Did you know that the US chiropractic industry is worth around $15 billion? Chiropractors treat approximately 35 million Americans annually and that figure is only growing as people continue to turn towards holistic treatments to help their ailments.
If you’re wondering how your chiropractic practice can attract new patients while retaining current ones, then your marketing strategy is one of the core features of your operations to evaluate and refine.
From leveraging word of mouth referrals to encouraging your patients to leave reviews, we’ll dive into a few top marketing tips for chiropractors that can help promote your practice in a sustainable manner.
Keep reading to learn more!
How Much Should You Budget for Advertising Your Chiropractic Practice?
One of the immediate questions you likely have for any facet of your practice is about cost: how much something will cost, how can you be sure it’s worth it, how much effort will it take you to execute, etc. are all valid queries. Marketing efforts are no exception, of course.
It’s recommended that you spend around 5% of your gross revenue on marketing efforts if you want to maintain your practice and somewhere between 7% and 15% of your gross revenue if you’re wanting to expand and scale your practice.
For example, if your gross revenue is $10,000 per month then you should put aside $500 for marketing initiatives. Of course, marketing budgets can change over time and other factors come into play, so these numbers are all relative to your particular practice and goals.
What Is a Customer’s Lifetime Value + How Does It Impact Your Marketing Efforts?
Your patients are how you keep the doors open–or rather, the profits you garner from delivering great chiropractic care to them are how you keep the doors open. But how can you estimate the financial gains your practice will earn from each patient?
That’s where knowing a customer’s lifetime value is the ace up your sleeve. Abbreviated as CLV, this formula helps you anticipate the total financial worth of a patient at your chiropractic office. This math can be applied to any industry and is especially helpful to those working in the healthcare and service fields.
A customer’s lifetime value can be calculated in the following way:
Average Annual Value x Relationship Years + Patient Referral Value
= Customer Lifetime Value
Let’s put this into practice and say you have a patient who visits your chiropractic practice once a month and each visit costs $100. The total revenue generated is $1,200 and you factor in a 20% profit margin, so the Average Annual Value of that patient is $240.
Let’s say this patient continues to visit your practice for 5 years before moving to another state; the math would shake out to this:
AAV ($240) x Relationship (5 years) = $1,200
When you start consistently tracking this metric at your chiropractic practice, you can leverage marketing tactics and strategies around pricing, sales, patient referrals, patient retention, and more in order to reduce costs and boost your profits.
After all, knowledge is power–when you know what to financially anticipate from a typical patient over the course of their relationship with your practice, you can make better informed decisions about how you engage them.
For example, if you know that an average CLV at your chiropractic practice is about $500, then you wouldn’t want to exceed that figure for your marketing budget.
Take a Crack at These Marketing Tips for Chiropractic Practices
Ready to revamp or ramp up your marketing efforts to maintain or scale your chiropractic office? Check out these marketing tips:
Keep Your Website Updated and Accessible for Mobile Users
Everything and everyone are online these days, so it’s imperative that your practice has a solid website that looks professional. Potential patients will find your website while searching for chiropractors to check out, so having a nice website that reflects you and your practice can help distinguish you from the competition.
In addition to ensuring that your site is optimized for mobile users, which is a feature in most DIY website building platforms, consider including the following:
- A section that outlines your background and the values that guide your practice
- Your mission statement
- Contact information, hours of operation, location details, and more
- A place for announcements or specials
- Social media links
- A blog where you demonstrate your expertise and interests through engaging articles
- Link to leave a review on Google and other rating sites
- And more!
Personalizing your site will help clients, both new and existing, learn more about you; building that relationship is critical to long-term success!
Get Engaged with Your Community
Engaging with your community can take form in a multitude of ways, ranging from hosting an open house to sponsoring a little league team or offering discounts for first responders and veterans. Whatever you’re passionate about, see if there’s an existing event or organization you can connect with–or start your own initiative to spread the word! This demonstrates your care for those in your community and helps raise awareness of your practice and values.
Don’t Ignore Social Media Platforms
Just about anything can go viral these days–why not a montage of your crunchiest chiropractic cracks? Or maybe you have a charming parakeet in your waiting room that the internet would love to meet. Regardless of the potential to go viral, utilizing social media platforms is a no-brainer to connect with your patients and keep them informed of what you have going on each month.
Wish You Had More Time to Get Creative with Marketing Strategies? Partner with Holistic Billing Services!
Marketing efforts can take creativity to ideate, time to execute, and energy to maintain and track–if you’re swamped with your medical billing and coding processes, then you already don’t have the bandwidth to pursue this important component of your practice!
Your friendly experts here at Holistic Billing Services completely understand where you’re coming from, and we have the experience you need to support your revenue cycle. From accurate coding and prompt submission of claims to answering your questions and keeping up with healthcare legislation, we’re here to help you succeed!
One of language’s inherent qualities is the capacity to have more than one way of saying the same thing—or at least, what might be perceived as the same thing. There seems to be another way of phrasing something in countless cases, which can be helpful for connecting the dots between ideas or it can result in the feeling that you can’t quite find the right word you’re thinking of.
Holistic medicine is no exception, especially when it comes to the connection between your practice, your patients, and the general public who may or may not know a lot about the intricacies of holistic medicine.
That’s why it’s helpful to take a step back to see how people might be referring to holistic medicine, such as integrative medicine or functional medicine, and then dive into the various terminologies to see where they overlap and where they differ.
