New Year's Resolutions for Your Specialty Practice

We did it! We survived 2020!

Hands down, 2020 was the toughest year (so far) of the twenty-first century. But we got through it. As we move into 2021, this is the time when many of us are making New Year’s resolutions. To help our readers commit to new initiatives for practice success in the coming year, this blog will suggest a number of useful New Year’s Resolutions for Specialty Practices.

Recommit to having a strong online presence

When was the last time you googled your practice to see what kind of results come up online? If you haven’t done that within the last year, now would be a good time to. Take a look at recent reviews and see what folks are saying about your practice. Check the online directories for services such as Google Reviews, Yelp, Real Self, Vitals and Healthgrades to make sure your practice’s information is current. If your practice isn’t yet listed on any of the most used online review directories, then you need to get it on those ASAP. These days, if your practice does not have online reviews, potential patients are more likely to choose a different practice that does. While you are at it, this would also be a good opportunity to ensure your listings on Google and other search engines are up to date.

This is also a good time to start strategizing for how you will ensure your practice has a strong presence on social media, as well. According to a study from Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans are actively using social media. So, if you are not maintaining active social media accounts on sites such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, then you are missing out on an opportunity to market your practice to a large chunk of current and potential patients.

Assess & improve your practice's financial health

While 2020 may be over, the COVID-19 pandemic is surging on. The threat of another round of shutdowns or elective procedure suspensions looms on the horizon. To make sure your practice is ready to weather whatever may occur in the coming year, now is the time to assess the current financial health of your practice and identify problem areas as well as implement changes to both improve revenue and reduce losses.

For details on how to make sure your practice is financially ready for the new year, check out this past blog and whitepaper.

Build & implement action plans to make your practice crisis ready

If specialty practices learned anything in 2020, it was that many of them were not prepared enough to handle an unexpected crisis--a pandemic, economic crash, civil unrest, extreme weather or any of the other catastrophes that hit us in the last year. Now more than ever, it is important to make sure your practice has a plan to be crisis ready.

To be truly crisis ready, your practice must start to look beyond the commonly expected risks and be prepared for less obvious (but no less imminent) threats that could cripple business or interrupt your ability to care for patients. For a more detailed look at how to create a crisis-ready practice, you should read this blog article and whitepaper.

Require cybersecurity training for your practice team

While the healthcare industry has long been a primary target for cyberattacks and data breaches, cybercriminals were even more active than usual in 2020. And it looks like things are likely to continue to be like this in 2021. That means it’s more important than ever to make sure your staff are properly trained on best practices for cybersecurity.

A survey conducted by Kaspersky Labs found that only 29 percent of healthcare workers were able to identify the correct meaning of the HIPAA Security Rule. It also found that 40 percent of respondents were not at all aware of cybersecurity measures in place at their organizations to protect IT devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.). Perhaps the scariest part? The study found that 1 in 4 healthcare workers never received any cybersecurity training, of any kind, from their employers. To prevent having your practice fall victim to cyberattacks, make sure your staff have the security knowledge and training they need. For help understanding what threats you should be training your staff to avoid, see this past blog article.

No matter which New Year’s resolutions you choose for your practice, you should consider 2021 as an opportunity to get your practice on track for even greater levels of success.

Start the new year off right and get a fresh take on optimizing your practice’s performance by attending our January 28^th webinar on Determining Key Performance Indicators for Your Practice!

To learn more about how Nextech can help your practice succeed no matter what the new year has in store, fill out this form and a member of our team will be in touch soon!