goals - Dr. Kelley

Healthcare Marketing Goals -Set Your Annual Goals!

“What?” You might be asking.

“It’s time to set my annual healthcare marketing goals already?”

Yes! I know the year isn’t over yet and you’re still making progress on this year’s goals. But having the next year’s goals in place by the beginning of October gives you time to cement those goals in your subconscious.

I don’t typically recommend a specific way to create your goals…different ways work best for different people. You could produce S.M.A.R.T. goals as discussed by Tony Robbins. You could build D.U.M.B. goals as discussed by Brendon Burchard. (Seriously, check this out!) The important thing is that you find a goal-setting method that works for you and stick with it. I have a few tips to help you along the way:

Written. Your healthcare marketing goals must be in writing and kept in a convenient location you can refer to every day. To hold yourself accountable, purchase my $10 Workbook here-> Companion Workbook – a place to plan out your daily, weekly, monthly, and annual goals.

Concise. Be as specific as possible about what you want to achieve in the coming year.

Measurable. Your goals must be measurable in order for you to know when you’ve achieved them. You shouldn’t have to guess when a goal is accomplished. You should know with certainty…and celebrate!

Manageable. Don’t develop so many goals that it becomes overwhelming… If you have that many goals they are probably action steps, not goals.

Grounded. Your goals should be based on your values and purpose, and aligned with your mission, and vision. If a goal isn’t congruent with this foundation, rework it or ditch it altogether.

Regardless of the process you use to flesh out your goals, it can be helpful to break them out into major categories. (If you decide to have lots of subcategories, only list 1-2 goals for each one. Keep in mind you only want 10-15 goals for the entire year!) The ones I use are:

Professional – Includes any goals focused on your career. You may further break this down into categories such as financial, practice numbers, marketing, education, etc.

Personal – Non-work-related goals fall into this category, which can be further sub-divided if necessary. (i.e.: Mental, physical, emotional, creative, etc.)

Financial – Any goals you have regarding money, savings, investments, etc.

Adventure – Goals for fun and recreational activities are a must! Otherwise you run the risk of only focusing on work and getting burned out.

Connections – Who do you want to meet, work with, interview, mentor, etc. in the upcoming year?

Have you set your written healthcare marketing goals for this year? What works for you? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments section to help others who may be struggling.

For more information on building community connections, I encourage you to read my new book Community Connections! Relationship Marketing for Healthcare Professionals. If you want more valuable information about how to Connect with YOUR Community, you can find FREE healthcare practice marketing content, PowerPoint Presentation Jumpstart Kits, workbooks, blog articles, and my FREE “Practice Marketing Planner” Now!

Maintain or Regain Your Healthcare Practice?

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

Maintain or Regain?

Maintain or Regain Your Healthcare Practice?

I had an interesting conversation with my husband Michael, last week. We were talking about how for most people…if they change nothing about their nutrition, exercise, and emotional health habits…today is the healthiest they’ll ever be. For the majority of people who don’t eat well…don’t exercise…and let stress run their lives…they lose health incrementally each day. Thus making today their healthiest day…pretty sobering thought, isn’t it?

In my own healthcare practice, I see patients struggling to regain their health…to get back to a point where they used to be. Therefore, this wasn’t the interesting part of the conversation for me. No…the interesting part of the conversation was when I realized the same truth can be seen in other areas of life. If a person changes nothing about his poor spending or saving habits, today may be the wealthiest he’ll ever be. If a business owner changes nothing about her inconsistent healthcare marketing habits, today may be the most successful she’ll ever be. Yikes!

This discussion reminded me of something I used to tell my patients. It’s far easier to maintain your health (with regular exercise, proper nutrition, and stress management) than it is to regain your health once you’ve lost it. The same is true for money…reputation…fluency in a foreign language…trust…hard drive backups…physical upkeep of a house or business…etc.

Take an honest look at yourself and your healthcare practice. Consider making a list of the things you continuously excel at as well as a list of those skills, abilities, or intangibles you’ve let slide. Why do you excel at the things on the first list – natural aptitude, practice, or force of will? How can you apply those same abilities to the second list? What steps can you take to maintain your business success? In what areas do you need to regain your skills?

