15 Ways to Increase Patient Volume at Your Small Practice
By: Nextech | September 19th, 2024
As a small practice, your goals might include caring for more patients and growing your business while continuing to provide the highest quality care. Your goals can be achievable with the right strategy for getting more patients in the door.
For any practice looking to increase its patient volume, we compiled a list of 15 easy, effective ways to leverage marketing savvy and administrative efficiencies to increase patient volume without overworking your clinical and administrative teams.
- Update Your Website
- Develop a Social Media Strategy
- Invest in Email Marketing
- Set Up Online Bookings
- Run Google Ads
- Work with Influencers and Referring Partners
- Invest in Your Employees
- Digitize Your Practice
- Leverage Telehealth
- Focus on Patient Engagement
- Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion
- Streamline Practice Management
- Make Your Practice More Accessible
- Conduct Regular Quality Improvement Initiatives
- Offer Financial Assistance
1. Update Your Website
In the past year, 58.5% of Americans have used Google to search for a new healthcare provider. When they find your practice’s website, it should be easy to call and make an appointment. A website with intuitive navigation that displays information about your practice’s services and how to make an appointment is like having a salesperson that works 24/7.
To test website performance, ask a friend or family member to review it. Observe where they click and how easy or hard it is to access key pieces of information. Based on their feedback, you can optimize your practice’s website so it brings in more patients, no commission required.
2. Develop a Social Media Strategy
Social media marketing allows your practice to interact with the local community so you stay top-of-mind for those who may require your services. But trying to appear on all social media platforms can be overwhelming for your team, especially if your practice doesn’t have a full-time social media manager. Instead, pick a few social media platforms where you can have the most impact.
Since your practice is smaller, and most likely local to one area, focus on a few well used platforms with robust local search. TikTok, whose local search isn’t as strong as Facebook or Instagram may not be the best choice, for example.
3. Invest in Email Marketing
Email marketing is effective for reminding patients about upcoming appointments, reducing no-shows, and marketing new services to current or potential patients. To be successful with email marketing, have a staff member compile educational materials and any practice updates into a monthly or biweekly newsletter. Remember to lead with value, not a sales pitch, in emails.
To keep your email marketing process from becoming too time consuming, take advantage of technologies and automation instead of having a staff member manually send emails. An EHR and practice management solution with integrated marketing capabilities, for example, can auto populate who a specific email will be sent to. If a staff member writes an email reminder for patient appointments, for example, that software can automatically send it to anyone with an appointment in the next week, filling in the exact date for each receiver.
4. Set Up Online Bookings
Ninety-four percent of patients prefer online booking systems since they reduce friction points like calling into a practice and being put on hold and make it easier to set up an appointment themselves whenever they want. A patient portal with scheduling capabilities also means less time on the phone for your staff. In that time, they can focus on providing an excellent patient experience or marketing to potential patients.
Not all patient portals offer online booking, however, making it important to demo a program before purchasing. It’s also important that a patient portal is cloud-based and protects patient data, as a 2023 study published by JMIR Human Factors identified privacy violations as a top concern among patients.
5. Run Google Ads
Google Ads are a great way to make it more likely your practice ends up first for local searches. An ophthalmology practice in St. Louis, for example, could bid on the phrases “ophthalmologist in St. Louis” and “eye doctor in St. Louis” to quickly get in front of the right people. When people who live in the local area see that ad, they are much more likely to visit your website – and become potential patients – than people from more far-flung locations who might see a more general ad for “best ophthalmologist.”
6. Work with Influencers and Referring Partners
Influencers and local community partners are great allies in getting the word out about your practice and offerings. You can even create a referral program for patients. The reward for a certain number of referrals could be a discount on a specific service or treatment or a coupon to a local business.
When introducing the referral program, ask happy patients to provide reviews as well. These testimonials build social proof and establish trust with other patients researching your practice on Google or social media.
7. Invest in Your Employees
Your practice is only as strong as your employees. Attracting and retaining high-quality employees is critical for any successful business, and especially in healthcare because those employees are often required to have advanced training, certifications, and experience that are harder to replace. When employees are offered professional development and training opportunities, it can improve their satisfaction level with their employer.
Take some time to reflect on how you could invest in staff training. The Eye Center in Massachusetts saw an opportunity to improve how employees screened patient files through investing in an EHR that included training on how to document consultative requirements.
Patient administrator Cheri Wheeler reflected, “From what I experience every day, Nextech facilitates a smooth flow of patients. The clinical team is able to get through the patient’s history of present illness and other consultative requirements very quickly.”
8. Digitize Your Practice
There are myriad reasons to digitize your health records system: it keeps your practice compliant with the 21st Century Cures Act, lessens the administrative workload, and reduces errors as staff record and transfer patient data. Another benefit? It opens up space to take on new patients.