In this article, we’ll break down a few popular terms for holistic medicine and discuss why it’s relevant that your practice is aware of them, too.
How Is Integrative Medicine Defined?
Let’s begin with answering the question: what is integrative medicine and how is it defined?
According to the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, integrative medicine is defined as “healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person, including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and patient, is informed by evidence, and makes use of all appropriate therapies.”
They’ve further defined 8 principles of integrative medicine, including points like:
- Patient and practitioner are partners in the healthcare journey
- Medicine and treatments are grounded in evidence that proves their effectiveness
- Natural and less invasive interventions should be used when appropriate and when proven to be effective
- And more!
Integrative medicine differs from holistic medicine because it involves a global approach to healing, including Western techniques and Eastern medicines.
What Is Functional Medicine?
Integrative medicine is often interchangeably referred to as functional medicine—but this isn’t entirely accurate.
Whereas integrative medicine strives to leverage any kind of medicine, treatment, technique, etc. to help the patient on their wellness journey, functional medicine aims to address the root cause of illness by enabling optimal functions of the body and organs.
The Institute for Functional Medicine explains that “the precise manifestation of each cause [of disease] depends on the individual’s genes, environment, and lifestyle, and only treatments that address the right cause will have lasting benefit beyond symptom suppression.”
Functional medicine differs from integrative medicine in terms of approach; where integrative medicine seeks to utilize a variety of methods and techniques from around the world and different traditions, functional medicine starts with a deep dive into the patient’s individual make-up.
Other Terms for Holistic Medicine & What They Mean
Let’s dive into a few other common terms related to holistic medicine and what they mean:
- Homeopathic medicine: This is a particular approach to healing that utilizes plants and minerals to help the body heal itself; there aren’t any regulated certificates or official trainings for homeopathy and this genre garners doubt and skepticism regarding how effective it is
- Alternative medicine: This is a catch-all term that relates to anything beyond the traditional Western medicine approach, methods, techniques, etc.
- Naturopathic medicine: An ND is a medical license that uses natural substances to balance a patient’s internal chemistry; NDs are considered primary care physicians, although not every state supports this medical degree
Why It’s Important to Know How to Define Various Terms for Holistic Medicine
Patient education efforts are always a good idea and can take shape in countless ways; one way is to help define various terminologies for your patients to learn more about holistic medicine.
Articulating the various terms that people might refer to your practice can help them realize the intricacies and multiple facets of the work that you do, which leads to a deeper appreciation and can encourage more dialogue between you and your patients, your patients and the general public.
Gaining an awareness and better understanding of the different phrasings people might have for your practice is also beneficial on the marketing front.
For example, people in your community might be looking for “integrative medicine” on the internet instead of “holistic medicine”. By knowing this and learning more about your potential clients, you can target those keywords if they resonate with your practice, or, at the very least, you can provide educational material explaining what other terms mean.
Putting yourself in the potential client’s shoes can help you understand their thought process, connect with them in a more meaningful way, and build better relationships.
What’s In Holistic Billing Services’ Name? More Time and Energy for Your Holistic Practice
We know that operating a successful, impactful holistic practice requires a plethora of skill sets, time, creativity, and more. You have to wear many hats, which can get overwhelming and result in mounting frustrations and impatience.
But what choice do you have? When it comes to the medical billing and coding process, the burden doesn’t have to fall on your shoulders alone. That’s where Holistic Billing Services is the ace up your sleeve!
With our friendly experts by your side, you’ll enjoy an optimized revenue cycle, accurate claim submissions, prompt payment, and most importantly, more time and energy for your holistic practice.
Have you ever wondered if your holistic practice needs a mission statement? Do you feel intimidated about writing one or are worried it’ll sound too generic? Fear not, we’ve got you covered.
Mission statements are a foundational element of your holistic practice’s business operations and help communicate an important message to your clients, both present and potential. This compounds to foster patient loyalty and boost your overall healthcare revenue cycle!
Writing a mission statement doesn’t have to be mission impossible for your holistic practice. Let’s dive into the components of a mission statement, why your practice needs one, and how to put it all together.
Why Is a Mission Statement Important?
A mission statement articulates why your practice exists in the first place; unlike other types of business writing, such as a Statement of Purpose or Vision Summary, the mission statement reveals the values of the business and should have an inspiring tone of voice.
Mission statements can be displayed and promoted in a plethora of ways, including:
- Reception area or waiting room
- Exam room
- Brochures and pamphlets
- Newsletters
- Stationary
- Website
- Blogs
- And more!
In addition to being a valuable piece of writing, your holistic practice’s mission statement is important for the following reasons:
Increases Patient Engagement
When patients understand the core reason for your holistic practice’s operations, they’re more likely to engage on a deeper level with your practice. Patient engagement is huge for your healthcare revenue cycle in terms of patient satisfaction, client retention, and word of mouth marketing.
Stands Out from the Competition
Anything, within reason, that your practice can do to distinguish itself from the competition is probably a good idea: crafting a succinct and compelling mission statement is one such manner to go about this! A little creativity and sincerity can go a long way to helping your practice stand out from the competition and make your operations more memorable.
Helps Your Patients Connect with the Core of Your Practice
Patients will have their own perceptions and expectations about your holistic practice from your online reputation, word of mouth recommendations, and other sources of information that don’t include your actual practice space. Reading your meaningful mission statement can help shape their perception and build a better relationship between your practice and your patients.
