There are 6 ways to grow your medical practice, health clinic or private hospital

Usually, when we first talk to someone interested in engaging our sales and marketing services, we will take them through the 6 Ways Process to help diagnose the marketing hurdle(s) you are facing. Only when we know the problem, can we recommend fix. If you would like to schedule one of these calls, contact us.

To understand the 6 ways, it helps to answer the following questions to get a baseline (the 6 KPIs or Key Performance Indicators) of where you are now:

1. How many new enquiries are you getting every month?
2. How many new consultations are you seeing every month? The amount of new, first-time, consultations that arise from your enquiries is your conversion rate.
3. How many new patients (new treatment bookings) are you seeing every month?The amount of new patients (treatment bookings) arising from your new consultations is your close rate.
4. How many procedures does each patient adopt?
5. What is the average price of each adopted procedure?
6. What is the average margin on these procedures?

The answers you may get could appear like this:

1. I = 500, new enquiries per month, of which of 10% convert
2. C = 50 new consultations per month, of which 50% close
3. P = 25 new patients per month, adopting an average of 2 procedures each
4. PA = 50 new procedures adopted per month, priced at an average of
5. AP = £1,500 (per procedure) resulting in £75,000 per month
6. AM = with a contributing margin of 50% (or £750/procedure) to cover overhead and retained earnings after variable costs of goods sold.

This inputs will tell you where you practice “is”. Only when you know where your practice “is”, can you identify where you practice “ought” to be. Clearly, if you can identify strategies to increase any of these 6 KPIs, then you can improve your practice to where you think it “ought” to be.

How can you find out where your healthcare marketing “is”?

If you haven’t measured things in this way before, it may be hard to identify what your 6 input KPIs are. What follows is a short guide on finding your 6 input KPIs.

For some, this may be the first time you will have looked at your practice in this way. Regardless of how well you think you’re doing, examining the numbers like this will usually reveal where you really are.

Now, if you have a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database system, much of this information will be available through standard reports. If you’re like most private health practices, the system you use to manage your diary and your patient information will fall short of tracking or providing information like this.

[dropcap1]1[/dropcap1] Number of enquiries

To find the number of new enquiries you can

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• count the number of new contacts entered into your database over a few months and find an average number over slow and busy months, if you have a database where you store new enquiry information
• distribute a counting sheet to everyone answering the phone (the best place for this sheet is next to the phone) and count the number of calls and emails received from new enquiries as they come in for an entire month, if you don’t have a database of past records or you do not record your new enquiries

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[note_box]We define new enquiries as new contacts that have provided some kind of reply contact information (whether it be a phone number or an email address). You can further segment your inquires by what kind of contact information they provide and where they come from.[/note_box]

Don’t have enough enquires?

[info_box]If you think you don’t have enough enquiries, you’ll need to increase your sales and marketing efforts. Tactics may include:

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• website design
• SEO internet marketing which can by DIY
• conversion rate optimisation
• paid search
• social media marketing
• customer service training

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[dropcap1]2[/dropcap1] Number of new consultations

This is usually an easier number to find by simply counting the number of new consultations you saw this month.

However, you must first decide whether you will calculate your conversion based on tracking each enquiry (tracking method), or whether you will use count all the new consultations in a given month, regardless of when they enquired (heuristic method).

The maturing method is the most accurate, however it requires a unique identifier for every enquiry (i.e. a lead number) and an ability to follow that lead to count how many have booked consultations over time. The heuristic method is the most common, and it generally works out unless your sales cycle is longer than 3 months.

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• If you’ve chosen the tracking method, count up all the new enquiries in a given month, and identify how many of those leads have been seen for consultations. For example, if you count 100 new enquiries for January, and by March, 20 have had consultations, then your tracking conversion rate (after two months) is 20%.
• If you’ve chosen the heuristic method, count up all the new consultations in a given month and compare them to how many enquiries in that same month. For example, if you count 20 new consultations in March and you count 100 new enquiries in March, your heuristic conversion rate is 20%.

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Don’t have enough consultations?

[info_box]If you think you don’t have enough consultations, you’ll need to improve your sales and marketing efforts and/or train your staff to sell better. Tactics may include:

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• email marketing
• telephone sales training

[dropcap1]3[/dropcap1] Number of new clients / patients

This input is calculated in precisely the same way as above (number of new consultations).

Which ever method you’ve chosen (tracking or heuristic), stick with the same method for counting new patient appointments (treatment bookings). If you split your procedures, then only count the last treatment booking as a complete new patient.

Don’t have enough patients or clients?

[info_box]If you think you don’t have enough patients or clients, you’ll need to improve your sales and marketing efforts and/or train your staff to sell better. Tactics may include:

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• consultation skills training
• customer service skills training
• email marketing
• social media marketing

[dropcap1]4[/dropcap1] Average number of procedures

Sometimes, your patients will be adopting more than one procedure at a time (i.e. two eyes in refractive surgery, multiple procedures in cosmetic surgery or dental surgery). If these procedures are commonly performed together AND are of similar price, please average the number of procedures by counting up the procedures performed and divide by the number of patients treated. If the procedures are dissimilar in price OR are not usually coupled, then we’ll need to do a separate 6 WAYS on each procedure.

[dropcap1]5[/dropcap1] Average price per procedure

Again, this will require some customisation. In refractive surgery for example, it’s fairly straightforward to take the monthly receipts of payment and divide by the number of procedures performed. In other settings, we may need to perform additional calculations.

Need to increase or decrease your prices?

[info_box]If you think you need to change your prices, read our multi-part series on pricing professional services. Articles include:

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• positioning your price point
• differentiating between cost, price and value
• apply the product lifecycle concept
• differentiating between cost-plus and value -based pricing
• understanding how price changes impact profit
• using psychological and positional pricing