Patients Make the Best Referrals - Weekly Tip, Week 1

Your patients are your best source for building referrals. Here’s are some simple tips for this week to help you get the most out of the relationships you have with your patients:

1- Ask your patients to rate their overall experience at your office. Remember, people want to feel included. By taking a proactive approach and requesting feedback from your patients, you will be able to make minor adjustments to better serve your customers. Also, when your patients feel more engaged, they are more likely to refer business to you. Remember, when somebody takes the time to fill out a survey or tell you how they are feeling, do not discount their opinions. Even if it is something simple, make sure that your patient knows you care enough to do acknowledge their concerns.

2- Get to know their names. It’s the simple truth that people love to hear their names. This does not just apply to you knowing the names of your patients but also to your staff. Have a policy that every person who walks into your front door is to be greeted (hopefully by name) within 15 seconds. You know how you feel when you walk into a restaurant and nobody greets you. Worse yet, especially when there is somebody standing behind the counter that refuses to make eye contact. Make a point of NOT being like this. Get to know your patients, make them feel special and remember to address them by name.

3- Thank your patients. Sounds easy enough but when was the last time you thanked your patients for their business and/or their referrals. One idea is to have a box of thank you cards printed and ready at all times. Have your staff place a thank you card with your patient’s chart. Every person that touches the chart signs the card. All cards get dropped in the mail at the end of every day.

These are just a few quick, easy and extremely inexpensive tips for you to build better patient relationships. Remember, you would not have a practice if you didn’t have patients.

The Importance of Knowing Your Patients

By Michelle Matura Hentzell

Consumers have many choices for health care providers or health care related services. So how do you make yourself stand out above your competitors? What makes you different? You want to show to the consumer why you are different and why that it is better. As you think through a direct-to -consumer campaign, there are several things you will want to think about:

1. What is your value to potential patients? Simply stated, you want to clearly define how you provide value. For example, if you have a medical spa, share why your results are better, “Our X treatment decreases cellulite by X% over X months.”

2. Who are or could be your patients? Defining your target market is very important. For example, if you are a physician practice that is doing peripheral vascular disease screenings (PVD), you do not want to promote these screenings to a 20-year-old young woman. An older demographic would be more appropriate.

3. How do you reach these potential patients? There are many communication options to choose from like advertising, articles or speaking engagements to name a few. For example, if you are promoting DEXA screening, you are not going to want to advertise in Maxim Magazine.

There is tremendous marketing and communications power when you know to whom you should be communicating. Finding this information may be simple. Some are as simple as guidelines. You know that colon cancer screening should be occurring at the age of 50 so you know not to communicate to a 20 year-old. Another great place to find patient demographics or segmentation is looking at the make-up of your practice or business. Focusing on the right targets will help you yield positive results.

Tips for Increasing Practice Revenue

By Michelle Hentzell

1. Be sure to collect accurate patient information. If it’s a new patient, be sure to get their address, phone number(s), birth date and insurance information when they call your office to schedule their appointment. For your existing patients, verify their information prior to every visit. By having the most accurate information possible, it will eliminate problems you may have on the back end.

2. Be sure to share with your patients your financial policies. These policies should be signed and dated by the patient and placed in their chart.

3. A policy should be set for no show patients. If a patient does not call to reschedule 24 hours before the appointment, charge them a fee. That is time they are taking away from another patient that may need your care.

4. Verify the patient’s insurance prior to their seeing the physician. If the patient has a copay, collect it prior to the visit. Unfortunately, there are patients that never pay their copay once they leave your office.

5. Be sure to use ABNs and waivers for services that are not covered. Advanced Beneficiary Notices (ABNs) are required by Medicare for patients prior to having certain types of services. Other insurance providers may require waivers to be signed by your patients. This practice makes the patients aware of their responsibility for services that are not covered.

6. Be sure to capture all charges. Daily, a staff member should check to make sure that every patient that visited your office was charged for the services they received during their visit.

7. Be sure to carefully review EOBs. These documents can provide you important information to help you improve your billing and collection process. You can find things about timeliness of payments, accuracy of payments, etc.

8. It is helpful to track denials by reason and by insurance provider. Doing this will help you identify if there is a problem with the billing process.

9. When available, use automatic payment posting. Not only will you receive payment more quickly but it will be more accurate. This will free up staff time to focus on payment collections.

10. Be sure to update and review fee schedules. It is important to update your practices fee schedule each year or when you update your insurance provider contracts. Also, compare the charges that all of your insurance payers that you use in your practice. You do not want to lose revenue, remember that insurance companies will pay the lesser of the contracted amount or the billed amount.

11. Hire a good collection agency. Patients talk to other potential patients and if you do not enforce collection, the word gets around.

More Tips for Increasing Practice Revenue

By Michelle Matura Hentzell

We are sharing with you a few more tips on increasing your practice revenue. Check back in a couple days for additional tips.

1. Be sure to collect accurate patient information. If it’s a new patient, be sure to get their address, phone number(s), birth date and insurance information when they call your office to schedule their appointment. For your existing patients, verify their information prior to every visit. By having the most accurate information possible, it will eliminate problems you may have on the back end.

2. Be sure to share with your patients your financial policies. These policies should be signed and dated by the patient and placed in their chart.