Core Components of a Mission Statement
Now that we’ve outlined the importance of a mission statement for your holistic practice and how you can leverage this piece of writing to promote your practice, let’s dig into the core components of a mission statement.
Brevity
Perhaps you’ve heard of the phrasing “Be brief, be bright, be gone” to illustrate the mantra for effective communication; the same applies here for your mission statement. It shouldn’t be more than about 100 words or a few sentences, which means you’ll want to refine it from a rambling story to a clear, concise piece of writing.
Philosophy of Care
Your holistic practice exists to deliver quality care to members of your community, of course, but how can you express this in phrasing that is relevant, compelling, and authentic to your operations? Brainstorm with your staff or even pick the brains of your patients to see how your practice manifests its philosophy of care in daily operations.
Guiding Principles
What are the core tenets and values that guide your holistic practice’s operations? Highlight a couple of them in your mission statement so that your patients gain a clearer understanding of your principles.
A Healthy Dose of Inspiration
Your mission statement’s mission is to inform and inspire all who read it, including yourself, your other staff members, and your target audience. As such, it’s important to utilize an inspiring tone when writing and to captivate the reader with an authentic message that reflects your practice.
How to Write a Mission Statement for Your Holistic Practice in 3 Steps
As we said earlier, writing a mission statement doesn’t have to be mission impossible: it doesn’t need to take days or weeks to put it together, just a little bit of creativity.
You can write your holistic practice’s mission statement in three easy steps:
- Define your practice’s purpose: articulate what your practice does to serve your patients and the community
- Describe your practice’s goals and objectives: briefly highlight what sets your practice into motion and guides your operations
- Be specific and brief: avoid using filler words or industry jargon that will distract your reader from your mission statement
Your mission statement can be effectively leveraged in a myriad of ways, ranging from your website presence to posting it in your office and including it in marketing efforts. This piece of writing is essential for connecting with your audience and distinguishing yourself from the competition in your area.
Another important reminder is that your mission statement can evolve over time. For example, perhaps you add another specialty to your practice, or you initiate a relationship treating the veterans in your community; these elements can and should be reflected in your mission statement!
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to Streamline Your Operations!
Wish you could spend more time refining the various pieces of writing you need for your holistic practice? Do you often find yourself swamped with medical billing problems, rejected insurance claims, and generally at a loss for updated billing regulations?
Partner with the experts at Holistic Billing Services to take the burden of billing off your shoulders and empower you to focus more energy, creativity, and time into your practice. We’ve got experience in your specialty, and we can’t wait to see you optimize your operations! Your success is our success and we’re here with you for every step of your healthcare revenue cycle.
As you know, there are countless healthcare KPIs (key performance indicators) to review, to monitor over time, and to create goals for improving. We know that the process of pulling reports on so many different KPIs can be overwhelming and confusing, which ultimately makes the process ineffective.
That’s why we love to write various articles that emphasize and explain different metrics to track, their role in your overall operations, and best practices for analyzing them. Today we’re highlighting a financial metric that is often overlooked but which has a tremendous impact on your healthcare revenue cycle: payer reimbursements.
Keep reading to learn more about payer reimbursements, how they play a role in your holistic practice’s revenue cycle, and our top tips for evaluating them.
What Are Payer Reimbursements?
After delivering quality care to patients, the medical coding and billing process begins so that the patient, insurance company, or government program can pay for the services rendered: these are known as payer reimbursements.
Depending on how your holistic practice operates, you might bypass insurance companies or government payer programs like Medicare and opt for the patient to be solely responsible for paying for your services. On the other hand, you might accept insurance or Medicare so that you have a wider pool of patients to attract, in addition to the patient-payer model.
Either way, someone or some entity is paying for the work that you deliver to your patients, and this is why payer reimbursements is a key financial metric to be aware of and track for your holistic practice.
How Do Payer Reimbursements Affect Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle?
Here’s a well-kept secret: your holistic practice needs money to operate, sustain itself, and grow over time. Payer reimbursements affect your healthcare revenue cycle because without consistent, accurate, and timely payments, your practice can’t function.
Therefore, tracking this KPI helps you determine a baseline for your practice’s financial standing and empowers you to know where any discrepancies might be falling through the cracks. Tracking this metric means you’ll have a clear understanding of where, when, and how your holistic practice is getting paid or if there are any areas that need attention.
Top Tips for Analyzing Your Holistic Practice’s Payer Reimbursements
Check out our top tips for analyzing your holistic practice’s payer reimbursements:
Learn Your Payer Reimbursements Through and Through
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. That’s why our first tip for analyzing your practice’s payer reimbursements is to leave no stone unturned and to delve into each case. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know—so do your due diligence to investigate the current standings of your payer reimbursements!
Catching problematic patterns or infrequent inconsistencies in your payments enables you to address them before they continue to cause an unstable financial performance for your practice. Whether it’s a problem caused by inaccurate coding or a payer’s unintentional miscoordination or some other factor, your analysis gives you the power to resolve it.
Plus, with a close eye on your insurance contracts, Medicare billing processes, and patient-payers, you can spot each inaccurate payment as soon as it happens so that it doesn’t spiral into a bigger problem.
