What are you looking for?

Physicians are constantly juggling three aspects of their life: Professional, personal and social. Understanding what your priorities are and what you are willing to sacrifice is a key element when considering growth in your practice. If you grow your medical practice will you be willing to sacrifice personal time to account for the growth? Sacrificing time with your family and friends or giving up your hobbies plays a role in making this determination.

Growth

Can you handle more patients? Many practices make the mistake of always looking to expand and accept new patients. While onboarding new patients is great, you need to determine how large of a practice you can handle so that you never sacrifice the highest level of service.

Also, keep in mind that growth and profitability do not necessarily go hand in hand. Even though your practice may be onboarding more patients, you may not see the bottom line jump. This is an indicator that patient growth may not be the source of your profitability and there may be other financial issues to consider.

At its core, growing your medical practice means having a healthy number of paying patient visits every day and week. But maximizing cash flow might not equate to increasing the number of patients. On the contrary, it could simply mean keeping your patient volume steady and becoming a better business person.

To improve your profitability there are a few items to consider:

Expense Reductions
Bringing down expenses is a quick way to help the bottom line. Evaluate where you are spending money. Ensure that your patients are receiving the best service, but do not overpay your vendors for less than ideal products.

Find the Right Volume
Do not just focus on increasing the volume, but find the right volume when it comes to your patients. This means evaluating what you are doing for that volume of patients in terms of offering evidence-based and protocol-driven services that help patients get better faster.

Related Read: Three Keys to Providing Terrific Patient Service

Advertising to the Right Audience
Do not simply market yourself to the general population. Target those that need your services and focus on the high-margin procedures and services. Not all services provide the same bottom line return, so finding what you enjoy and making sure that it aligns with what is profitable is the best position you can put yourself in.

Set Goals

Create goals for your medical practice and stick to them. Identify exactly where you want to grow and how you will accomplish this. Remember that patients will leave your practice for several reasons (unhappy with the service, moving to a new location, etc.). Bringing in new patients is likely necessary just based on expected patients leaving. Developing your practice is exciting and offers flexibility to meet your goals, but step one is determining what you are looking for which takes both time and effort.

Related Read: A Good Business Plan Can Help Your Practice Thrive

For more information, contact Kevin Omahen at [email protected] or 312.670.7444. Visit ORBA.com to learn more about our Health Care Group.