When Dr. James Murphy joined Scarsdale Ophthalmology, they didn’t have a digital system. He suggested Nextech’s system. “I told them about Nextech,and they were like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ With Nextech, we can see at least 50% more patients,” said Murphy said.
9. Leverage Telehealth
Seventy-three percent of patients are open to using telehealth, but few smaller practices offer virtual appointments. By embracing telehealth, you’re serving this growing market and providing more ways for patients to make an appointment.
However, that same study had a huge caveat: Patients prefer telehealth when the appointments are conducted well, not when the platform is frustrating to use or there are connectivity errors. This suggests that investing in a patient portal and practice management software with a built-in telehealth platform is crucial.
10. Focus on Patient Engagement
A 2022 study published in the Journal of Patient Experience found that when patients feel engaged in their health, they are likely to report better healthcare outcomes.
However, while patient care is the priority, clinicians also have to split their focus on documentation and running a practice — eating up time that could be spent engaging with patients. By streamlining these more administrative tasks, you gain back time for the more personal side of your business: building strong connections with patients.
For Panacea Eye Center, streamlining processes came down to investing in the right practice management system. “With our old system, it would take the entire day for my staff to work up to 12 patients,” said Dr. Sarah Khodadadeh of Panacea Eye Center. “We’re now seeing 40 to 45 patients [and eventually we anticipate seeing] between 60 and 70 patients a day.”
11. Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion
Acknowledging diversity and creating inclusive policies in your healthcare practice are great tactics to meet the needs of America’s diverse patient population. There are multiple ways to do this, such as fostering an inclusive private practice or hiring diversely. It’s much more appealing for a Spanish-speaking patient, for example, to receive care at a practice where staff members speak their language.
12. Streamline Practice Management
Let’s say you implement changes to your website and social media, leading to a flood of new clients. Is your practice prepared to handle them? If you have a smooth practice workflow that includes efficient scheduling and short wait times, the answer is yes.
Modern software for specialty healthcare will provide customizable templates so that your practice can quickly set up administrative tasks to run in the background.
Nextech’s scheduling templates, for example, are created to accommodate a provider’s preferred start time, break time, patient volumes, and more.
Vanessa Stokes, practice administrator at California Skin Institute, noticed this right away. She said, “I really credit our productivity and our efficiency to these templates because we’re able to fit in so much more than if it was just a blank canvas.”
The right practice management software will also streamline other administrative processes, like billing, inventory, and more. For Stokes and her team, Nextech lets them make informed business decisions and ensure clinical staff are seeing optimal patient volumes.
13. Make Your Practice More Accessible
A common-sense way to see more patients is to open up more appointment slots. You could accept walk-ins, stay open later a few evenings a week, or open on Saturdays.
But while effective, adding more availability can lead to burnout, and few people would be excited about the prospect of working on a weekend. Instead, consider ways to make your clinicians more accessible without extending the practice’s hours.
For the Davis Eye Institute in Indiana, this included speeding up the documentation process so clinicians could spend more time seeing patients. Dr. Drew Davis of Davis Eye Institute reflected, “I can put more time into the patient interaction instead of the documentation, and they’ll feel like they got the most incredible experience in the world.”
14. Conduct Regular Quality Improvement Initiatives
Conducting quarterly improvement initiatives can enhance the efficiency of your practice and increase patient volume. But for these initiatives to be effective, they should be backed by practice data.
While reducing patient wait time could be impactful, for example, it may not be necessary if your practice already has below average wait times. Fortunately, your team should be able to pull data that identifies areas for improvement from a robust practice management and EHR solution.
15. Offer Financial Assistance
Nearly 1 in 12 Americans have medical debt, and many people experience anxiety about healthcare costs. Your practice can ease patient financial worries by setting up an administrative workflow that handles payments from multiple payers, including Medicare and Medicaid.
A comprehensive EHR and practice management solution built for specialty healthcare makes it easy to accept more payers and will provide additional payment options to ease financial worries, such as financial assistance programs or payment plans.
Next Steps
While all of these ideas are effective, your team should focus on implementing a few at a time versus all at once. Too much change all at the same time could be disruptive to your practice and might diminish the efficacy of these new methods you're installing. Instead, select a few techniques that seem easiest for your team to accomplish and that would quickly deliver tangible results. From there, build on your success with another group of new ideas to implement and methodically work your way through the whole list over time.
One of the best places to start is by upscaling your practice management software and EHR. With the right technology, you can easily knock out:
- Streamline practice management
- Make your practice more accessible
- Set up online bookings
- Invest in employee training
- Leverage telehealth
Plus, updated, efficient software provides the data and automation capabilities necessary to complete several other items on this list. To discover what a technology upgrade could do for your practice’s potential to increase patient volume, schedule a free demo with Nextech.
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