Build habits based on best practices, such as:
- Scrub insurance and Medicare claims prior to submission to ensure they’re coded properly
- Keep the lines of communication open with your payer contacts to make sure accurate rates are paid
- In the instance of any underpayment—be it your fault, or the payer’s—follow up and get every dollar you’re owed
Unless you’re applying resources to address reimbursement accuracy, you put your profitability at risk.
Evaluate Your Payer Reimbursements with These Questions
When reviewing this financial metric, ask yourself a few questions to gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on:
- Compared to your payer contracts, whether that’s with your individual patients or with an insurance company or Medicare, are the reimbursements accurate?
- Which payers are deviating from set rates?
- Are the under or overpayments happening consistently, or sporadically?
Review your data for the last six months; this is a substantial time period to examine without overwhelming yourself with trends of previous years. Ideally you won’t find any of these issues, but if you do, then you’re able to pinpoint which issues are stemming from where.
Be Conscious of Issues at the Start of the Year
Payer reimbursement issues can happen at any time but can be especially more likely when the new year rolls around in January. Inaccurate reimbursements can be the result of a misaligned fee schedule when payers have yet to update their systems with new codes and updated relative value units (RVUs).
Optimize Your Revenue Cycle with Holistic Billing Services!
Your holistic practice can’t effectively function on an ineffective revenue cycle, which is why examining your payer reimbursements metric is essential for financial success.
However, if you find yourself overwhelmed with the medical billing process, frequent issues with accurate coding, and general confusion regarding billing insurance companies or Medicare, then you’ll have an even bigger struggle for financial clarity.
Partner with the friendly experts at Holistic Billing Services to handle the complicated responsibility of your medical coding and billing processes! We’ve got billing specialists for your specialty and your success is our success.
In this day and age, nearly everything lives on the internet and it’s no secret that it’s an essential component of life, both personal and professional. The internet is an endless source of information and can positively or negatively impact your holistic practice, depending on your practice’s online reputation.
As potential clients turn to the internet to conduct research on holistic practices in their area, a phenomenon known as healthcare consumerism in which people shop around for the best care for their budget, it’s vital that your holistic practice is effectively managing its online presence and reputation.
Keep reading to learn more about the importance of your holistic practice’s presence and website plus tips for managing your online reputation!
Why Your Holistic Practice’s Online Reputation Is Important
The holistic care market is a $37 billion business, which means that general awareness and demand for holistic and alternative treatments is flourishing. How will your holistic practice attract, engage, and retain these prospective clients? Your online presence and reputation certainly play a major role here.
Let’s first break down what your online reputation includes:
- Your holistic practice’s website
- Reviews, both positive and negative
- Blog articles that your practice publishes
- Press coverage
- And more!
Research shows that 63% of patients choose one provider over another based on a strong online presence. Since patients are leveraging the internet to research holistic practices well before they ever show up to your office, appealing to them via your online presence is critical, even if you’re not trying to attract new patients.
Patients will likely form their perception of your holistic practice based on your online presence, or lack thereof, so it behooves you to shape and refine your online reputation to the best of your ability.
5 Tips for Managing Your Online Reputation
Obviously, the ideal is that every external entity views your holistic practice as an effective, high-quality place to receive treatments, but crafting this reputation isn’t easy. Let’s dig into some of our top tips for managing your practice’s online reputation:
Build a Professional-Looking Website & Optimize It for Mobile Users
The first step to managing your online presence is to have one. Your holistic practice needs a website just as any other business needs one! With so many user-friendly, no-coding-needed website building resources available like Wix or Squarespace, there’s no reason to not have a website for your holistic practice.
These do-it-yourself tools often feature an automatic version optimized for mobile users, but it’s worth noting to make sure that your site looks good on a desktop or cell phone.
Request Honest Reviews from Patients
Word of mouth marketing plays an instrumental role in influencing which businesses people patronize; in fact, 86% of customers rely on word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews.
As such, it’s good to solicit feedback from your patients both via patient satisfaction surveys and honest online reviews. If your patients seem hesitant to leave a review because they’re worried the process is too tedious or inconvenient, then you can do a brief tutorial of how quick and easy it is to leave one.
If you’re not sure how to ask patients to rate you, here are a few suggestions:
- Hand a card to the patient with the URLs listed for key consumer rating sites and ask them to rate you
- Add a clickable link for key sites to your email signature and website
- Keep a tablet at the front desk and ask patients to post a review before leaving your office
Gaining feedback from your patients is a win-win because it validates your holistic practice’s efforts and builds the relationship between your practice and your patients. Be sure to try out different methods for requesting reviews to see which ones work best for your patients.
Upon Receiving Reviews, Engage with Them
A great step to take upon receiving reviews or questions online is to engage with them. It’s as simple as thanking someone for taking the time to leave a positive review, answering a posted question and encouraging the author to contact your office, or addressing a negative review with an apology and steps to resolve the issue, if relevant.
Your patients took the time to leave a review; it’s a good rule of thumb to respond and thank them for it!
Fill Out Every Online Profile Available for Your Business
With so many places for patients to research holistic practices, it’s beneficial to fill out and promote more than one online profile available to your business. This might include:
- Yelp!
- Bing
- Better Business Bureau
- And more!
Don’t forget to check out any local organizations or resources available to register your holistic practice’s website. Routinely keeping these profiles current can help more people discover your practice and learn about your services.
Stay Consistent in Your Online Branding
Last but not least, another top tip is to stay consistent in your online branding across all platforms. Maintaining your voice, no matter the platform, demonstrates authority, authenticity, and leaves a memorable impression in the reader’s mind. Whether it’s including your slogan or mission statement whenever relevant, or another manner for staying consistent in your online branding, it’s great to help readers learn more about your holistic practice.
