Updated on April 7, 2024 by Jordan McGlone
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Increasing patient volume in medical practice can translate to growing the business and gaining a stronger reputation among patients. Undeniably, the best way to increase patient volume is to improve medical services and be the best at what you offer. This step will surely gain the customer’s trust and inevitably refer your clinic to other potential patients.
There are many ways to supplement this practice. Especially today, in the digital era, marketing strategies have already shifted to using technology. The healthcare industry is not exempt from this innovation.
Technology and some other creative methods can bring in more patients and even further improve the flow of patients and your operations.
Learn more about how to grow medical practice by increasing patient volume and flow from this article.
Key Takeaways
1. The best way to increase patient volume is to improve the quality of services and fund marketing strategies.
2. Patients consider the expertise of a clinic, ease of communication, reviews, and extensiveness of services when choosing a clinic to go to.
3. PatientCalls is a medical answering service that helps medical practitioners handle administrative tasks.
How Do You Increase Patient Volume in a Medical Office?
Increasing patient volume is a typical objective for a medical office to increase revenue, expand services, and gain a stronger reputation. The best and most effective ways to increase patient volume include providing excellent medical practices and consistently improving patient satisfaction.
In addition to these tasks, there are other ways, some old and new, to bring more new patients while retaining your existing patients.
Below are seven effective ways to increase patient volume in the medical office.
Optimize Online Presence
Nowadays, building a company website has become a norm for all types of businesses. This channel makes your services more available and provides information for your potential patients.
In building a website, ensure it is user-friendly and immediately highlights your core services and contact details. This way, patients will more likely choose your hospital for their medical problems.
Implement search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure your website ranks well in search engine results for relevant keywords. This strategy is an effective way to ensure that your business is more visible than others.
Launch Referral Programs
Referral programs are great ways to increase patient volume. This approach can be taken through different avenues.
One is to encourage patients coming into your clinic to bring in other patients by offering them referral incentives. With this approach, your clinic may gain more recognition the more patients talk about your services.
Another angle to take referral programs is to partner with other healthcare providers. Create a partnership with other clinics that offer programs that are not available in your organization. This way, you can have a mutual relationship with other clinics. They can refer patients to your clinic in case of overflow or when they do not offer the services that you do.
Offer Telemedicine Services
Telemedicine or telehealth services is a fairly new market in the healthcare industry. This service does not necessarily bring in physical traffic to your clinic, but it is a great way to increase patient volume.
Telemedicine is the form of providing consultations through phone calls or online meetings. This step widens your patient reach and offers flexibility for patients who do not have access to convenient transportation.
Improve the Reception of Patients and Scheduling
Patients are more likely to come back to your clinic and refer your services to other individuals if you have an efficient reception. This means that patients do not have any trouble reaching your office and can easily schedule appointments.
In addition to this, you can also improve reception by eliminating voicemails. While patients can leave their concerns through voicemail, it does not guarantee that they will be attended to as soon as possible. Voicemails can create barriers between your business and the patient.
An efficient way to improve reception efficiency is to outsource appointment scheduling. Answering services, like PatientCalls, can help your office attend to patient needs and administrative tasks even after working hours without needing any voicemail machines. As some patients also work the same hourse as clinics do, it is easy to miss out on patient inquiries or scheduling.
Experts from PatientCalls are trained to receive calls concerning healthcare. Third-party services like PatientCalls can take care of appointment scheduling, insurance claims, and payments, as well as answer some inquiries, which allows any healthcare provider to focus on their core functions.
Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Nowadays, there are several ways to reach your target consumer through marketing campaigns. The first step to most of these solutions is knowing who are your target audiences. You can use targeted marketing campaigns to promote your services to potential patients directly.
If you are a pediatrician, you can create online advertisements that specifically target parents with children. This is an effective way to convert readers into potential customers.
You can also perform targeted marketing campaigns through community outreach programs that highlight the needs of your target audience and the services you provide as solutions.
Improve Aftercare Services
In addition to having great medical services, patients also value good aftercare. This refers to following up on your patient’s condition after a procedure or check-up. This can also include encouraging them to schedule a follow-up check-up to ensure full recovery.
While aftercare services are commonly considered complementary to your core services, they are vital in retaining existing patients. This step shows your commitment to providing customer satisfaction.
Introduce New Services
Expansion of your existing services is a sure way of increasing patient volume. The more comprehensive your services are, the more patients are likely to choose your clinic. While this solution may require a bit more of investment, it is an effective way to attract more patients.
In addition to medical practices, you can also improve your patient retention by offering complementary services to patients. This may include making waiting areas more comfortable, compensating them for delayed services, and offering discounts.
What Are Some Creative Ways to Increase Patient Volume in Clinic?
In addition to the mentioned strategies above, there are more innovative solutions for increasing patient volume in clinics. Nowadays, an organization that knows how to leverage technology often has an edge over other businesses.
Below, we listed some of the newer and more creative ways to market your clinic and increase patient traffic in your business.
Reduce No-Shows by Using Appointment Schedulers
No-shows create a series of problems for your business, as well as for other patients. No-shows mean less revenue for a business, and it means that the appointment schedule could have gone to a more serious patient in waiting.