If you haven’t already developed your 2017 personal and professional goals, there’s still time! And if you head over to my website, you can sign up for my FREE healthcare marketing tip of the month newsletter and receive a FREE goals workbook to download. As an added bonus, you’ll receive the first two chapters of my e-book, Community Connections! Relationship Marketing for Healthcare Professionals.

Please share your comments, suggestions, and stories at dr-kelley.com and help me create a larger community of successful healthcare professionals!

For more information on building community connections, I encourage you to read my book Community Connections! Relationship Marketing for Healthcare Professionals. If you want more valuable information about how to Connect with YOUR Community, you can find FREE healthcare practice marketing content, PowerPoint Presentation Jumpstart Kits, workbooks, blog articles, and my FREE “Practice Marketing Planner” Now!

Metrics to Measure By

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

In order to gauge the success of your practice, you need to track certain data. In a sea of numbers, you need to know what metrics to measure by. ruler

Revenue Per Visit

It’s never easy to raise your fees but sometimes it’s necessary. You don’t want to do it arbitrarily, on January 1 for example, because it will seem to your patients, well, arbitrary!

You should have a solid number to base rate increases on. That’s what revenue per visit will give you. To calculate your revenue per visit, calculate the average amount you collect from patients and subtract the average cost of conducting a visit. Now that you have that number, you can determine if you need to increase your fees. (For additional information and guidelines, you can consult the most recent edition of the Physicians’ Fee Reference book.)

Not Always Dollars

Revenue isn’t the only metric you should judge your practice on. If you want to have long term success, you need to have a high patient satisfaction rating. You can design a brief survey for patients to fill out rating you on things like waiting time, ease of scheduling, how well you listen, and how helpful your staff is. A simple 1-10 rating on a few key questions is all that’s required to get some good data here.

stars-1128772_1280 If patients don’t feel they can address these issues with your office, you can bet they’ll address them on public forums like Yelp and Zocdoc and give you a poor review. Give them the chance to explain any frustrations to you.

Not Always Patients

It’s not only patient satisfaction you should be concerned about. How happy is your staff? How much turnover do you have? Unhappy employees aren’t going to treat patients the way you’d like them to be treated. Unhappy staff quit, and it’s frustrating for patients to see a different face each time they come in. It makes you look bad and it’s expensive to continuously hire and train new staff.

And honestly, a lot of doctors don’t know how to run the front desk. Some don’t even know how to schedule an appointment, let alone the complicated stuff like insurance billing or sending out blood for lab testing . If your entire staff quit without notice (whether that’s one person or several), how bad off would you be? You probably don’t want to find out.

You likely give feed back when a staff member does something you’re unhappy about. Give them the same opportunity to provide feedback to you. And make an effort to tell your staff when they’re doing something right!

Traffic Patterns

What times of day are you busy and slow? Do you open at 10:00 and wait until 12:00 for your first patient to come in? It’s easier for working people to come in before work or during lunch than late morning or late afternoon. Would your patients benefit from evening appointments? open

Start asking your patients if they’d have any interest in Saturday appointments. For people who are paid hourly, they lose money if they aren’t at work. Saturday appointments might work really well for them and increase patient satisfaction for you!

There’s a lot to be said for working a typical 9-5 schedule, but even if you were available one late evening a week or one Saturday a month, it might help increase your patient load.

Slow Times

Make note of busy and slow times of year too. Summer is typically slow for many practices. Use those times to go on vacation, to do renovations, or to do major systems upgrades. Sometimes if makes financial sense just to close the office rather than pay staff when it’s quiet.

Referrals

You should know where every patient who comes into your practice was referred from. By an existing patient, a Facebook ad, Google, another physician? If you want to grow you practice,you need to know where to concentrate your energy and money when it comes to attracting new patients.