3. A policy should be set for no show patients. If a patient does not call to reschedule 24 hours before the appointment, charge them a fee. That is time they are taking away from another patient that may need your care.

4. Verify the patient’s insurance prior to their seeing the physician. If the patient has a copay, collect it prior to the visit. Unfortunately, there are patients that never pay their copay once they leave your office.

5. Be sure to use ABNs and waivers for services that are not covered. Advanced Beneficiary Notices (ABNs) are required by Medicare for patients prior to having certain types of services. Other insurance providers may require waivers to be signed by your patients. This practice makes the patients aware of their responsibility for services that are not covered.

6. Be sure to capture all charges. Daily, a staff member should check to make sure that every patient that visited your office was charged for the services they received during their visit.

7. Be sure to carefully review EOBs. These documents can provide you important information to help you improve your billing and collection process. You can find things about timeliness of payments, accuracy of payments, etc.

8. It is helpful to track denials by reason and by insurance provider. Doing this will help you identify if there is a problem with the billing process.

Tips for Increasing Practice Revenue

By Michelle Matura Hentzell

Here are a few more tips on increasing your practice revenue.

1. Be sure to collect accurate patient information. If it’s a new patient, be sure to get their address, phone number(s), birth date and insurance information when they call your office to schedule their appointment. For your existing patients, verify their information prior to every visit. By having the most accurate information possible, it will eliminate problems you may have on the back end.

2. Be sure to share with your patients your financial policies. These policies should be signed and dated by the patient and placed in their chart.

3. A policy should be set for no show patients. If a patient does not call to reschedule 24 hours before the appointment, charge them a fee. That is time they are taking away from another patient that may need your care.

4. Verify the patient’s insurance prior to their seeing the physician. If the patient has a copay, collect it prior to the visit. Unfortunately, there are patients that never pay their copay once they leave your office.

5. Be sure to use ABNs and waivers for services that are not covered. Advanced Beneficiary Notices (ABNs) are required by Medicare for patients prior to having certain types of services. Other insurance providers may require waivers to be signed by your patients. This practice makes the patients aware of their responsibility for services that are not covered.

6. Be sure to capture all charges. Daily, a staff member should check to make sure that every patient that visited your office was charged for the services they received during their visit.

Check back for more tips.

Tips for Increasing Practice Revenue

By Michelle Matura Hentzell

There is always the challenge of keeping the revenue stream flowing. Over the next week we will be sharing tips that will help.

1. Be sure to collect accurate patient information. If it’s a new patient, be sure to get their address, phone number(s), birth date and insurance information when they call your office to schedule their appointment. For your existing patients, verify their information prior to every visit. By having the most accurate information possible, it will eliminate problems you may have on the back end.

2. Be sure to share with your patients your financial policies. These policies should be signed and dated by the patient and placed in their chart.

3. A policy should be set for no show patients. If a patient does not call to reschedule 24 hours before the appointment, charge them a fee. That is time they are taking away from another patient that may need your care.

The Value of Doing Research Before Developing Your Marketing Strategy

By Michelle Matura Hentzell

With any business, including health care related businesses, it is important to do some research before developing your marketing strategy to maximize your return-on-investment. Here are some steps to follow:

1. What is the goal of your research? Do you want to increase revenue or do you need to improve your customer service? Or, are you looking to market a new product or service?

2. Find out the buying habits of the customers in your target market. You can find this information through trade publications, marketing magazines, government reports or your local chamber of commerce. There are also companies where you can purchase data.

3. Conduct a survey. You can do a random mail or telephone survey to test your ideas.

4. Learn as much as you can from your current customers. You can do personal interviews, surveys or focus groups about the products or services you provide.

5. Observe…observe…observe. You can learn valuable information by watching the different points of customer contact in your business, including reception, sales or even customer service.

6. Know your best customers. You can find this information but reviewing your sales records. You can then identify your most profitable products or services so you know where to focus your marketing efforts.

7. Develop your marketing strategy. Once you have collected your data, you can build or re-evaluate your marketing strategy with the appropriate focus.

Do You Have a Unique Value Proposition?

By Michelle Matura Hentzell

Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) provides you direction as to how to market your products, services or websites. That is why it is important to know about how your UVP applies to your business.

The idea is to organize all of your key “values” in just a few sentences. If you have 30 seconds to share the benefits of your business what would you say and what would provide the most impact? You want to be sure to include the following elements in your UVP:

• Identify your target market
• Share the key benefits that your product or service provides to your target market
• Share a brief description of your product or service
• This is the most important piece of you UVP, what makes you unique

The above elements are guidelines for developing your UVP but ultimately you need to have a finished product that shares how you set yourself apart from your competition.
For a short time, businesses can find success without their UVP but over time, it will be important to develop a UVP. Why you may ask? Because a savvy competitor will easily find a way to set them apart and your business will fall behind.

Here is an example of a value proposition:
Insight Marketing Group provides marketing and business development support to physician practices and health care companies. Through strategic initiatives, Insight Marketing Group will help grow revenue, increase market share and build awareness.

The UVP may change as you develop new products or services or if you identify other unique characteristics to set you apart from your competition. There are tools on the net that provide detailed guidance on how to develop your UVP. The key is to continue to set yourself apart and communicate those unique differences in the marketplace.