Let Holistic Billing Services Handle the Medical Billing Burden!
If you’re feeling too burned out or overloaded with medical billing and coding processes, issues, or legislative updates to put creative and consistent effort into your online reputation, then let Holistic Billing Services step in!
Our friendly experts are knowledgeable in your specialty and can immediately boost your healthcare revenue cycle by handling your medical billing and coding processes. Plus, we operate as an extension of your practice, so you know that your success is our success!
Contact us today so you can focus on what matters most: your patients.
Running a successful medical practice involves a long list of components. In addition to actual patient care, there’s administrative work, insurance claims processing, and billing. Add to that patient support, marketing, and follow up consultations. It’s a full plate — enough to make it tempting to do what needs to get done right now, while putting everything else on the back burner.
Such can be the case with developing a healthcare strategic plan. Sure, you want to scale, but it doesn’t need to happen today, so pencil it in for later. Before you move on to the next task, take a minute to consider this further. At the end of the day, having a plan in place is what will ensure that you move in the direction you want to go — and that you have a tangible way to track progress.
What is a Healthcare Strategic Plan?
A healthcare strategic plan is an established process used to determine what are your practice’s goals, procedures to meet them, and the steps to take along the way to ensure that you’re on the right track.
While you can certainly implement short-term goals, the focus is on long-term planning, with specific milestones at certain intervals.
7 Benefits of Healthcare Strategic Planning
While it’s common sense to simply think that you want to gradually grow your practice, establishing a healthcare strategic plan means creating a blueprint with actionable steps for each stage of your growth. In doing so, everyone involved within your organization will reap the benefits, including:
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Streamlined Processes
Establishing standard procedures ensures consistency and everyone on your team being aware of what to do and when to do it. It eliminates wasted time and resources going back and forth trying to figure out what to do or who’s in charge of doing what.
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Better Communications
When you have processes for all elements of your practice, you eliminate the guesswork. It also ensures that each department knows how other departments conduct their own tasks, which better helps them align to work like a well-oiled machine.
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Predictive Analytics
An essential part of having a strategic plan means using software that tracks your key performance indicators (KPIs). What these are may vary depending on your specific goals. For example, attracting more website traffic, engaging more users on social media, patient referrals, and determining whether you’ll have a surge in appointments during certain times of the year. By tracking past performance, identifying insights, and acting accordingly, you’ll be in a better position to gauge what is likely to happen next.
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A Better Patient Experience
When you establish processes, train your team adequately, and provide your staff with the right tools and resources, a natural consequence is that patients will have a better experience as they interact with your practice — ease of scheduling, reduced wait times, efficient claims processing, timely follow-ups, appointment reminders, efficient customer care, etc.
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Employee Retention
Employees are more likely to stay at a position where they are supported and provided with all of the tools they need to do their job. This includes planning for a large enough staff for busy times of the year, using software that is easy to use, and knowing where to find SOPs for any tasks they may be unfamiliar with. This makes it infinitely easier for them to conduct their responsibilities effectively.
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Brand Awareness
Every long-term success plan incorporates marketing best practices. Developing buyer personas (in a medical practice’s case, this means identifying the patients you wish to attract), creating content that addresses their questions, and ads, where they can find them, is a great starting point. Combine this with word-of-mouth marketing from the excellent patient experience and it’s only a matter of time before your target audience starts recognizing your brand.
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Patient Retention
When you’re intentional about making things better for your patients, they notice. And while quality care should always be paramount, so is a commitment to valuing their time, addressing their concerns, and making them feel that every single time they engage with your practice, they are the most important thing at that very moment. And none of this happens by chance. It’s all the result of well-executed strategic planning.
How to Develop a Medical Practice Strategic Plan
Now that you’re aware of all of the advantages of making strategic planning a priority, let’s take a look at how to create one for your own practice.
Develop Your Mission and Vision
This sounds cliché, but organizations do this for a reason. Why did you start your practice? How do you want patients to feel? What do you want to be known for? That’s your mission and should be the guiding principle in everything you do.
By the same token, your vision focuses on how you want to move forward. Is your goal to be the leading oncology practice in your area? Is it to be a pediatric dentistry clinic that’s accessible to all income brackets? Even if you move the goalposts, you want to have something to aim for.
Establish Your Core Values
What are the characteristics you believe are most important when running your practice? This could be anything that fosters a sense of trust (e.g. transparency, proactivity, integrity). Or it could be diversity and inclusion (e.g. ensuring you have people from different races, cultures, and backgrounds in leadership positions). What do you want your practice to be known for? Base your core values on that.
Prioritize Your Goals
Every organization has goals; but not all of them are equally important. For example, if your main objective is to aid underserved communities, you can start to develop ways to liaise with nonprofits, pro bono clinics, charities, and other community groups who share the same purpose. If you want your practice to be known for medical research, look for ways to work with clinical research scientists. If you want to be known as a practice with extraordinary patient care, look into the resources that will enable you to do so — such as a customer portal, healthcare CRM, employee training, etc.
Develop Action Plans
Once you’ve established your practice’s priorities, it’s time to make a list of actionable steps for how to get there. Identify who’s going to be in charge of what. Institute a budget. Establish milestones and deadlines for each of them. And make sure that everything aligns with your core values. For example, if one of them is transparency, keep everyone involved notified of what’s going on and how to communicate with you in the event of any hiccups or concerns.
