Contributed by Greg Stanley, Whitehall Management
In the world of finance, several key indicators signal the health and direction of the U.S. economy. In practice there is one indicator that tells better than any other the health and direction of a professional practice. That indicator is the number of new patients that are directly referred to your practice by other patients. If this number is not at least 15 new referral patients per month, you can tell that your service or your clinical results are not impressing patients enough to generate natural referrals. Although you may tell yourself that patients just don’t get the big idea about comprehensive care, if your referral numbers are below the standard just mentioned, you may safely assume that it’s you that just doesn’t get it.
Cost, Convenience & Control
There are only three areas of a practice that can cause poor referral performance: “Cost, Convenience, and Control”. If you’re not impressed with your referral success, now you know where to look. The problem is always found among the “Big Three”. Cost is more about perception than your actual fee structure. You can actually have the lowest fees in town but still be perceived as expensive. All you have to do to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat is to show and push big cases on your patients. If your cost per treatment is priced at half that of the competition, but because you’ve presented patients with a large treatment plan as the only option, you’ll be perceived as expensive even though your fees are below average.
Patients don’t care about unit cost as much as they do about the size of the check they have to ultimately write at the end of the visit. I mention this perspective because I have so many doctors tell me that they have the “Cost” aspect of referral intensity taken care of, when in fact it’s the reason they’re struggling. Convenience that inspires direct patient referrals can only be defined by the patients. Our definition of convenience is relative. After years of telling patients they have to wait for weeks to get into the practice, we think they should be impressed when we now tell them that we can get them on the schedule in a few days. A few days sounds like no wait at all to us, but to a patient it might sound like an eternity.
Control is a factor of case presentation. If you are too weak, patients will be confused about exactly what they should do. If you are too strong, patients feel like they are being “pushed.” When a patient is in a state of confusion, or feels like they have been “sold” something, they are uncomfortable with their perceived lack of control. And patients who are uncomfortable in your practice are not going to be good “referral soldiers.” If you can deliver on the cost, convenience and control elements of a patient’s expectation of your practice, you’ll see your direct patient referrals expand. They will continue to expand until your increased patient volume prevents you from offering this same level of impressive care.
And getting a few referrals from rich, heavily insured patients with obvious needs, doesn’t mean you’ve created referral intensity. Referral intensity can be seen in the patient who calls several of his or her friends on their cell phone as they drive home from your office.
Team Training Camp
At our team training camps we have found a tremendous benefit to having doctors and staff working together on perfecting the “Big Three” referral intensity components in a seminar setting. From my perspective at the front of the room, I see doctors nodding in agreement with the presentation about the ideal “cost, convenience and control” components of referral intensity. I also see their staff shaking their head as they look over at their doctor. In other words, the doctor honestly believes the practice is referral worthy. The staff tell a different story.
Special Staff Report Card
For this reason we have the staff fill out a special report card on their doctor and his or her efforts to optimize the patient’s experience. We’ve found that the doctors with the highest staff graded performance scores have the highest referral numbers in the room. Everyone knows that referral patients are easier to work with because they’re pre-sold on you and your practice. We’ve also found that referral patients are more likely to accept comprehensive recommendations as well as refer more patients to the practice. The Whitehall Team Training Camp is a powerful experience and has proven itself as a cost effective tool for turning a confused group of individuals into a highly effective, well-coordinated team.
Special Team Training Camp Offer
We routinely receive a large number of requests for information about our Team Training Camps. Doctors are understandably reluctant to spend the money to transport their team halfway across the country to attend a meeting sight-unseen. To help doctors overcome this barrier to perfecting their own team, we are now extending an invitation to doctors to experience the Whitehall Team Training Camp with their spouse at no charge.
This is a chance for the doctor to come and see first hand how effective the meeting is at training and motivating staff to work together to create referral intensity. We know that doctors attending this meeting will be so impressed that they will move heaven and earth to get their staff to the next training camp. Take this as your written invitation to attend Whitehall’s next Team Training Camp as our guest.
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