Clinical Solutions Blog

As a clinic owner, you spend loads of time (and money) on your physiotherapy marketing to acquire new patients.

New patients arrive and seem more than happy with the initial assessment and first treatment. They return for a few subsequent sessions and then, they cancel an appointment and stop coming back.

You’re left wondering, did they suddenly feel better and graduate from treatment? Or has this patient self discharged from treatment?

This concept of self discharge is not isolated to the physical therapy industry.

For example, out of all the people who set up a Canadian bank account, 32% will cancel their bank account within the first 100 days.

And 46% of people who attend a Chuck E Cheese, will never go back again.

In the world of physiotherapists and chiropractors, what percentage of new patients will self discharge? 

Actually, a better question to ask is: How many patients graduate from your treatment plans? 

You probably don’t know.

Well, from the clinics I’ve worked with, this number is 40%. That means that 60% of new patients never complete their treatment plans and will self discharge. Quite a large percentage right?

If you want to stop spending time (and money) on marketing to acquire patients only to lose them, you are going to love what I’ve got to share because we are going to solve this issue once and for all.

We’re going to cover:

• Why patients self discharge and what you need to do about it
• Why it’s so important to change this and retain the patients you acquire
• 4 steps to put a re-activation program in place

Ready to dive in?

I got an email from one of our blog subscribers recently and I thought it was such a great and relevant marketing challenge facing most clinic owners, that I wanted to share it with everybody here on the CSC Blog so you could also benefit from the answer.

This is what the email said:

"Hi Rick,

I am struggling with not being able to get past the front desk to speak to the doctors directly. If I leave my referral pads or my brochures at the front I don't even know if the doctors see them. How do I get in front of doctors to tell them about the TMJ rehab or pelvic health rehab we provide?"

In this post I’ll be sharing:

• Why so many clinic owners have such difficulties getting past the gatekeeper at a doctors office.
• How to look at it from the gatekeeper’s perspective.
• What I learned from owning clinics and managing over 200 staff.
• 4 practical solutions to make sure you DO get past the front desk gatekeeper.

You just attended an awesome physiotherapy marketing workshop and now you want to implement all this cool new stuff at your clinic. You also want to start selling retail products to your clients (such as tens machines) so your clinic can offer a complete solution to patients.

After the workshop you plan a team meeting to share your goals and visions but, nobody seems as excited as you. There seems like an air of resistance and lack of commitment. Still, you want to move ahead so set a plan for people to implement, which includes selling more retail products to patients at their visits.

Weeks go by and nothing gets done, nothing changes. Despite your big team meeting and action plan, everyone seems to go back to their usual routine, forgetting about the ultimate plan altogether!

The challenge clinic owners have is:

When your culture sucks and your staff are not engaged, nobody will want to do anything!

Let’s talk about what healthcare management really is, why culture is your first focus toward a successful business, and what makes your clinicians and employees engaged. At the end I’ve also put together a quiz so you can test how much engagement you currently have - if there’s a gap, then you will know what to fix!

If you’re interested in going into business to create the kind of clinic that continues to see growth, to have an environment you and your team enjoy being in, and to feel a sense of deep appreciation for creating the kind of life you love living - then listen up, we’ve got just the right expert to share tips on how you can have all that and more!

After 12 years in business and now taking on an additional HR staff member, successful clinician and business owner Jeff Walsh is growing, streamlining, and focusing on bigger and better things to come.

This is our third interview in the ‘Clinic Owner Interview Series’ - a series where we’re learning insider tips straight from the experts themselves. It started with Gordon McMorland, from National Spinal Care, a successful multidisciplinary clinic, sharing his tips and insights into growth, taking risks, expansion and more. Then we had Kim Hall, from Physio2U, giving us a sneak peak inside her business and how she’s managed to make it such a huge success in a short amount of time.

Now, in this third segment, Jeff Walsh, BScPT from Nova Physiotherapy, reveals key points about how to be a working clinician while at the same time growing into multiple locations, knowing when it’s time to delegate for business growth, and creating an environment that matters to both patients and yourself.

Jeff Walsh, along with business partner Robbie MacDonald, own 4 clinic locations in Halifax Nova Scotia with over 21 team members. With a special interest in Sport Physiotherapy, Concussion Management, and 3D Gait Analysis, the clinics are quite deeply involved with the sporting community around Halifax and have built strategic relationships that have helped grow their clinics.

Nova Physiotherapy are the proud winners of the Consumer Choice Award 2010-2016.

In this interview, Jeff offers incredible insights on how to build, live and love a business [and life] that’s worth all the effort.

Take a look Inside the Life of Jeff Walsh...

Healthcare is changing at a faster pace than any of us could have predicted. As a clinic owner, how do you deal with these rapid changes?

Compared to 5 years ago, practitioners are faced with growing complexity from every single angle. And, the rising challenges of physical therapy marketing seem to cross all borders - competitors, funding, consumers, systems changes, digital technologies - you name it, each area presents its own complexities!

Feeling ovewhelmed? You're not alone!

That’s why today we’re going to talk about 7 of the most prevalent rising challenges facing clinic owners right now. Then, we’ll talk about one of the best possible solutions to all of these challenges - something you just can’t afford to miss.

Ready to dig in? Let's go...

One of the biggest problems I see most health businesses face is they are always playing defence and not offence.  