Track Analytics
Change requires a common goal, everyone rowing in the same direction, and consistency. But since it happens so gradually, you need a way to gauge whether you’re moving the needle. Use software that enables you to create dashboards that reflect the metrics that are important to you. Depending on your goals, this could be marketing metrics, such as patient acquisition costs; or patient satisfaction metrics, such as average wait time; or total monthly revenue, or days each claim spends in accounts receivable. Doing so will help you identify what’s working and what needs to be modified.
Streamline Your Billing Processes for More Efficient Practice Management
At Holistic Billing Service, we’ve been assisting chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage therapy practices for over two decades. We are the nation’s largest billing provider for holistic healthcare, serving more than 2,500 practices across the United States.
By partnering with an experienced medical billing team, you can spend less time thinking about managing CPT coding and insurance claims, and more time scaling your practice and delivering high-quality care to your patients.
Contact us so that we can create a custom solution that aligns best with your practice’s needs.
There are so many things that are part of the day-to-day of any medical practice. Scheduling, appointment reminders, credentialing providers, patient intake, managing electronic health records, billing, claims processing, appealing rejected claims, ordering PPE and other supplies, disposing of hazardous waste, patient follow up. It can often feel like a hamster wheel, with everyone balancing as many balls in the air as possible.
While it’s crucial for all of these operations to occur like a well-oiled machine, it’s also crucial to keep track of practice benchmarks. Doing so, known as healthcare benchmarking, will provide you with insights as to what is working well and what may need a modification in processes.
What is Benchmarking in Healthcare?
Healthcare benchmarking refers to measuring the performance of your medical practice against how it compares to other successful providers. Doing so helps you gauge trends and effective practices — as well as what keeps patients coming back.
When you benchmark the performance of different components within a healthcare, it helps you better define goals and to develop roadmaps to help you reach them.
The Importance of Healthcare Benchmarking
Paying close attention to performance metrics enables you to identify a lot more than simply whether your business is in the green. Yes, that is your north star; but it’s not the only component for sustainability and longevity. Additional benefits of healthcare benchmarking include:
- Productivity
- Containment of costs
- Relative value units (RVUs)
- Fair compensation
- Quality of care
- Patient experience
Taking such a comprehensive look at all the elements of your practice helps you strengthen the foundation of your business, as you can better plan for the future — and to ensure that every single step is data-driven.
Types of Holistic Practice Benchmarks
So how do you get started with healthcare benchmarking? Which metrics should you be tracking, and how can you keep it all organized? The most efficient way to do so is by grouping them by categories:
Quality of Care
The medical profession is a calling. People come to you because they trust you to diagnose, treat, and/or cure their ailments. This is a tall order, and sometimes you need the assistance of specialists; or a patient may require hospitalization. It can also pose additional challenges to receive accurate data.
Operational
In order to streamline this process, it’s essential to standardize information systems. Use the same software platforms, tools, nomenclature, and training across the board. Then pay attention to factors such as patient waiting time, ease of communication (phone, text, patient portal); their comfort while in the waiting room, their answers in patient satisfaction surveys, patient retention, employee retention.
Financial
As for financial aspects, make a list of every single element that affects your bottom line. Healthcare claims management, value-based reimbursements, healthcare payers’ claims processing, billing, supplies, compensation, and all accounts receivable and payable. How long does everything take? What’s the return on investment? Are there more beneficial players’ contracts?
Compliance
Complying with healthcare regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA), the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), and myriad other regulations require lengthy processes to comply with their terms. Some of them require daily monitoring, going through a continuum, and audits. Using software that keeps track of everything and automates alerts is the most effective way to stay on top of everything.
Marketing
Having a marketing strategy is an important part of any medical practice. It’s how you spread the word about your services and attract your intended audience. And as with everything else, you should be looking at key performance indicators for healthcare benchmarking to ensure that you’re getting a return on your investment. Elements you want to track include conversion rates, cost per lead, and patient acquisition costs.
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Take a minute to reflect on your holistic practice’s current marketing strategy; where are your efforts being directed? How frequently do you check in on the performance of your marketing efforts? How can you tell if they’re effective or if they need refining?
Marketing is an essential element of nearly every business or organization, of course, but the number of metrics at your fingertips can be overwhelming. Or, if you haven’t invested a lot of energy into your marketing strategy, then you might be unsure where to start or how to approach it.
In this article, we’ll tackle how marketing impacts your holistic practice and which metrics to track for success.
How Does Marketing Impact Your Holistic Practice?
Marketing entails a whole host of efforts and initiatives that impact your practice in a few manners:
Attract New Patients
Your patients won’t know you exist without some type of marketing strategy. Whether that’s word of mouth from current clients, search results advertisements, setting up a table at a local event, or something else, your holistic practice needs to market itself in order to make your community aware of your services.
Plus, if your marketing efforts are the first time a future client has ever heard of you, you’re able to make a great impression and lead with your best foot forward!
Keep Patients Informed of New Initiatives
Marketing is also great for your current clients to retain them and inform them of any new initiatives that you’re developing. For example, you might be moving to a bigger location and bringing on another practitioner. You can make a great marketing campaign around this, which is both engaging and informative!
