People often ask me, “How do you get so much done in a week?” And I tell them, “I have a fantastic to-do list system.” I actually thought I had really perfected the system last month when I switched to using the Planner Plus Pro App on my iPad instead of the traditional paper-pencil planner method. I now keep a running to-do list on paper and schedule my activities in the App. I love that system because if I’m unable to accomplish something, I can easily bounce it around to another date on the calendar with a simple touch of the finger. Nonetheless, I…

Every week we receive several questions from our colleagues in the Medical Practice industry. Many times the questions are similar in nature. We realized many of you may also want to know the answers and waiting until they become a full article seems silly. So we've added a new service. When we get a good question in that applies to many people, you'll get our answer to the QUESTION OF THE DAY! If you have a question for us, e-mail us at [email protected]. Question of the Day: How do you manage a patient who comes in with a laundry list of things they want addressed on…

B.F. from Texas has this question: We have quite a few patients in our community that treat us as their PCP, which is great, but they forget we are an Medical Practice as well. Sometimes the waits can be longer, refill requests take longer and unfortunately (especially during this flu season) results of labs, etc... can take a little longer for us to contact if labs are normal. How do you make patients understand this so they do not feel neglected or like we don’t care about them? There is often a blurred line between PCP and Medical Practice. I think this is because we are using old…

Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Did you know it's estimated that more people watch the Super Bowl each year for the commercials than they do for the actual game? I was one of those people last year, at least through the first half. Then I decided I really didn’t need to watch the second half of the game, I would just see which commercials my friends on Facebook thought were the best. As I pondered that thought again this morning, something hit me. There are several lessons Medical Practice marketers can take away from Super Bowl commercials. 1. Timing Matters Your message has to be played at…

My goal for this year is to read 52 books, and so far I’m still on track to make that goal happen. Over the course of my life, I’ve discovered if you want to grow and evolve as a professional, you have to take self-development into your own hands. One of the books I recently read was called The Accidental Sales Manager. As a “newbie” to management, it was full of so many nuggets and AHA! Moments for me. I actually took eight pages of notes. Instead of writing an article today, I wanted to share with you 15 of my favorite takeaways from the book. 1. You must coach the…

When you opened your first Medical Practice, you had a physician to staff it. Then you started getting busier and you needed to hire additional help. While recruiting new front desk or nursing team members may have been fairly easy, trying to hire a new midlevel or physician can be a nightmare if you do it yourself, not to mention expensive. Outsourcing recruitment to a company that specializes in hiring physicians can cost you between $30,000 to $50,000. So how do you - as a small Medical Practice business owner - survive and find success in recruiting top-level talent to come and work for…

When you perform a Google search for "Medical Practice", or "Medical Practice (your town name)", you will typically see three types of search results. 1. Ads 2. Traditional organic search results 3. Local (Google Maps) results Ads are often very effective but cost you money every time someone clicks on one. Links from the traditional organic section can send visitors to your homepage, or to any of the other pages on your site that have been indexed by Google. Local results will send people to your Google+ Local page. This was formerly known as a Google Places page, but people will now see…

Taking the time to write a press release and then never seeing it printed can be frustrating. When it happens several times in a row, your tendency may be to devote your time to something else and forget press releases altogether. There are several reasons a press release may not be published. Perhaps you didn’t contact the right editor. Maybe the local news had other stories that demanded their attention. More often than not, it’s probably because your press release just wasn’t considered “newsworthy” so the editor whose desk it landed on didn’t find it…

Every dollar you spend marketing your Medical Practice business is a dollar you’re not taking home. It is also a dollar you are investing in hopes of making even more money on the investment down the road. But how do you know if you’re just aimlessly throwing money away each month or if your marketing efforts are truly bringing patients in the door? There are several things you can implement to measure your return on investment, commonly called ROI. ROI = (Net Revenue - Marketing Expenses / Marketing Expenses ) *100 In the healthcare marketing ROI formula above, net revenue equals…

“Bill me the balance. I’m good for it.” Just try that line next time you rent a car or check into a hotel. Yet every day, thousands of patients effectively say that very line to Medical Practice staff and physician clinics. Every day clinics in America lose millions of dollars due to nonpayment, collection costs, and the actual cost of billing patients after the fact. The process of billing patients for deductibles and other patient responsibility can be a long drawn out procedure resulting in significant costs, delays and write-offs. The traditional method of sending out…