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.
According to researchers, statistics show that only about 50% of patients continue taking medications as directed a year after being prescribed. The Aetna Foundation is sponsoring a research study at the University of Pennsylvania to determine if a daily lottery of cash prizes will improve patients' medication adherence.
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.
Having attended a small, private high school, I'm rather familiar with codes of conduct. On the first day of school, we were all told to sign a document that said we'd read the school's disciplinary code and were aware of the consequences of misbehaving. But that didn't mean the school principal sat back with his feet on the desk. There were still those who insisted on pushing the limits.
Does this scenario sound familiar? Probably. As much as I'd like to say that bad behavior got left behind in the high school hallways, most of us have been witness to a co-worker misbehaving in our adult lives. We've all met that colleague who enjoys making people feel bad at meetings, is continually rude to patients, or can't seem to ever be on time for a meeting. They're unpleasant and bad for business in every industry-but according to the Joint Commission, in healthcare, bad behavior puts patients at risk.
That's why the accrediting body issued a safety alert earlier this month calling for hospitals to develop their own codes of conduct for dealing with "bully doctors" before January 1, 2009. But will these "codes of conduct" really change the behavior of the industry's worst offenders?
The answer is probably not. Just as a week's worth of detention didn't stop my high school's biggest bully from terrorizing his classmates, a simple code of conduct won't go very far in deterring your hospital's highest grossing surgeon from yelling at a nurse or fellow physician during surgery. But this isn't to say that I don't give the Joint Commission credit for trying.
Bully doctors—and really, any employee that bullies—are a problem everywhere, but for some reason, it's particularly bad in healthcare. It's something that we as an industry have ignored for years. Why? Well, for one, healthcare has always been a very individualized profession. Physician training is very focused on the individual-how well they score on exams, how well they perform certain procedures, and how their individual performance is evaluated during residency and fellowships. It isn't until they start working in a hospital setting that they are suddenly considered part of a team. As one physician executive I talked to recently said, it's like the star of the track team suddenly becoming a member of the football team.
And of course, there's the old idea that men were meant to be doctors and women were meant to be nurses. That, thankfully, is changing, but I think most hospital executives would admit that there's still a little bit of that old philosophy in the back of the minds of the physicians who cause the most problems. It's changing—but change doesn't happen overnight.
To really make a difference, our hospitals need more than a code of conduct. We need to make sure that our hospitals are a culture where bullying isn't tolerated—at all. CEOs need to show the highest level of leadership, applying a no tolerance policy to hostile behavior, even when the offender is a high-profile, and high-grossing surgeon. While there's certainly a risk in disciplining your organization's top money-maker, there's plenty of risk in not doing so. When employees work in a climate where there is fear, they're less likely to speak up when they see that something isn't right. This hesitancy can lead to a serious medical error that could not only kill a patient, but also put the hospital in serious financial jeopardy.
So where do you start? If your organization's culture hasn't addressed bully behavior before, don't expect to magically solve the problem by putting the word out that it won't be tolerated. Gerald B. Hickson, MD, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Patient & Professional Advocacy, says it has taken Vanderbilt University Medical Center almost 10 years to refine its credo—or culture of no tolerance for unprofessional behavior. He says building this culture has been an ongoing process—one that has seen many changes along the way. He offers the following first steps:
Make your administration aware that unprofessional behavior is a threat. If your team doesn't recognize that there is a problem, Hickson says, they won't have a plan to do something about it, nor recognize the threats to quality care.
Educate your entire staff—from physicians down to custodians-about why unprofessional—or hostile—behavior is a problem. If your staff recognizes that you, as a leader, are concerned about bullying, they're more likely to come forward when they feel that bullying has occurred, or better yet, tell their co-worker that their behavior is inappropriate.
Will these, or any steps, completely eliminate bully behavior in our hospitals? Not likely. But I do give the Joint Commission credit for putting this issue on the radar and reminding us that it's not just an issue of the workplace, but one that can have dire consequences for quality and patient safety efforts.
Maureen Larkin is quality editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at mlarkin@healthleadersmedia.com.
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A California court has refused to stop a 10% reduction in the Medi-Cal program's fees to doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals that went into effect July 1. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled against a preliminary injunction sought by a group of healthcare providers to halt the fee cuts. The court determined federal law doesn't allow private parties to sue over excessive rate cuts and those concerns should be addressed by the federal government. Members of the group suing the state are considering appealing the decision.
Detroit Medical Center has repaid $2.7 million to Wayne State University's School of Medicine for past physician payments. The money was for contractual agreements to WSU's University Physician Group for care stipulated under a 2006 agreement between the two longtime partners. Since February, DMC has withheld $1 million a month in state Medicaid payments for doctors, saying that higher Medicaid reimbursement WSU doctors began receiving in October put physicians' salaries above so-called fair market value.