Clinical Solutions Blog

Recently I was chatting with a clinic owner in Ontario (before the christmas break) who’d hit his goal to have a $1 million clinic. His clinic revenue had been growing 20% a year for the past 3 years- then suddenly his revenue flat lined.

I asked him what had happened? Was it the economy?

Nope. He told me he’d made ONE bad hire that turned the clinic’s culture on its head. I realized he didn’t understand that there are 4 types of employees. Like 99% of clinic owners, he had hired the type of employee he thought he should hire, not the type he needed.

The wrong type of employee will lower the morale of all your staff and cause a downfall in productivity and less focus on the patient experience. That will repel patients from the clinic.

You definitely don’t want them at your front desk answering phones and greeting patients.

When hiring someone for your clinic, you have to understand what type of employee they are. There are only 4 types of employees. Understanding this principle will prevent costly hiring mistakes and give you the Midas touch for finding the right person for your position consistently.

I recently came back from the ACCELERATE Clinic Owner Business Summit. It was an event I produced, the first event of it’s kind in Canada. And it was a GREAT success!

The event was sold out with the 1st month and we have a triple digit waiting list. There were over 13 awesome speakers with MBA style case study workshops - and overall the event was incredible.  We even had a Net Promoter Score of 93% for the event. We'll definitely be hosting a 2018 event, so stay tuned for updates on early bird registrations.

At the start of ACCELERATE we ran a live phone poll about the biggest struggles clinic owners faced. As it turns out, one of the biggest challenges (by far) was managing and recruiting clinicians.

Being that millennials make up a large proportion of those people you’ll hire, that seems to present an even greater challenge to most clinic owners.

So let’s talk about that…

We’ll cover:

• What millennials expect they will do in the next few years
• Some amazing facts and stats from Deloitte's Millennial Survey
• What millennials most want out of employers
• 10 effective strategies to gain and retain millennials at your clinic

Let’s deep dive into millennial and how to lead them...

According to Strive Labs, 20% of patients drop out within three visits and never come back again. That's a lot of new patients self discharging, patients you’re never going to see at your clinic again. And a lot of lost revenue, too!

Patient engagement is something most clinic owners need to focus on more. And one of the challenges I hear clinic owners talk about is how poor new grads are with patient engagement.

This is to be expected, after all, they are just fresh out of physiotherapy or chiropractic school. From the patient’s perspective, they often look young (in most cases), they look and act inexperienced and they may not talk in a confident professional manner.

This dramatically impacts new patients who are calling your clinic. For instance, when a caller asks, what does the front desk say? The new patient caller wants to feel confident that your service is going to help them so if you’re telling them they are seeing a new grad with less experience, might have the perception that they are getting inferior treatment at your clinic.

But, there are easy ways you can fix this so your new grad has confidence and so do your patients.

In this post we’ll cover:

• The pros and cons of hiring new grads
• Ways to improve patient engagement
• A simple script for your front desk and new grads
• One simple technique to make every new patient a raving fan

I really don’t like the word receptionist. I mean, the front desk team do more than just “reception” work. They answer phones, book patients, bill insurance companies, talk with insurers, laundry, take payment, schedule next week appointments, show and sell product to patient, fill charts, and the list goes on.

The front desk team are really customer service reps or patient care coordinators or clinic ambassadors/hosts.  

Given that more than “70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated,” Source: McKinsey, the front desk team are crucial to the patient experience.

You need to hire the right person. Someone with passion, trustworthy, loyal and great positive character. But for some reason this is more difficult than it seems.

Does the following sound like a familiar scenario?

You put a job posting on Craigslist or Indeed and you get over 100 applicants in your inbox. What next? Who do you choose? You barely have time to even look at over 100 emails, let alone work out how to choose the very best candidate. And in the past you’ve wasted tons of time interviewing potential candidates, who in the end, just don’t fit the bill.

If this is the case, chances are you don’t have a hiring process in place, which is why we’re going to cover this right here, right now, because there is a much more efficient way to go about this.

We’ll cover:

• Common problems and concerns with hiring
• Why first impressions are your number one priority
• The exact 6 steps to follow to hire the best front desk team

Did one of your top physiotherapists, chiropractors or massage therapists just leave your clinic to work for a competitor? Or maybe one of your senior therapists has just given notice for retiring? Even worse, one of your therapists left and started a new clinic across the street.

As clinic owners, at some point we’re faced with the hiring challenge!

You may live in a busy city where there seems to be ample healthcare professionals around, yet you never seem to be able to recruit top talent healthcare professionals. They all seem to run off to your competitors, to the hospital, or to the bigger national multidisciplinary clinics because they offer more benefits.

After cofounding a network of 100+ physiotherapy clinics in Canada and now being the founder and CEO for Clinic Supplies Canada, I’ve learned a thing or two about hiring and maintaining staff. In fact, in 2015 huge competitors were trying to steal my staff - without success I might add. Why? Because we have amazing company culture that staff members want to be in. The point being, there are easier ways to recruit and maintain staff members, which is what I’d like to share today.

In this post I’ll cover:

• How building a bench of clinicians gives you power of choice in your marketplace.
• How getting involved with universities and colleges can be an easy lead to top talent.
• The most important thing to focus on when recruiting top talent.
• The importance of core values and company culture and how to create powerful incentives in your practice.
• How to target any obstacles that might prevent top talent working at your clinic.
• How to sell your vision of healthcare so the process all happens effortlessly.

Have you ever wanted to criticize a situation constructively, but found yourself holding back because you didn’t know how to convey your message without making the other person feel defensive or attacked? 

As a clinic owner, you must provide constructive feedback on a regular basis to keep your staff, contractors and marketing goals on track. It can be frustrated managing physical therapists, chiropractors, and massage therapists especially when they are self-employed/independent contractors.

In my current role as a health business consultant and educator I continually see the difference between great health businesses and those that are always going to struggle to stay afloat. There are many factors that contribute to business success or failure, but there is a main one that sticks out in my mind.

Just about every company has one. The workplace bully, the perpetual complainer, the know-it-all. These are all examples of the co-worker from hell. As a clinic owner, you should be very cautious of who you hire in your clinic. Hiring the wrong physiotherapist, chiropractor, or office manager can destroy the clinic’s reputation that you’ve worked so hard to build - ultimately affecting your bottom line. 

Determining whom to avoid and whom to hire isn’t easy. So how do you minimize your chances of hiring a monster? Simply put - a honest reference check. Past performance is often the best indicator of future performance, therefore, reference checks are vital to the selection process. Hiring someone without conducting a proper reference check is like placing a loose cannon in front of your patients - dangerous and unpredictable. What you don’t know can hurt you! Avoid hiring a toxic employee!