This is important to take into consideration when building out your marketing strategy ideas because retaining a client is cheaper than attracting a new one; be sure your branding speaks to your current clients and keeps them in the loop with your practice.
Build Your Reputation
Beyond attracting and retaining your clients, marketing is how you build and refine your holistic practice’s reputation. Do you have decades of experience within your community? Do you make a point of volunteering in your community? Cater specifically to veterans in your area? Whatever makes your practice special is what you should convey in your marketing efforts.
This helps build rapport with clients, both current and potential, and establishes your practice in your community.
Marketing Metrics: What to Track
Now that we’ve addressed how marketing can be a powerful tool to leverage and have a significant impact on your holistic practice, let’s look into three key marketing metrics to track along the way:
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
This metric calculates the total amount spent on a marketing campaign and divides it by the number of leads your holistic practice got as a result:
Cost of Campaign / Number of Leads = Cost Per Lead
For example, if you spent $1000 on a campaign and you got 50 leads from it, then the cost per lead would be $20. On the other hand, if you spent $1000 but only received 10 leads, then the CPL is $100.
It’s important to note that the only way you can effectively calculate this metric is if you know the specific origin of a new lead. That’s why it’s helpful to ask your new leads how they heard about you; did they see an advertisement on social media? Hear about you from a friend? Tracking these origins is great to know where new leads are coming from.
Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC)
Patient acquisition cost provides you with the number of paying patients your holistic practice earns from a particular marketing campaign:
Cost of Campaign / Number of Paying Patients = Patient Acquisition Cost
This marketing metric helps you understand the more real, tangible cost of bringing in new revenue to your holistic practice. Following the same example, if 10 leads of the pool of 50 turns into actual paying clients, then the PAC is $100.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Figuring the ROI on a marketing campaign involves just a little more math and looks something like this:
Income Derived / Cost of Campaign X 100 = ROI
This first factor, the total income earned, involves you calculating the lifetime value of a patient. Let’s say each of the 10 new patients you acquired spends around $800 over the course of their relationship with your practice. That total amount would be $8,000.
$8,000 / $1,000 X 100 = 800%
This metric is helpful for monitoring the overall revenue generated from a particular marketing effort. This perspective is helpful for determining if a marketing campaign was “successful” depending on your holistic practice’s expectations or if something should be tweaked in the future.
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Your holistic practice exists to deliver quality care to your community; no matter what specialty you offer, it’s crucial that your patients recognize, value, and return to your practice. After all, you won’t last long if you don’t attract patients!
But how can you go beyond simply making your patients aware of your practice and foster a long-term, genuine connection between you, your practice, and your community? How can you instill patient loyalty in a manner that is sincere and beneficial to the future of your practice?
Patient loyalty is a key component of your healthcare revenue cycle and this article strives to provide you with the context and measures to take in order to grow and nurture it within your practice. Keep reading to learn more!
How Does Patient Loyalty Impact Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle?
Let’s look at a few key statistics regarding customer loyalty that can apply to your holistic practice:
- 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition
- 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers
- Increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%
As with any business venture, minimizing churn and turnover results in a more stabilized, consistent revenue stream. It’s cheaper to keep the customer you already have than to attract a new customer to replace them.
This directly applies to your holistic practice and your overall healthcare revenue cycle! Putting in the effort and developing an enduring, profitable relationship with your patients leads to a better revenue cycle and empowers you to scale your business as more patients come your way. But how can you achieve genuine patient loyalty?
How to Instill Patient Loyalty in Your Holistic Practice
Patient loyalty can be nurtured in a variety of manners in addition to providing excellent holistic services! Consider these tips to further solidify the relationship between your practice, your patients, and your community:
Create and Maintain a Comfortable, Clean Environment
Nobody wants to enter a place of business that is disorganized, dusty, or cluttered—particularly not in a holistic environment where wellness, healing, and good energy are synonyms with your business. From the steps leading up to your practice to the waiting room, bathroom, and everything along the way, make an effort to reflect your holistic values in the environment of your practice.
This might include:
- Dusting shelves, decorations, ledges, etc once a week
- Burning incense
- Softly playing relaxing music
- Sanitizing high-touch points
- Keeping your waiting room clean and organized without making it crowded with furniture or other objects
- Maintaining a clean, sanitary bathroom for patients
- And more!
Setting the tone for your patients’ experience and delivering a fantastic first and lasting impression is a surefire way to get patients returning to your office again and again.
Be Professionally and Administratively Organized
Scrambling to find a patient’s misplaced file or having a desk littered with sticky notes doesn’t bode well for appearing to run your practice smoothly and efficiently. Your patients want to see that your office is professional and organized, meaning they can trust you to deliver a great experience in terms of treatment and administration.
From answering the phone in a clear, consistent manner to handling scheduling conflicts and following up with patients about any billing issues, your holistic practice needs to be on its game to demonstrate trust and loyalty.
Build Rapport with Your Patients and Create an Individualized Treatment Plan For Each of Them
If you and any team members appear cold or indifferent to a patient, that can leave a negative impression. Instead, make an effort to engage the patient in conversation and use their name in communication. Deploying active listening skills and exhibiting you have an interest in your patient—not their pocketbook—can help build patient loyalty, engagement, and overall satisfaction.
