allergy testing to stress tests and psychometric assessment tools, just about any practice can find something to measure.
Choosing to use more testing with your patients offers several compelling benefits beyond diagnostics. Your patients get a tangible indicator of their progress. Change happens slowly at times, and your patients may be improving without realizing it. Measurable results make the subtle journey to health more visible. When your patient says, “I just don’t feel like it’s working,” you will be able to show them how well it truly is.
Objective testing also leads to better retention and to more return visits. Patients tend to stay engaged in the process longer when they have a health measure they can track. It is also far easier to implement ongoing wellness and prevention protocols when you are measuring progress. Patients may not want to come in annually for a checkup, but they will return regularly to get test results.
The physical parts of our practices tend to get our attention. Items like equipment, furniture, and practice tools are the squeaky wheels that lead us to believe, “This is what my practice is about.”
It can come as a surprise, then, that when you buy or sell a practice that much of the value is not in those elements. In fact, much of the value in some practices is something you can print out on a few pieces of paper: the patient database.
The ability and permission to contact your patients are often far more valuable than we realize. The means to easily send out an e-mail or print a newsletter that reaches the audience it should and is read by the recipients is a powerful thing.
E-mail is the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to communicate with your patient base. A good patient newsletter will bring business to your clinic every time you send it.
To make it work, though, you will need to adhere to the following principles:
It is never too early to start with any of these strategies. Here’s hoping that our looking back helps you moving forward.
Dan Clements and Tara Gignac, ND, are the owners of StoneTree Clinic in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada, and are the authors of The Practitioner’s Journey, a success guide for alternative and integrative practitioners.
Dan Clements and Tara Gignac, ND
A practitioner once asked us, “What do you wish you would have done a lot sooner in practice?”
It is a great question. So much of practice is just that: practice. We learn many things through the school of hard knocks, but given the chance to do it all over, what would make the biggest difference to do more of? What knowledge would have changed things had we learned it sooner?
Here are 4 shifts you can make in your practice right now that will help you grow faster, stay balanced, and reach more patients than ever.
Perhaps the single biggest benefit most practitioners miss out on is that they can almost always generate the same revenue in less time.
Spreading 15 or 20 billable hours over a 30-hour clinic week, for example, creates a cascade of problems in your practice. Your costs increase, and your time tends to be less productive because your schedule is ineffectively booked. The erratic gaps between patients force you out of the rhythm of care but often are not long enough to allow you enough time to focus effectively on other tasks. The result? Instead of doing productive work with those unfilled hours, you find yourself checking e-mail and doing busywork.
The same applies to the administrative and management work of your practice. That work, too, has a habit of expanding to fit whatever time you make available for it. Just as 15 patient hours can somehow consume a 25-hour schedule, 3 hours of administrative work can eat up a whole day if you let it.
The key here is to shift your focus from total clinic hours to percentage booked. If you are not already booked solid, cut your available hours back until you reach at least 75% to 80% booked, and do not increase them until you can consistently stay at that level. Apply the same rule to the management of your practice: set limits on your administrative time and do not give yourself a day if 3 hours will work.
To see more patients in less time, though, you will have to minimize the hours you lose to cancellations, no-shows, and other schedule changes. One of the best ways to fill those gaps is to use a waiting list.
A common mistake, however, is to start a waiting list only when your appointment book is completely full. Even the smallest practice should develop a habit early on of trying to fill the small gaps that crop up in every schedule.
One of the keys to a waiting list that works is to expand the contact information you collect from your patients. For a waiting list to be effective, you need to reach people quickly, and that means collecting not only their home telephone number but also the best way to reach them. That could be a work or cell number, a text message, or even an e-mail.
Armed with great contact information, you can start tracking patients who do not get their ideal appointment times. You do not need anything extravagant: a simple paper-and-pencil system works just fine. When the schedule shifts, you will have patients waiting who can fill the gaps, and that lets you do more of No. 1: work less.
There are objective tests available for almost every aspect of health you can imagine. From blood work and allergy testing to stress tests and psychometric assessment tools, just about any practice can find something to measure.
Choosing to use more testing with your patients offers several compelling benefits beyond diagnostics. Your patients get a tangible indicator of their progress. Change happens slowly at times, and your patients may be improving without realizing it. Measurable results make the subtle journey to health more visible. When your patient says, “I just don’t feel like it’s working,” you will be able to show them how well it truly is.
Objective testing also leads to better retention and to more return visits. Patients tend to stay engaged in the process longer when they have a health measure they can track. It is also far easier to implement ongoing wellness and prevention protocols when you are measuring progress. Patients may not want to come in annually for a checkup, but they will return regularly to get test results.
The physical parts of our practices tend to get our attention. Items like equipment, furniture, and practice tools are the squeaky wheels that lead us to believe, “This is what my practice is about.”
It can come as a surprise, then, that when you buy or sell a practice that much of the value is not in those elements. In fact, much of the value in some practices is something you can print out on a few pieces of paper: the patient database.
The ability and permission to contact your patients are often far more valuable than we realize. The means to easily send out an e-mail or print a newsletter that reaches the audience it should and is read by the recipients is a powerful thing.
E-mail is the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to communicate with your patient base. A good patient newsletter will bring business to your clinic every time you send it.
To make it work, though, you will need to adhere to the following principles:
It is never too early to start with any of these strategies. Here’s hoping that our looking back helps you moving forward.
Dan Clements and Tara Gignac, ND, are the owners of StoneTree Clinic in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada, and are the authors of The Practitioner’s Journey, a success guide for alternative and integrative practitioners.
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It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
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