New Patients are the lifeblood of the practice. As Practice Owners and Managers we live and die by whether we have enough people to help. Another way to look at this is “how full is the schedule”? The old saying “you have to spend money to make money” comes into play here but within reason. So this raises the question: “What is a New Patient worth to you?” There is a simple way to figure that out. In order to do so you will need two pieces of data:
- What is your average reimbursement per visit? Don’t make this to complicated. A simple way to figure this out is to take what you collect from each of your major insurances (maybe the top 5 insurances you work with volume wise) and find the average amount you are paid per visit
- What is your average length of stay? How many visits does it take to get a patient that you evaluate today to a successful d/c? Don’t guess on this, do a search on your last two months worth of discharges and find out what the average number of visits was that it took them to get to discharge.
Now take the two numbers above and figure out what every New Patient is worth to you.
Average reimbursement per visit X number of visits to discharge.
For example, if you collect an average of $80 per visit and see a patient for an average of 12 visit to discharge then using the formula above, every New Patient that you see is worth $960.
Now that you have this data, you can make some real decisions about what a good Return on Investment (ROI) is. There are so many things out there to try but do they really work and will they be worth the money that you spend on them? If your inbox and social media feeds are anything like mine these days, you are inundated with the “best thing ever” the newest “artificial intelligence system”, and much more to help you get new patients. One group is professing workshops, another email campaigns, someone else social media, one says it is all about your website. It can get pretty confusing and quite honestly, pretty expensive. The worst part is that you could get (or may have been) burned by one of these things and so you get gun shy and don’t want to try anything at that point. If this sounds like you, here are some simple tips for you.
So now that you know how much a New Patient is worth to you, you can start to make some decisions about what might be the right things for your practice. Keep in mind that what might be right for one practice, may not be the correct thing for you and vice versa.
Despite what you spend or do with your marketing and promotion budget, there is a simple rule that you want to consider as you look at what is right for you. HOW MUCH YOU PROMOTE IS DIRECTLY RELATED TO HOW MANY NEW PATIENTS YOU GET. So, the issue is, how do you apply this mantra? I have successfully applied this in my practice, and we continue to grow in New Patients week after week and month after month.
Here are three very simple things that I learned along the way that I want to pass on to you that will help you to apply the above statement. These have been successful in helping us to grow our practice year after year without the fear of physician owned PT clinics, big industry PT clinics, hospital owned clinics, you name it.
- PEOPLE HAVE TO SEE SOMETHING A MINIMUM OF 13 TIMES BEFORE THEY WILL TAKE ACTION. What are the promotion lines that you should be on? The true answer is that you should be on social media (Facebook, and Instagram at a minimum), communicating with past patients, community involvement, and emails at the very least. Now you will right away jump to the thought of “that’s a ton, I can’t do all of that!”. I will touch on that thought in #3 but stick with me for a second. What I profess to you is that you use the same message across all of the platforms you are on. You may not be on social media, you may not believe in direct mail (again I will touch on this belief in #3) but whatever you are on, you need to put the same message in front of people multiple times. So, we accomplish this by using the same message, lets say about knee pain when going up and down stairs, on all of the channels that we are on. You don’t have to write different content for each channel, you write it once and then use it across all the channels you are on. Now that you know what a New Patient is worth to you, you can start to decide whether a post card or newsletter campaign to your community that may cost $1000 is worth it. If you were to get 5 New Patients (worth $4800 in the example I shared with your originally) for the cost of spending $1000 would you do that? This is an 80% return on investment. Who wouldn’t want this? But so many times I hear people say, we don’t send newsletters or bulk mail to the general community because it costs to much. Yes, there is an expense but man there is a huge ROI on that investment.
- THE MESSAGE YOU USE TO PROMOTE HAS TO BE ABOUT THE PERSON YOU WANT TO BECOME THE NEW PATIENT – NOT YOUR CLINIC. So many times, I see an ad or a blog about how great physical therapy is, why you should come to one clinic vs another, why you should choose PT over chiro or meds or whatever. Well that is losing the attention of the potential new patient from the get-go. Studies show that people respond to things about themselves, not others. Think of it this way, they have problems: pain, difficulty with stairs, whatever. This is the message you should be talking about in your marketing and promotion. People make a decision to take action when they feel it will help THEM with THEIR problem. In order for this to be successful, they have to first acknowledge that they have a problem. So many times, a potential new patient will think “I’m 40, my knees should be sore when I climb stairs”, or “of course my knees should bother me after I run 5 miles”. As PT’s we know this is not true, but we need to get the potential new patient to understand this. Keep the message simple and tell a story about what is happening in their knee, WHY that is not “normal”, and WHAT they should be doing about it. The ending of the story is to then seek out care, from your clinic of course. You want to tell them this but not till the end. Think of a good movie you have seen lately, they didn’t tell you the outcome until the end. Follow the same premise in your promotion.
- CHANGE YOUR MINDSET ABOUT PROMOTING. This is a factor I seem to put into most of my 3 steps because it is so true. There is a common fixed mindset that I hear from Private Practice Owners quite often. “If I send more than one email or do more than one post per week people will get pissed off and stop following me”. I used to think this way too. But I will bring you back to the simple rule that has been the biggest factor in growing our practice and ensuring its survival regardless of what the doctors or hospitals are doing: HOW MUCH YOU PROMOTE IS DIRECTLY RELATED TO HOW MANY NEW PATIENTS YOU GET. So I challenge you to change your mindset and send out more stuff (whether it is mail, emails, blogs, posts, social media content, etc.) as it will pay off. Again, remember, people have to see something 13 or more times before they take action, you don’t want them to wait for 13 weeks before they take action do you? Who knows what will happen in that time frame. I hear people say “email is dead” or “no one read their mail in their mailbox anymore”. Well let’s change your mindset on this too. If we are trying to get our message in front of people more why wouldn’t we consider these avenues. You probably have less physical mail in your mailbox now than you did 5 years ago. That thought alone makes mail an avenue to consider. Another common thing I hear is; “promoting is expensive!”. To this statement I say “think about what you found a New Patient is worth to you”. Now compare this to what it costs to put up multiple posts on social media (and even boost it for a few bucks), join an email service and send out an email blast every day (most are less than $50 / month if not free) or even send out some mailers in bulk mail to your past patients (there are some great things you can do for less than $1000). All of a sudden it doesn’t seem so expensive anymore. Begin to change your mindset and move in a direction of “more is better” and “free is not the best” and I guarantee you, you will see the payoff.
Yes, there are a ton of services out there that can do things for you. To this I say, make sure you pick what is right for you. My dad always said, the best consumer is an educated consumer. As the Private Practice owner, you have to be educated on all of the options you have. This is what allows you to make the decision that is best for your business and your pocket. I put on a great webinar every week on How To Get New Patients Who Will Help You to Grow Your Business. I invite you to check it out. The purpose of the webinar is to get you to think about all the different things you could be doing that you are not, how you can take the things you are doing and do them better or more of them. It’s free and I guarantee you that you will learn something new from it, regardless what you have done in the past. Click this link to register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2613646202254002700
I wish you the best in your Private Practice and I hope to meet you at an event in the future and hear all the wonderful things you have accomplished.
I’d love to hear how you are doing in your private practice. Reach out to me on any of the channels below or reply back to this email.
Mike Bills MS PT
President, Measurable Solutions
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