5 simple (but effective) steps to grow your practice in 2024

Healthcare is an ever evolving landscape, which means there’s always new opportunities to seize and improvements to make. And with tech at the forefront of big changes in the industry, it's time to think about how you can leverage your tech to create sustainable growth for your practice. 

From your marketing to communications, analytics to engagement, we’ve got five easy ways to guarantee a boost to your practice this year.

1. Streamline your processes

An all-in-one system helps in myriad ways to streamline your processes. First, it’s cost effective: instead of paying for multiple licenses across many different systems, all doing their individual thing, you only need one, saving your team crucial funds that can be put elsewhere.

But most importantly, streamlining your workflows through one system saves crucial time. Some manual tasks that normally take hours, now take just a couple of minutes – sometimes even seconds. And that means the time saved can be put to better use, such as spending more time with patients in consultations, or concentrating on getting new and returning patients booked in for appointments.

Medical Secretary and Semble user Natasha Jovic told us it used to take her 20 minutes to perform simple tasks, because her processes were spread across multiple, unsecure systems that didn’t talk to each other. Now it takes her just a minute or two to do the same work - and as a result has managed to increase patient numbers by 40%.

“It’s made life easier and saved us all time, which means my clinicians have been able to double the amount of patients they’re seeing. They were getting around 50% of new referrals booked in last year, whereas now it’s at 90%.”

2. Invest in your marketing strategy

Healthcare professionals are operating in a more competitive landscape than ever before. Practices that once relied on word-of-mouth referrals are now coming to terms with the explosion in patient choice across the internet. With 7% of daily Google searches being health-related, it's wise to create a digital marketing plan.

So, how can you distinguish yourself from the rest? There’s a few small but mighty steps you can take that’ll help get people talking about your practice.

• Make the most of any marketing support available through the bodies, groups and institutions you’re a part of. Most hospitals have a marketing or business development function that offer new consultants an induction programme.
• If you work in primary care or another allied health profession, seek the help of a marketing agency, ideally one that understands the healthcare market and the rules and regulations that pertain to advertising in the medical industry.
• Set up a website – the sooner you can do this the better. (We have some handy tips in our ‘Launching a private practice’ eBook.)
• Create a 'Google My Business' profile to put yourself on Google Maps (this can even be done before setting up a website).
• Enquire about the possibility of giving educational talks or providing content for industry blogs.
• Reach out to other companies operating in the same space, like Semble, to help push out content or even investigate joint marketing initiatives.

A good marketing strategy has the potential to improve patient acquisition and retention, as well as growing your overall revenue.

We previously teamed up Louis Meletiou, Marketing Director at Medico Digital who gave us some invaluable pearls of wisdom on cultivating and measuring an effective healthcare marketing strategy – take a look here.

3. Strengthen your patient communication

Strong communication is key to keeping your patients engaged and strengthening your relationship with them. There are so many ways you can up your comms game, but start with automation. Automating key correspondence eliminates time spent on such admin but reaps big rewards.

Pre-consultation questionnaires, appointment reminders and follow-up messaging can be sent automatically, which helps to reduce the number of no-shows, but also builds trust and encourages positive reviews and recommendations. Your patients know you're invested in their care; they can rely on your practice to help them get to appointments on time and provide an excellent level of care before, during and after a consultation.

4. Follow your financials

While financial gain may not be your driver for going into healthcare, it’s the thing that will ensure you can maintain a sustainable practice.

Many aspects of your practice can contribute to your financial income. How many new patients are you seeing? Are they showing up to appointments? Which products are best-sellers? Are payments being taken on time and invoices being paid?

A good practice management system will provide you with these answers. An analytics suite, like Semble Data, gives you complete visibility of how your practice is doing financially, as well as the fiscal drivers for your clinic. By monitoring things like payments, aged debt, invoices and even appointment no-shows, you can make informed decisions that will contribute to the financial growth of your practice.

5. Revisit your business plan

Whether you're starting a business plan from scratch or coming back for a refresh, there’s never a bad time to remind yourself of your values, your purpose and what you want your practice to achieve. This will help you keep your goals for growth clear and strong. Here’s some key steps to get you started.

Identify your end goal: What are you trying to achieve? Identifying clear business goals will make the building of a step-by-step plan to achieve these aims much easier.

Know your business in numbers: To write a business plan that will allow you to reach your goals, you need to understand how your business is currently performing. Obtaining an in-depth overview of the health of your business will help you to make concrete and achievable goals based on accurate data.

Identify key successes and failures: A business plan is all about improving and growing your business. To do this you must understand your strengths and weaknesses; consider what has worked well for your business and what has not. Identifying strengths mean you can work them into your plan to help you improve performance. Identifying weaknesses will enable you to know areas that need some attention and resources.

We’ve got plenty more tips on creating a business plan right here.