Today, there are many ways to prevent no-shows. One is to use appointment self-scheduling software. Such programs allow patients to schedule an appointment for themselves. In addition, the software can send follow-up messages to the patient to remind them of their appointment.
Harness Social Media Channels
It’s not a secret that most individuals spend a significant amount of their time on social media. Why not use this platform to promote your services? Social media platforms often have customizable marketing tools that can help you target the right audience for a fair price.
Engaging content, including educational posts, patient testimonials, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the practice, can help build trust and credibility, ultimately attracting more patients to the practice. You can also post video summaries of your services to help patients identify and navigate through your services.
Offer Extended and Flexible Working Hours
Patient volume and flow can also be improved by using medical answering services like PatientCalls. Such services take in appointment requests and schedule them even after hours. Medical answering services can reduce the pressure on healthcare providers while streamlining administrative tasks.
Medical answering services also allow you to extend your working hours to address concerns from patients. This provides better satisfaction for customers as they can reach you as soon as the concern arises, making your business open to urgent cases.
Answering services can provide a wide variety of services for you. This may include answering patient inquiries, connecting patients with doctors, processing insurance claims, and facilitating payment. Such services serve as an extension of your limited services as they can accommodate patients during peak times or after hours.
Collect and Respond to Patient Reviews and Testimonials
Patient reviews and testimonials play a significant role in shaping perceptions of your practice and influencing potential patients’ decisions. Some patients rely on testimonials to help validate a clinic’s proficiency.
Promoting testimonials can help patients decide whether to bring their business to you or not. Highlight positive reviews to improve your online reputation.
Similarly, it would also help your business to address negative feedback. Your team must be able to quickly answer negative comments to show other patients that you listen to their problems.
Improve Authority in Your Field of Expertise
Increasing your authority on the services you offer can be achieved through different ways. You can conduct seminars and produce informative brochures that will help educate patients and show your grasp of medical practices.
In addition, you can also post educational blogs and other materials on your website. Providing related information can help patients understand your level of understanding regarding a particular procedure.
What Are Some Factors Affecting Patient Volume?
Patients consider several factors when choosing which medical clinic they should go to. Some of the most obvious factors include your reputation and the extensiveness of your services.
In addition to these, there are some factors that you may not readily consider improving when you are trying to increase patient volume, but you should.
Take note of the following factors to increase patient volume:
- Extensiveness of services. There are several patients who are looking for several different services. If you offer a wide range of services, then you are most likely to be selected by a patient. The convenience that a wide range of services offer often outweighs other factors.
- Ease of communication. Studies have proven that efficient communication and appointment scheduling significantly improve efficiency and positively affect patient perception. If patient inquiries are directly answered and very little hassle is generated from appointment scheduling, patients are more likely to choose your services.
- Expertise in the field. Patients are more likely to seek care from healthcare providers with specialized knowledge and experience. Expertise in a medical practice instills confidence in patients, which in turn can lead to referrals.
- Feedback and reviews. Positive online reputation influences perceptions of quality and trustworthiness, attracting new patients and retaining existing ones.
- Use and integration of technological advancements. Several technological advancements help in streamlining medical procedures, including setting up appointments, claiming insurance, and paying bills. Integration of technology may attract tech-savvy patients and improve patient satisfaction, leading to increased patient volume.
Surely, there are other factors that affect a patient’s decision when choosing a clinic to go to. The mentioned factors are just some of the critical ones that every clinic must consider when building strategies for improving patient volume.
How to Improve Patient Flow in the Clinic?
Improving patient flow in the clinic is different from increasing patient volume, but they are highly related. A clinic with good patient flow can attract patients and accommodate more patients.
A good flow of patients enhances efficiency in work, reduces waiting time, and provides higher overall satisfaction for patients. You can improve patient flow through the following steps:
- Streamline appointment scheduling.
- Open lines after working hours.
- Reduce waiting times, especially during the preliminary stages of consultation.
- Utilize technology (e.g., software applications and cloud tools).
- Utilize automated reminders to avoid late or no-show patients.
- Ensure compliance with regulations to avoid penalties.
- Improve patient education and engagement.
- Implement extensive aftercare protocols.
- Implement standardized protocols for receiving and processing patients.
- Continuously monitor and evaluate operations.
Address all of these steps with one solution. Contact PatientCalls and use our medical answering services. Our team of experts specializes in processing medical-related calls and improving clinic efficiency by taking care of administrative tasks.
In addition, our services are fully HIPAA-compliant. As such, there is no need to worry about patient confidentiality or potential breaches from your end.
Increase Patient Volume With the Help of PatientCalls
There are a lot of missed opportunities when your clinic cannot receive patient inquiries through calls after hours. This not only defeats the purpose of increasing patient volume, but it also results in revenue losses for you.
Use PatientCalls’ medical answering services and ensure that every patient call is answered and addressed. With the help of our expert customer service representatives, we can help you set schedules and take care of other administrative tasks.
Reduce pressure from healthcare providers by allowing our team to manage patient information and schedules for you efficiently. Our services can also be integrated with software use and customizable solutions for patients.
Contact us today and get a free quote.