How To Grow Your Health Practice Rapidly
The healthcare industry is packed with thousands of professional services, making it one of the most competitive in the world. Healthcare professionals spend many years in school before choosing a particular speciality. Afterwards, they decide to either work in an already established practice or to set up their own. If you decide on the latter, this article provides answers on how to grow your health practice rapidly.
To grow your health practice, you must treat it as a business. Business growth is essential for economic progress and survival. Growth can be in terms of profit, revenue or patient/client base.
Hence, growing your practice in a digitalised world may require that you:
- Improve your website’s functionality
- Improve your local Google search using Google My Business (GMB)
- Inform and educate your community
- Improve the quality of your services, and
- Understand how to respond to complaints.
In this article, we discuss the above areas to provide healthcare professionals with tips and ideas on how best to approach the growth of their practice.
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Improving your website’s functionality to grow your health practice
The first step to growing your health practice should be to build a robust online presence. Establishing a digital footprint is a step in the right direction. Since your website is the first impression that potential clients have about you, improving your website’s functionality is key to growing your practice.
If you already have a website, how functional is it? Does it have a responsive design? Do visitors find what they are looking for? What information do you track?
Provide essential information
This is like the bread and butter of any website, but it is amazing how many websites miss this. To be clear, this is critical in helping to grow your health practice.
Your website must provide essential information needed to convert visitors into patients or clients. For example, directions to your hospital or clinic, medical insurance providers you accept, payment options, medical forms, etc.
You can also include FAQs, how to book an appointment, and requirements for the first visit. By so doing, you will improve how visitors perceive your practice, establish a relationship with potential clients even before they visit and gradually start growing your practice.
In addition, don’t leave out important information like contact details, emergency numbers, and your medical speciality. You may also include your credentials and information about your practice, with pictures to back them up.
Make navigation and responsiveness painless
Ensure that your website is easy to navigate without stress. Don’t forget that your website is a connecting point for you and potential clients. Hence, they should able to request an appointment online and get all the necessary information they need about your facility.
Crucially, you must design your website to be responsive. In other words, your clients should be able to access and view your website on any screen – mobile phone, iPad, laptop or desktop.
Collect your website’s data
Remember that 21st-century improvement of any kind requires data. Therefore, you must deploy tools that allow you to collect information about your visitors. Free tools such as Google Analytics could provide you with great insights that will transform how you run your clinic or hospital for the better. You can also collect visitors’ information in exchange for a gift, such as an ebook, a video, etc.
Some of the points above may look trivial, but it is small details like that that come together to make a big impact. They help to improve your website’s functionality and ultimately grow your health practice.
Improve your local Google search using Google My Business (GMB)
Up to 80% of people use the internet to find a service or product. Thus, for your healthcare practice to grow, you have to improve your local Google search.
Using Google My Business (GMB) is an excellent place to start. Google My Business is a free tool you can use to list your hospital or clinic on Google Maps and Google Search. By listing your hospital or clinic on Google search, potential customers can find you easily, engage with your services and contact you.
Having a GMB profile puts your business on the digital map, making your clinic or hospital visible in local searches. Hence, improving your local Google Search is a great way to grow your practice.
[If you would like more visitors to your website right away, check out this page.]
How to use Google My Business (GMB) to grow your health practice
As a practice owner or manager, you can use GMB to improve your local Google ranking and grow your health practice. How can you achieve this?
| Also, check out our comprehensive article on how to optimise Google My Business for best results. |
First, register your business on GMB. If you’re already registered, update your business information. Outdated information is detrimental for your SEO ranking and makes it difficult for potential customers to find you. It is vital to keep the information on your GMB profile accurate. This is not just for better ranking, but also to earn your potential clients’ trust.
It is also important to regularly post on your account. Google Posts allows you to make announcements, promotions, and broadcast events from your GMB profile. It is a great way to interact with your clients, informing them about the day-to-day happenings in your facility.
Encourage reviews to boost Google rating and ranking
You can encourage your clients to rate your business, share their experiences, and leave reviews on your GMB profile. By so doing, you can get feedback about your services and boost your social proof. Customer reviews also contribute immensely to your local Google search ranking.
What if a client posts reviews that are unsatisfactory? What do you do? Instead of getting discouraged, look at it from a positive angle. Use the feedback to make the necessary improvements in your services or help them resolve their concerns. Responding to reviews in a positive manner help others to perceive your services as good despite a bad review.
Use Google Q&A to your advantage
Google Q&A can help you improve your local Google search ranking and grow your health practice. Google Q&A is a feature on GMB introduced by Google in 2017. It helps other business owners and potential clients ask and answer questions about your business, i.e. your clinic or hospital.
You must respond promptly to all questions asked. Also, it helps to be polite and clear with your answers.
When your GMB profile accurately reflects your brand, it not only helps to improve your local Google search but also grow your practice.
If you need any help with using GMB, get in touch. Our team can help you achieve results quickly.
[If you would like more visitors to your website right away, check out this page.]
Inform and educate your community
Informing and educating the people in your catchment community should be part of every clinic’s or hospital’s strategy for growth. The more informed your community is, the more they stay healthy. You can do this using leaflets, social media or via your website.
These days, people are always searching for information online and offline. Research has shown that more than 40,000 people are making a Google search every second.
However, the problem is not the lack of information; it is the difficulty in separating useful information from the noise. That’s where your practice comes in. If you can educate the people in your community with timely and accurate information, they will trust you, and this will boost your authority.