• Defence = resistance and reaction
• Offence = attack and score

In a game, there’s a need for defence and offence because the teams play in opposition to each other. But in business, well, let’s just say playing defence isn’t the best position to take.

If you’re always playing defence you’re basically just reacting to what goes wrong. Nothing really gets solved and no real progress to move forward is being made. On the other hand, if you have systems and processes in place you’re playing the offence, always strategizing the attack and therefore obtaining more points on the scoreboard.

What are you doing to put your health business on the offence?

It won’t surprise me if you were to say nothing, or you weren’t really clear on the difference between defence and offence. That’s what we’re here to look at today.

What got me really thinking about this recently was listening to the Tim Ferriss Podcast with Seth Godin. I'm a big fan of both Tim Ferris and Seth Godin. I love Tim’s ability to deconstruct world-class performers to extract the tactics and tools we can learn from them. I love Seth Godin and think he's a marketing genius. I also saw Seth speak at the Hubspot Inbound Marketing conference in Boston in 2015.

Listening to that podcast got me super inspired and I wanted to share what I learned from it, along with the concept of defence and offence and how to use it to change the face of your health business starting today.

Ready to get inspired?

When I work with clinic owners, I coach them to run more efficient, effective businesses. One of the particular areas of interest to me is helping clinic owners put their business on autopilot so they can produce better results in less time.

In my experience, the best clinic patients often come from patient referrals. But although we all want to ask our existing patients for those referrals, at the same time, we don't want to seem pushy or desperate. And we could also be faced with the problem that our staff or contractor clinicians don't want to ask for the referrals at all.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the patient referral process is something you can also automate and today I’ve brought in an expert to help - meet Nadeem Kassam.

I managed to pull Nadeem aside and ask him a few critical questions about this automation process. Today he is going to share his know-how on boosting referrals from existing patients so you can watch your practice grow and your revenue soar.

By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll have some practical, actionable tips you can start using so you and your clinic can reap the benefits and rewards of streamlined patient referrals.

Ready? Let’s chat with Nadeem...

Google AdWords have just made a massive change to how their paid ads appear in the search engine results. If you’re a clinic owner who uses Google Adwords or you’ve been thinking about adding it as one of your healthcare marketing strategies, the competition is about to get a whole lot fiercer!

If this is all news to you, I’ll be sharing the Google Adwords changes in just a moment.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve had ample operational experience with managing over 200 multi disciplinary centers and from working with countless clinic owners in my Clinic Accelerator Program. Out of that experience I’ve learned that using paid advertising is a great source of physiotherapy and chiropractic marketing for bringing in new patients - IF you know it is an effective channel for your business.

What I see all too often is people don’t track their Adwords marketing, they don’t know what to measure, how to work out if it is actually effective, and if it’s translating into new patients or not.

With the new changes, if you want to make Google Adwords work for you it is going to be essential to have a better understanding and better management of your Adwords campaigns. The new changes will limit ads to 7 per page with no right hand side advertising. You will lose your shirt if you don't know how to properly optimize Adwords. 

So let’s talk about the Google Adwords changes and some solutions that can help solve the issues that these changes will bring.

One of the top struggles clinicians face with patients is getting them to commit to their care plan and see it through.

In fact, only 40% or less of patients graduate from their treatment plans.

How many of your patients are graduating? Do you even know this number? Or, is it more common to see patients leave and never come back after their first or second appointment?

I’ve coached and consulted with many clinicians in my Clinic Accelerator Program. I’ve got clinic operational experience in managing over 200 physiotherapists, massage therapists, and chiropractors over the past 10 years.

I help clinicians learn healthcare marketing techniques and apply them to the treatment rooms to get better results with patients and in business.

And here’s the thing…

What separates a good clinician and a great clinician is what happens when you do your initial assessment on day 1. It’s all about how you approach this first assessment, what happens during, and how you frame what’s going to happen in future.

Patients shop like consumers. Consumers don't buy on what's logical / rational, they buy on emotions and how they feel. Spend the time and make it an emotional and amazing first experience - this is where you’ll see your outcomes skyrocket.

So what I’d like to do is share with you today is an all star system that will make your patients more compliant, stick with the plan of care and get better results - ultimately leading to more patient referrals.

I recently went for a massage therapy session and it was awesome to see how this clinic offered direct billing for the massage therapy session from blue cross and green shield. As I sat in the waiting room, I heard at least 3 other patients ask about this service and how they could get enrolled.

This clinic was also using new technologies to make it easier for patients. They were using Jane App to make it super easy to book appointments online - zero hassles for me (and other patients).

This got me thinking about 2 things:

1. How clinic owners could use extended health benefits more effectively
2. How being innovative with marketing and selling products can attract more patients

Like most employers, at CSC, we offer health benefits for our staff.  It's a cost that is expensive but we see it as an investment. We want our staff to be healthy and happy so they can take care of our customers. And, after my massage appointment, as I was submitting my paperwork with Sunlife so I could get reimbursed, I started reading the fine print - which I found very interesting.

Using the CSC extended health plan as an example, I wanted to share what typical things are included, what I learned out of this experience, and exactly why it is so important to clinic owners and clinicians.

More than that I'm going to show you how you can use extended health benefits trends to attract new patients, and, more importantly, keep them coming back over and over again.