How to Stop your Medical Practice Losing Money

As a doctor, there are several factors that can lead to your medical practice losing money.

While most businesses take a financial downturn at times, it is important to be as prepared as possible to stop your medical practice losing money.

Here are 5 ways to help your stop your medical practice losing money, and to grow profitability.

1) Improve Collection Methods

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, but how much you keep. So goes the old saying about profitability. In a medical practice it is easy to lose money to patients who are not paying on the day, or do not have a clear payment plan in place.

When it comes to providing medical care to your patients, doctors always have a process. The same approach should happen for medical practice collections.

Your practice collections process is one of the top factors impacting your cash flow . Take the time to create an established plan for your collections and you will see a spike in revenue.

2) Focus on Keeping Urgent Care Patients

As urgent care and retail clinics become more popular, many doctors find themselves seeing fewer appointments for low-level health problems. While this can free up more one-on-one time with your chronic condition patients, it can also lead to your medical practice losing money.

The simplest way to do this is to let your offerings be known in your marketing and on your practice website. If patients are aware that you will see urgent care or walk-in appointments, they are more likely to choose your practice.

You can also compete with Urgent Care by offering telemedicine services. An at-home virtual appointment is very attractive to patients with acute or minimal health issues. Best of all, many of these patients are willing to pay out of pocket for the telemedicine services you provide.


3) Tweak Your Marketing Strategy

At least twice a year, you should review your overall medical practice marketing strategy.

This includes your medical practice social media pages, your email and direct mail marketing, and any print marketing or signage you have. Make sure your office hours are posted clearly, and that your seasonal promotions are up-to-date.

4) Follow Up Patients

When patients may reschedule, cancel at the last minute, or do not show up, it creates a loss in revenue. Patient follow-ups are extremely important, and it’s up to the medical practice team to ensure there is a process in place for follow ups.

Having a log of patients that need reminder or follow up calls is a great start, and discussing those patients each day in a morning meeting of some type is another excellent idea.

 

5) Monetize After Hours

Often the time away from the medical practice is the exact time when patients need help. rather than visit an urgent care or emergency, they may prefer to speak with their trusted physician.

You can approach this in several ways, including extending office hours on certain days of the week, or offering some sort of concierge medicine program. You can also begin offering telemedicine visits as a part of your medical practice.

All of these options enable the one thing patients value most: access to their doctor, and the support they need when they need it.

These basics tips will help you to slow down the medical practice losing money. If done correctly, and tracked with medical practice benchmarks, this can help to turn around an unprofitable practice.