Blogging to build your authority
A conventional way of informing your community is printing pamphlets with the necessary information that can help people lead a healthier life. However, you can also use online methods, such as blogging and social media.
Running a healthcare blog is a great way to inform and educate your community while growing your practice. Blogging gives your website more content, helps attract new clients, and improves your local search rankings.
Nevertheless, a blog can be quite challenging to manage, as it requires lots of time investment. To run an effective healthcare blog, you have to post content regularly and consistently. Also, ensure that you develop content around the specific services you offer and the demands of your community.
The above challenges aside, a blog could be a very effective way of attracting new patients or clients who are seeking information about a service. It also works hard for you for years and years to come – long after you have forgotten the time invested in writing it.
Thus, it is an essential long-term strategy to help you grow your health practice.
You can run an efficient blog for your practice without investing a second of your time. If you would like to learn more, contact us.
Using social media to connect better with your patients/clients
In a fast-growing digital world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to disregard the importance of social networks. Using social media is a great way to boost your online presence. Hence, social media is now an essential tool to educate your community and to grow your healthcare practice.
You can use social media to build a community around your healthcare practice. There are many ways to achieve this using social media. You can create live video contents, and potential clients can engage with you. You can leverage hashtags to increase your visibility on the platform. Hashtags are used across several social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. They help potential clients find you quickly.
| Learn more about types of social media posts for clinics and hospitals and get more ideas for posts. Or, download our free social media calendar and get 12 months of highly-engaging post ideas. |
Social media could be a huge time black hole. This is why we developed a unique social media calendar for health professionals that tells you exactly what to post every day of the year. You’re welcome to download your free copy.
Improve the quality of your health services
Poor quality healthcare can affect your patient’s life, health and safety.
There are many definitions of quality of care, but that’s not important here. What is more important is that care follows the WHO-endorsed six domains of quality. Care must be safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable, and people-centred.
To grow your practice quickly, you must ensure that you minimise medical errors. Your services must be top-notch and unbiased. You must aim to reduce delays and minimising wastes. More so, focus on achieving optimum patient safety.
Quality improvement is such a broad topic, and it is beyond the scope of this article to cover them. However, here are some quick tips:
- Employ skilled healthcare professionals and assign them appropriately
- Have and implement clear policies
- Have enough resources to make safety improvements.
- Listen to your patients’ feedback, effectively engage them, and ensure that they are satisfied with your services.
Keeping patients/clients happy
In order words, quality service equals happy clients, more referrals, and faster growth of your practice. So, how do you keep your clients happy? It is easier than you may think.
There are many ways you can achieve this. First, you can start by keeping your hospital or clinic environment clean. As a healthcare provider, you must maintain a high level of hygiene at all times. Also, ensure that the environment is comfortable for your patients – not too cold, not too hot. Proper lighting and noise control can make a difference in a client’s experience.
However, more than just a superficial service to make patients happy, your services must meet patients’ needs and aspirations. Your role as a practice owner/manager is to deliver individualised patient care. You must provide the right care to the right patient at the right time. By so doing, patient perception of service will improve. Your client-base will also increase, helping you to grow your practice.
Reducing waiting time
Quality healthcare service also means reducing unnecessary delays. This is a huge one from the perspective of clients/patients. You can reduce the waiting time by creating a smooth and timely appointment scheduling process.
Also, you can improve your patient’s experience by encouraging family-caregiver interaction. If appropriate, speak with family members about your patient’s health condition, medication, and treatment procedures. They play a huge part in the patient’s recovery.
Contact us if you would like some help conducting a comprehensive assessment of the quality of care in your practice.
Respond to complaints to grow your health practice
No matter how excellent your services are, not everyone will be satisfied or happy with your services. Thus, healthcare professionals must know how to respond to complaints from their clients/patients.
Understanding the problem
The first step is to view your client’s complaints as feedback. By so doing, you will be able to detach from the situation and address the root of their complaints. This approach will improve your efficiency and help in growing your health practice.
Strive to understand the reason for your client’s complaints. Note that clients complain for a reason. It could be either because you did not meet their expectations or they were dissatisfied with your services. Clients may also complain about what they see as high fees, privacy breaches, and communication breaches.
How to address client’s or patient’s complaints
Encourage your clients to give feedback about your services regularly. Written anonymous feedback is better than verbal feedback. The former avoids bias.
On your part, respond to complaints as soon as you receive them. Your clinic/hospital should have a unit/team dedicated to handling patient’s complaints. As a practice owner/manager, you should be in the team managing complaints, so you’re always aware of critical problems. As a minimum, you should handle complaints relating to clinical practices yourself. You should allow your complaint department to respond to complains about administrative issues.
Here is a quick way to handle a complaint:
- Gather the facts. Assess your medical records and hold a meeting with staff members involved to get a hint of what might have gone wrong.
- If necessary, schedule a face-to-face meeting with the client who complained.
- Identify the root cause of the complaint. Do you need to conduct more staff training or make improvements in your processes?
- Take action to make the necessary improvements in your system. Most importantly, ensure that you tell your client about the changes you have made in response to their complaint.
Learn more about how to handle negative feedback.
Conclusion
In conclusion, growing your health practice requires a lot of time and effort. As we have already discussed, you must improve your website’s functionality and improve your local Google search. You should also aim to inform and educate your community. Improve the overall quality of your services and respond to your patients’/clients’ complaints positively.
To grow your health practice, you must first build and maintain your client base. Put your patient’s safety and satisfaction before everything else, you are on your way to experiencing exponential growth in your health practice.
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