#48: 7 Ways Automation Can Improve Your Bottom Line Keep Your Schedule Full & Patients Coming Back

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Steve: Is your staff spending too much time on the phone trying to combat no-shows or follow up patient appointments and answering questions from new prospects? Are you spending as much money on staff time working the phones, as you are saving as a result of the calls they make?

Luckily, there is a simple answer. Get off the phone and automate patient appointment reminders and other notifications. You can save time, save money, and put the focus back on the patients who are in the office.

In this podcast, we’re discussing how you can automate important processes in your practice; particularly 7 Ways Automation Can Improve Your Bottom Line

Keep Your Schedule Full and Patients Coming Back.

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Podcast Intro

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Huyen:  Welcome back to our show, my name is Huyen Truong and my co-host from the intro is Steven Tait.

This is one of my favourite topics as I am particularly passionate about automation and how it could leverage our time and scale our businesses.

Automation can definitely help with no-shows, new patient lead generation, online reputation management, patient engagement, and more.

Since building patient loyalty and referrals stems from their overall satisfaction, having time to nurture your patient relationships is vital to the long-term success of your practice. So where can we find more time to dedicate to this?

Many daily processes can be automated that will allow you to reclaim more time to focus on other more productive activities, strengthen your patient relationships and increase patient satisfaction.

Steve:

Here are 7 practice processes that, if automated, will relieve and eliminate many of the tasks that can be tedious and time-consuming. The results will be improved practice productivity and increased profitability.

The first one is…

Appointment Reminders- Rather than having to call every patient, an appointment reminder software service will automatically remind patients of their upcoming scheduled appointments, and even allow you to customize the message and time it’s delivery based on the patient preference.

Huyen

How about…

Missed Appointment Notifications- When your patients are forgetful or have emergencies that cause them to miss appointments and get off track with their healthcare, some systems will automatically send a notification to let the patient know that they have missed it, and invite them to reschedule their next appointment.

To optimize the scheduling process and increase patient satisfaction, some platforms include convenient online scheduling, allowing patients to schedule an appointment anytime and from anywhere.

Steve:

Yes, indeed…. having an online booking system in place will help reduce your office staff’s time on the phone and allows patients to book any time that they want. Some times during the daytime, patients are at work so it could be inconvenient for them to make a call for a personal health related appointment but it would be much easier with online booking.

In our podcast numbered 22, Dr John Morgan discussed how much increased engagement and less staff time and conversions online booking helped with his vet clinic. Check it out.

One thing to note about an online booking system is the user friendliness of the online booking system, not all software is user friendly, we noticed some major online booking systems that are quite clunky and require users to go through many registration steps in order to book in an appointment with a clinic; which for us is a turn off for patients and a killer for conversion rates.

Huyen

The 3^rd way you can automate is through…

Recalls- Keeping up with when patients are due for their next appointment and trying to reach them on the phone for scheduling can be ineffective and burn a lot of hours in the day. An automated recall system dramatically improves this process and eliminates that task from your list so you don’t have to sacrifice productivity.

Steve: How about our 4^th way to use automation for …

Lead Generation? A lot of practices are aware of using automation for appointment reminders and stuff like that but have little ideas about how automation can help you generate new patients too.

Any successful practice needs a good lead generating system. You might have heard about this term “lead gen” multiple times, but many of you might not know what it is. In general, “lead generation” is the process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business's products or services.

For medical and health care practices, lead gen is the process of identifying and acquiring new patients through the referral building, new patient acquisition campaigns or existing patients’ word of mouth.

Huyen

Yeah...This process can be time consuming, especially when it comes to the healthcare industry, which we call a “trust” business, where “know – like – trust” are 3 factors that influence purchasing decisions.

First of all, ask yourself how many times you or your staff have to answer the same questions from new prospects, or explain your procedure and how you do it differently to prospects over and over again?

When a new prospect enquires about your services, you can automate the engagement process with a new prospect with a series of emails featuring FAQs under the text, images or videos format.

Secondly, for a procedure that is a bit more complex and needs time to go through it with your prospects, and importantly build those Know – Like – Trust factors with your prospect, you need a special lead generation tool to attract and engage.

So how can you shorten the gap between these 3 fundamental elements of the user buying behaviour? What do you think Steve?

Steve - I think when it comes to medical marketing, it has to do with education, the more information the prospective patient knows about the procedure or the skills that you offer, the easier it is for them to make a decision.

And the best way to address this is via a webinar.

I bet many of you as a doctor might have attended a lot of seminars and webinars for educational purpose. Well... think about it from your prospective patient’s perspective, they also need that educational process too to understand how you can fix their problems.

Webinars provide a great way to connect with both your potential patients and referring doctors on a more personal level. Your passion for healthcare and your interest in sharing your knowledge will help create meaningful intimate connections and build trust in you and your practice.

This allows you to attract potential patients and referring doctors, building rapport, engaging their interest, and gaining their trust… all without needing to meet them in person.

Unlike the challenges of a live seminars, webinars provide vital flexibility for a time-poor professional community, since they can be pre-recorded. Webinars not only save you time but also benefit your audience, who can now watch your webinar when it suits their schedule.

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Webinar Promo (new script)

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Huyen

Welcome back... and hope that you spend some time looking into that webinar course, it could prove very valuable for your practice, building more new patients and business for you.

Coming back to the rest of our automation tips today…the 5^th way to automate is your…

Patient Surveys- Gathering patient feedback about the level of care you are providing is critical for maintaining a patient-centric practice. This process can be automated, so you don’t have to worry about manually sending surveys to patients after each visit or remembering to ask them to complete one every time they come in.

Steve

This is also a perfect opportunity to prompt another email or message to ask patients to leave you a positive review on Google. In case you have less than desirable star rating feedback, you can automate another message to the front desk office to call these patients to solve their problems before they go public.

Automate your patient review process will not only help manage your patient satisfaction rate but also help increase your positive reviews online and control your online reputation better.

Huyen

Moving on to our final 2 ways you can use automation to increase patient engagement and your bottom line….

Birthday Greetings- Birthday messaging is a simple way to improve patient loyalty, and it is actually a very smart and effective marketing strategy. Sending cards in the mail is a costly and time-consuming undertaking, and those cards may end up in the junk mail pile so your birthday wish never even makes it to your patient. You can automate these greetings without losing the personal touch, and that makes them special.

Steve:

And finally, the 7^th way is …

Targeted Care Campaigns- Patient education is essential for maintaining and improving healthy outcomes, but sending the right information to the right patient can be a tedious process. By automating this process, you not only free up valuable time to improve productivity, but your patients also get health-specific information pertinent to their individual health goals.

This could be done through your email marketing campaigns and on-going content production. Content can be in a traditional format such as blog post, or more engaging format such as videos, podcasts, webinars.

Huyen

Well, unfortunately our special podcast today has come to an end; if you want to learn more about how to set up more automation processes for your practice, especially when it comes to revenue generating activity such as lead generation, please contact us at contactus@onlinemarketingfordoctors.com and our team of specialists will guide you through all the ways available to you, and show you how to ultilise this to engage and attract new patients to your practice.

Our mission is to provide all the best resources that you need to automate and scale your practice up.

Thank you very much for your time. If you like our Podcast, please kindly give us a review rating on Itunes or Sticher. That will mean a lot to us and keep our motivation going to continue producing great podcasts for our audience.