If you're not connecting on a personal level with your fellow physicians, you'll probably be another specialty practice waiting around for referrals.
However, to make a meaningful connection, you need to understand the different types of referring practices and tailor your outreach strategy accordingly.
Every physician should be familiar with his or her sources of referral business. This will help define the specialties and areas of practice that are driving your volume, and also identify the geographic areas where you have the most opportunity to grow new referral business.
There are three types of doctor sources your specialty practice should be familiar with before you consider a marketing strategy:
A loyal practice group that is currently sending you a large patient volume. For example, physicians from an orthopedic practice have a strong relationship with a primary care office in town that consistently sends them senior patients for physical therapy sessions.
A semi-loyal practice group currently sending you some of its patients, but also sending some patients to a competitor. For example, an internist sends some patients to your cardiology practice, but also sends some to another cardiologist group in town. This is an opportunity to share any new services or procedures with these offices and demonstrate your interest in working with them.
A nonreferring group. For example, other specialty or primary care practices do not know about your practice. Perhaps you just moved to the area. This may be an opportunity for you to become familiar with these groups and explain the services you offer.
Once you know where your referral business comes from, you can put together marketing strategies that will promote your practice and encourage other doctors to reach out to you and ask questions about the services or procedures you offer.
This article was adapted from one that originally ran in the July issue of The Doctor's Office, a HealthLeaders Media publication.
There's a lot to be said for the U.S. medical education system. In a few short years it transforms the best and brightest young adults into highly-trained physicians with the knowledge and character to make life or death decisions.
But practicing medicine today requires more than strong clinical skills. There are also financial and operational decisions to make, and that is where most medical schools fall short. New physicians often leave training unprepared to negotiate contracts, cut practice costs, or deal with other business aspects of medicine.
This shortcoming is becoming clearer as reimbursement declines and margins tighten, making it more difficult than ever to run a practice.
Some, particularly younger physicians, are aware of the weakness and choose to avoid financial decisions altogether by working as salaried employees. Most physicians got into the field to practice medicine, so letting an employer handle the business aspects seems naturally appealing.
Others, however, are trying to plug the holes in their knowledge of healthcare and become more business savvy. The number of physicians returning to classrooms to get MBAs has spiked in the last couple of years, AMNews reports. According to the American College of Physician Executives, at least 2,000 physicians are enrolled in its affiliated master's degree-level business programs at any one time.
So how do you decide if getting an MBA is right for you?
First, understand that it isn't going to change your life, says Mark DeFrancesco, MD, MBA, FACOG, chief medical officer with Women's Health Connecticut, Inc.
"It's not like the Wizard of Oz where you get this and all the sudden you're brilliant," he says. "You're the same person you were before you had it. It's just a question of having more formal training."
DeFrancesco entered an MBA program after 10 years of practicing as an OB/GYN, and he now splits his time evenly between clinical and administrative duties. The value of the MBA comes from making it a little easier to switch hats between those worlds, he says. "Most of us that pursue this really do it to become the intermediary—to explain medicine to business partners and to explain business to the medical partners."
If that's not the career you had in mind, an MBA might not be worthwhile. An academic study of how MBAs affect physicians' careers found that most physicians spent substantially more time on administrative responsibilities after completing the program. An MBA can open up doors to administrative opportunities, but make sure you're prepared to lose a little clinical time.
Ultimately, a business degree will alter your view of the world, but what you do with it is up to you, according to Terry Loftus, MD, a physician blogger currently in an MBA program."It also provides specific tools you can use to re-evaluate how you approach your work," he writes. "It's similar to what I experienced the first time I used the Internet. I thought ‘That is really cool.' Little did I know at the time how indispensable it would become in my life."
Elyas Bakhtiari is a managing editor with HealthLeaders Media. He can be reached at ebakhtiari@healthleadersmedia.com.Note: You can sign up to receive HealthLeaders Media PhysicianLeaders, a free weekly e-newsletter that features the top physician business headlines of the week from leading news sources.
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