Taking this even further means creating an individualized treatment plan for each of your patients and maintaining a dialogue with them about it. While this might sound like common sense, and that’s great if it does, making the effort to inform each patient about their treatment plan, check in with them over time, and encourage questions are all great ways to nurture patient loyalty.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media platforms can be the ace up your sleeve if you leverage them appropriately for your holistic practice. Use your accounts to post about:
- Upcoming events, like open houses or charity events
- Holidays or moments in history related to your practice’s specialty
- Polls to get patient feedback, such as which composer to play in the office next
- Encourage honest reviews
- Some personal, yet professional, information about you and your practice—for example, showing off your beloved pet so that patients can get to know you a little better
Social media doesn’t have to be overwhelming or feel superfluous if you build and facilitate engagement with your patients!
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Your patients and your healthcare revenue cycle are more connected than you might think. Attracting new patients and providing great holistic care are two essential components of your revenue, but what else can you do to ensure your revenue cycle continues moving smoothly? How can you deepen the relationship between your holistic practice and your community in a manner that is sincere and still profitable?
Developing patient education resources for your patients and initiating conversations can have a significant impact. You might already be taking these steps in the natural flow of your practice’s operations, but making them an intentional part of your patient interactions can lead to a better patient experience and revenue cycle.
Keep reading to learn more about the different types of patient education resources, the link between patient engagement and your holistic practice’s revenue cycle, and some tips for fostering this engagement in your practice!
Different Types of Patient Education Resources
Patient education resources come in a variety of shapes and sizes and can be wholly custom to fit your specialty and your patients. Depending on what services you offer and what type of clients you have, your patient education materials can include one-on-one teaching, analogies, or any of the following tools:
- Brochures and other printed materials
- Podcasts
- YouTube videos
- Posters or charts
- Models or props
- And more!
The goal of patient education resources is to supplement the patient experience with opportunities to further learn and engage with their care. For example, a dermatology practice might have brochures explaining different skin conditions, perhaps one each for eczema or psoriasis, whereas an acupuncture practice might have posters that visually explain how the treatment works. It’s important to utilize the most appropriate medium of communication so your patient has the greatest chance of learning from your efforts.
The Link Between Patient Education, Patient Outcomes, and Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Patient education further builds rapport between your patient and your holistic practice, which leads to trust and a continued relationship. Increasing the patient lifetime value by attracting and retaining clients, naturally, helps your holistic practice’s overall healthcare revenue cycle. Plus, a client who is delighted by your services will spread the word about your practice and could lead to new patient relationships.
Patient education also leads to better patient outcomes as they learn more about their treatment and wellness plan. In fact, just 45 minutes of patient education can improve outcomes for patients with chronic diseases, according to a study in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. As patients gain a greater understanding of their conditions, the treatment that your holistic practice offers, and how to manage chronic conditions on their own, they become empowered and engaged in the process.
Delivering great care and equipping your patients with the tools they need to effectively engage with their healthcare journey demonstrates your practice’s dedication to their success—which leads to a better healthcare revenue cycle. Furthermore, providing resources relating to patient-payer relationships and how healthcare billing works can better inform your patients of their role within the revenue cycle.
3 Tips to Boost Your Revenue Cycle With Patient Education
Ready to further your patient education resources while boosting your revenue cycle? Check out these tips for each part of the patient’s journey with your holistic practice:
Initiate Clear Conversations About Payment Responsibility Prior to the Appointment
Your holistic practice’s reception desk plays an important role in the patient-practice relationship. This is where first and lasting impressions are formed, educating patients about their role in the healthcare revenue cycle takes place, and where patients should feel encouraged to ask questions.
The front desk is perfect for providing patients with information regarding co-pays, any insurance policies that are or aren’t accepted by your holistic practice, disseminating no-show policy papers, and more. It’s a great opportunity to welcome the patient into the practice and initiate clear conversations about payment responsibility.
Plus, if a returning patient has a balance remaining from a previous visit, this is a good time to gently but firmly bring it up and ask the patient for payment. Not verifying that the patient is in good standing—or not feeling confident in bringing it up—leads to a sluggish healthcare revenue cycle since you’re leaving money on the table.
Provide Patient Education Resources During the Visit
Your patients come to your practice for quality care and trust you and your staff to deliver on that. Along the way, it’s important to gauge how involved they are with what treatment plans you and other pertinent healthcare providers have coordinated for the patient.
Facilitating a conversation about why they’re at your practice, how your holistic services are contributing to a better quality of life, and encouraging them to ask questions along the way demonstrates a commitment to care. Plus, presenting a tangible education resource like a pamphlet or literature related to their wellness journey empowers them to do research on their own and ask questions as needed.
Your holistic practice’s revenue cycle benefits from returning patients who tell their loved ones about your practice and who value the time spent with your practice, making them less likely to be chronically absent from their appointments.
After the Appointment, Help Patients Navigate Their Bills and Gather Their Feedback Via Surveys
If your patient’s initial encounter with your practice’s reception desk entailed learning about their payment responsibilities, then the same reception desk after the appointment shouldn’t lead to any sticker shock. Staying proactive in conversations with your patients about their role in the healthcare revenue cycle boosts transparency in your practice and fosters trust between your patients and your practice.
Following the appointment, collect patient payment and their feedback via patient satisfaction surveys. Directly collecting payment, of course, benefits your revenue cycle by bringing in revenue to your practice. Gathering patient feedback is one more touchpoint for building rapport and reflects your practice’s commitment to providing an overall positive experience. With this information, you can make changes as needed to improve the patient experience!
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to Boost Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle!
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Contact us today!