Insights on Healthcare Marketing

With all of the consolidation and technological automation in medicine today, it can become easy to treat patient care as a commodity where every experience is the same no matter where you go. Standardizing policies and procedures can certainly play a role in improving quality and cost of care, but we must not lose the […]

As we explore what patients want, #6 is perhaps the most important. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” — Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird Empathy. It is the experience of understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, […]

This is the fifth post in our series about what patients want, and this a big one! Connection. There is an epidemic of loneliness in our country, especially amongst the elderly, stay-at-home parents with young children, the chronically ill and caregivers. Cigna conducted a big study earlier this year and found that loneliness was at […]

Next up in our blog series on What Patients Want is keeping them informed. How does your team orient a new patient to your practice? How do you keep them informed about what to expect? Here are a few tips: 1. Offer directions to your office prior to the first appointment. Be sure to mention […]

In our series on “What Patients Want,” we have talked about warm greetings and coordination. Today we focus on accountability. What does accountability mean? It means that someone within your practice takes ownership over a patient’s issue or concern, gathers the information and gets back to the patient in a timely manner. It means not playing […]

In our last post, we talked about the importance of a warm greeting. Today’s topic is coordination. Patients expect coordination within your office, amongst each member of your team as well as with their other healthcare providers. How can your practice enhance coordination? Foster smooth handoffs. Patients don’t want to have to repeat the same […]

Don’t underestimate this one. It is especially important for your receptionists and front desk staff but really applies to everyone in the practice when they first encounter someone. Here are a few tips: 1. Treat each patient like you would a friend who came to your house. Extend an extravagant welcome. 2. Be prompt/immediate — […]

A warm greeting Coordinated care Accountability To be informed and know what to expect Connection Respect Empathy To be recognized and remembered How can you turn each of these into opportunities to serve? We’ll dig into each one a little deeper in upcoming blogs.

Competition — Most markets are competitive. Patients have a lot of choices, and they will exercise that choice if they aren’t satisfied.  Retention — More patients leave a practice because of bad service than anything else. JD Powers and Associates found that 67 percent of the people who don’t come back to a practice, don’t […]

I’m so tired of hearing “I’m sorry.” My friend posted these words on her Facebook page along with tagging the radiology facility where she had spent half her day trying to get a simple diagnostic test. Used appropriately and sparingly, apologies can be important and powerful, but they can’t replace action. We’ve all been taught […]