If you aren’t getting patient referrals, something is wrong with your patient satisfaction or education. How can you fix it? If you aren’t getting a lot of referrals from people who were Googling, you need to improve your SEO.

If you aren’t getting traffic from ads you’re paying for, you need to rethink your advertising strategy. If you aren’t getting doctor referrals, you need to work harder at building relationships with your colleagues.

If You Don’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It

You should always be striving to improve every aspect of your practice. And maybe you are, but if you aren’t using metrics to measure your improvements, you don’t know what impact those improvements are having. Or not having. And that wastes money, time and energy. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

For more information on building community connections, I encourage you to read my new book Community Connections! Relationship Marketing for Healthcare Professionals. If you want more valuable information about how to Connect with YOUR Community, you can find FREE healthcare practice marketing content, PowerPoint Presentation Jumpstart Kits, workbooks, blog articles, and my FREE “Practice Marketing Planner” Now!

Mid-Year Goal Check

by Dr. Kelley Mulhern Leave a Comment

Can you believe we’re halfway through the year! It’s time for a mid-year goal check so we can see how far we’ve come and how far we have to go before the end of the year.

Review Your Goals

Earlier, we discussed setting goals . Because summer is slower for many practices, now is the ideal time to track your progress. Look at each goal. Why was it important? If you don’t have a good answer for that question, you aren’t likely to stick to those goals. Reaching a goal requires sacrifice, and if the goal isn’t compelling, you aren’t going to be motivated to work towards it.

A lot can happen in six months; you may have to make adjustments to both your goals and your plans to reach them. There’s nothing wrong with that, running a business is dynamic, and you have to be willing to change what isn’t working. What seemed urgent in January might not be a priority now.

Be careful that you aren’t doubling down on a goal that isn’t helping your business. It’s easy to fall victim to sunk cost fallacy when making business decisions. Car repairs are a typical example of the sunk cost fallacy. You spent money to put in a new transmission and then the brakes go out. The cost of the transmission and brakes together add up to more than the car is worth. The ideal decision would be to eat the cost of the transmission, it’s money already spent that you can’t get back, and buy a new car. But because you just spent all that money, you decide to spend money on new brakes too. Admit a mistake and don’t throw good money after bad.

Use a Real Measure

Hard numbers don’t lie, so make sure you look at them when you measure progress. Did your marketing campaign grow your patient numbers? Did the EMR system you implemented save you the time and money you thought it would? If the numbers aren’t adding up, you need to reassess your goals so you can “right the ship” before the end of the year.

Prioritize

Now that you’ve reviewed your goals, you need to spend your energy in the right place. Is there a goal on your list that stands out? There should be! Focus your attention on the big goals, the ones that will grow your business. That might mean enhancing your web presence, spending more time on community outreach programs, or improving the training methods for your staff.

No Zero Days

“No zero days” means that every day, you have to do something towards a goal, it can be a small thing, but you can’t let a day pass without doing something. Getting started is often the hardest part for many people. They’re fine once they get going, but getting going can be hard. That’s why implementing a “no zero days” policy is so helpful to eliminate that kind of procrastination.

You want to communicate more often with your patients by sending out a monthly newsletter, but it never seems to happen. From now on, you’ll do something to reach that goal every day. Sit down and decide on a subject for your next letter. Got the subject? Great, you can quit for today. But you’re already in front of your computer, and you already know what you want to write about, so you might as well write the opener.

Now that you have the opener, you might as well write the first paragraph. And so on until, voila! You’ve written the entire newsletter!

Accountability

Did you know that people who write down their goals and share them with others are much more likely to meet those goals? It’s true! A study found that more than 70% of people who wrote down their goals and gave weekly updates to a friend on their progress, met those goals, compared to just 35% of people who didn’t do the same.

Get yourself an accountability partner and let them give you the push you need.

Goals Not Traditions

If you find yourself making the same goals year after year, they’ve stopped being goals and become traditions. Use the mid-year goal check to cross those goals off your list once and for all. There’s nothing as motivating as a clean slate. That’s what you want to take into 2025, a clean slate, so you have a place to write down your new goals.