April 19th, 2012
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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you must have some questions about how to build your specific practice. Please send them in and I will attempt to answer them one at a time in this forum. Your question may trigger someone else to great things in their practice.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
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April 1st, 2012
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If you don’t take control of your practice, the joke’s on you. Only you won’t get it.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
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March 31st, 2012
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You are in the way of your practice growth. Face it, if your practice is 3 years old or more, it’s not going to change unless someone (probably from the outside) brings in new people or new processes or both.
Try this exercise. Figure out your practice profit from 2011. Now multiply by ten. What would you have to do to acheive that? Here are a few suggestions:
- Hire more providers in your specialty
- Hire more providers in a different specialty that complements yours
- Answer your phone more effectively
- Code better
- Bill and collect better
- Acquire another practice
- Start a new location
- Bring new ancillary services into your practice
- Start a cash pay practice option with affordable monthly payments
- Reactivate inactive patients
- Get current patients to refer
- Get other doctors to refer to you
- Get current patients to follow up better
Once you choose a strategy to get your revenue up, someone has to be responsible for the implementation – it has to be their primary job, no excuses. You probably are the provider, the marketing director and the executive in charge of practice development. If you needed your heart valve replaced, would you go to see the cardiovascular surgeon who is also an ObGyn and a rheumatologist? Put the best people in the key seats in your organization.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
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Tags: Aortic valve, Business, Cardiac surgery, Cardiothoracic surgery, Conditions and Diseases, Health, Health care, Health care provider, Heart valve, Medicine, Nurse practitioner, Patient, United States, Wikipedia
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March 17th, 2012
St Patricks Day Crochet patterns - Leprechaun Hat (Photo credit: LisaAuch)
Happy St. Patty‘s from all of us at UPB!
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March 1st, 2012
From a marketing perspective, it is critical to clarify who you are. What is it about you
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that makes you a unique and special choice in the healthcare marketplace? You may not be the obvious choice for everyone, and if you are your logic is flawed. But who are you and what segment of the market are you best designed to serve? Here is an exercise to clarify this point:
1. Why should I choose you over all other providers and non-medical alternatives, including the choice to do nothing?
2. Ask your patients why they choose you over their other alternative providers. Better yet hire someone else to ask them, face-to-face.
3. Ask your patients for testimonials and read them carefully to understand what part of your service they value the most.
4. Interview people in your market who are not your patients. Ask them why they have chosen their current provider. Then ask what they would most like to change about that provider’s practice, and would they switch if they could get it somewhere else.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
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February 21st, 2012
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The biggest marketing challenge for most doctors is a lack of regular contact with their market. It’s just too easy to sit behind that comfy big desk and act all smart and in control, and too hard to break out of your comfort zone. Try having more personal contact with your market. Do some speaking. Call on referral sources. Visit large employers in your market to get them to send patients to you. How hard are you willing to try to reach the level of success you want?
All the other things that don’t require your direct particpation are good too, don’t get me wrong. Don’t stop your newsletters, twitter feed, radio commercials and Google ad words. Just see if more of you gets everythign else to work a little better.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
Tags: Business, Facebook, Google, Health care, LinkedIn, Marketing, Online Communities, Physician, Radio advertisement, Social media, Social network, Twitter, United States
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February 14th, 2012
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Is the abbreviation for Valentine’s Day supposed to be VD? Lots of love to all!
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
Tags: Arts, Flickr, Holiday, Kitten, Opinions, Taylor Swift, Twitter, Valentine's Day
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February 12th, 2012
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We get a lot of comments on this blog site that never get posted because they are clearly spam. Generally I only tend to post comments from someone that has something to do with the business of medical practice management. So if your URL or email sounds kinky or unrelated you’re wasting your time with the comments. Sorry spammers!
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
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January 28th, 2012
Image by Matthieu Dejardins, eCommerce Activist via Flickr
Here is a very simple way to look at how to raise your top line revenue.
1. Perform more services.
2. Perform new services.
3. Improve your coding.
4. Improve your collection rate (percentage of charges that is collected).
I recommend that as you grow revenue you keep checking the averages of other practices to see how you are doing. You can get that info from MGMA, a variety of consultants and possibly your CPA if he/she has a number of physicians as clients. Before I consult with a client that is what I do. I look for the one area of the above four that shows worst performance. Then I devise a plan to go to work on that. You need that kind of focus to get the best results.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
Tags: Accountants, Accounting, Business, Certified Public Accountant, Firms, PRWEB, Revenue, United States
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January 21st, 2012
If you’re like most doctors, you run the practice your way. Your judgment, your experience, your horse-sense, your way or the highway. But what if you’re not a business genius? What if you lack the knowledge, skills and experience to consistently make good business decisons. Or worse, what if you don’t make decisions because you are haunted by past mistakes and bad decisons?
Look, in business everyone has a boss. If you’re self-employed the boss happens to be your patients and your cashflow. Why does everyone have a boss? Because other people (if they are the right people) can get more out of you. If you ran a Fortune 500 company, you would report to the board of directors. All your plans and their implementation would have to be checked and recheked with them. Running a small independent practice can be a huge problem if you are not regularly making yourself accountable to the numbers and the patient surveys. You need a check mechanism to protect you from your bad decisions or
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inability to make decisions.
Jim Collins says, people first then processes. Collins says get the right people on your team, the wrong people off your team, then get the right people in the right positions and then implement your strategy. He’s right.
David Zahaluk, MD is a revenue enhancement specialist for doctors and the author of “The Ultimate Practice Building Book.”
Tags: Business, Collins, Decision making, Facebook, Fortune 500, Jim Collins, Small Business, United States
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