{"id":1094,"date":"2017-08-04T15:56:34","date_gmt":"2017-08-04T22:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.sprucehealth.com\/?p=1094"},"modified":"2023-10-26T06:07:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T13:07:29","slug":"absurdly-simple-way-show-clinics-value-patients-employers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/absurdly-simple-way-show-clinics-value-patients-employers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Absurdly Simple Way to Show Your Clinic’s Value to Patients and Employers"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you run an independent medical practice, such as a direct primary care (DPC) clinic, then you know how hard it can be to grow your patient base. In fact, we’ve heard this from so many of you that we wrote two full eBooks on the topic: one about\u00a0directly attracting new\u00a0patients<\/a> and another\u00a0on\u00a0how to land employer contracts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But what happens when\u00a0you’ve been successful and managed to build your patient panel and maybe even secure a few employer contracts? If you’re not proactively thinking about how to\u00a0keep\u00a0your patients and employers on board with your organization, then you risk losing all of the time and effort that you put into enticing them in the first place. Research suggests, in fact, that annual turnover can be as high as 50%<\/a> without optimization, but you can reduce\u00a0this number to 5 to 10% with a bit of attention.<\/p>\n

“I once read that a local DPC practice had signed up a trucking company with 85 employees,” said Jason\u00a0Larsen, CEO of Assurance Healthcare. “So I gave that company a call to ask what had attracted them to DPC and to learn how we could go after similar deals. They told me, though, that they had canceled after just a year because their employees had only used the clinic three times. Out of 85 people. So I learned from that, just not\u00a0what I was expecting to learn. The DPC practice really missed the ball on something there.”<\/p>\n

If you want to keep your patients and their employers around, you need to show them consistent value. Happily, there’s an absurdly simple way to make sure\u00a0that you’re doing exactly this, and you might remember it from grade-school math class:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Understand the Problem<\/strong><\/li>\n
  2. Provide\u00a0a Good Answer<\/strong><\/li>\n
  3. Show Your Work!<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    1. Understand the Problem<\/h2>\n

    Every patient and every employer has some set of health-related problems to solve, but they may\u00a0not always have them clearly defined. Because of this, whenever you start a new relationship with a patient or employer, you should spend time clarifying the\u00a0issues that they’re facing and what exactly they’re trying\u00a0to accomplish.<\/p>\n

    Make sure to\u00a0get a good idea of their current baseline, too; you’ll need data\u00a0to compare your future results against. For patients, this could mean taking measure\u00a0of things like\u00a0smoking status,\u00a0chronic disease control, and personal health\u00a0goals. For employers, it likely means understanding previous sources of high cost, missed work time, and unsatisfied\u00a0employees.<\/p>\n

    Putting in the effort to identify and understand the needs of your clientele will help you establish\u00a0mutual goalposts. If you don’t create\u00a0a shared vision of what success means, then\u00a0you risk being caught off-guard when results that seem great to you don’t\u00a0meet the unexplored expectations of a patient or their employer.<\/p>\n

    This phase of problem definition also gives you a powerful opportunity. You know your organization’s medical abilities, so you know where you can best provide value.\u00a0Use this insight to ensure that the goals you choose are likely to be ones that you can\u00a0meet and exceed.<\/p>\n

    Don’t be shy about using technology to give yourself an edge, either. Modern health-tech platforms like Spruce can allow\u00a0you to offer\u00a0attractive\u00a0benefits to patients and employers, such as increased patient access via phone, text message, secure messaging, and telemedicine, all without burying your team in extra\u00a0work.<\/p>\n

    2. Provide\u00a0a Good Answer<\/h2>\n

    Once your goals are picked out, it’s time to go full steam ahead to achieve\u00a0them. The most important part of this process, however, can be unexpectedly tricky: getting your\u00a0patients through your\u00a0door.\u00a0This goes double for anybody who was added to\u00a0your roster only because of\u00a0an employer contract.<\/p>\n

    “We’ve started sending out welcome letters to new members,” said Mr. Larsen of Assurance Healthcare. “They all get a phone call, too, which asks them to come into clinic for a first visit to establish care. We make sure that we get them in as soon as possible after they sign up, and that’s the biggest thing for retention: getting them in to see us and making sure that they understand who we are, how we work, and what we offer.”<\/p>\n

    You can’t succeed if your patients\u00a0don’t use your services.\u00a0One\u00a0important strategy to ensure that\u00a0this occurs is to make use of\u00a0“internal marketing,” which includes\u00a0activities like\u00a0monthly newsletters, appointment reminders, check-in messages, new service announcements, event invitations, and anything else that gives you an opportunity to communicate with your panel. It may seem strange to “advertise” to people you’ve already recruited, but you\u00a0can’t achieve your promised results\u00a0without your patients’\u00a0participation, and you shouldn’t passively wait for it to occur.<\/p>\n

    It can be similarly important to maintain active communication with your contracted employers so that they stay\u00a0aware of your success. At Spruce, we can help practices track important metrics, such as patient message and call volume, telemedicine visit numbers, ER visits and hospitalizations avoided, patient satisfaction, and numerous other outcome measures.<\/p>\n

    You’re already doing the hard work of providing\u00a0great medical care, so make sure that you collect and share the outcome data that proves it.<\/p>\n

    3. Show Your Work!<\/h2>\n

    We can all\u00a0remember losing points on a\u00a0math problem in school because\u00a0we gave a correct answer but didn’t “show our work.” It was infuriating, of course, but it also demonstrated an important lesson: Sometimes you have to prove that your\u00a0outcomes are the result of\u00a0good process, rather than something less dependable.<\/p>\n

    This principle holds in your relationships with patients and employers, too. You’ve put a lot of thought into how to achieve your carefully selected goals, so be proud and share your methods; make sure every key decision-maker knows how you accomplished what you did.<\/p>\n

    Did you reduce ER visits for an employer by making yourself available to\u00a0patients after hours via telemedicine? Keep track of those cases! Collect testimonials. Include all of this as context when you report your results, and you’ll have\u00a0a compelling story of how you got your patients from their baselines to their goals.<\/p>\n

    Did you get a patient an MRI for a cheap cash-pay price because you negotiated with a local imaging center? Did you use your\u00a0in-office pharmacy to get somebody’s medication costs down to a tenth of what they used to be? Tell everyone who should be interested, and make sure that you continue to promote\u00a0your methods and efforts just as much as your outcomes. Let your patients and employers know how hard you’re working on their behalf and that your results\u00a0aren’t lucky or easily replicable.<\/p>\n

    \n

    You’ve got your patients and your employer contracts, but now you need to make sure that you keep\u00a0them. It doesn’t have to be hard, but that doesn’t mean that it will happen automatically, either.<\/p>\n

    If you stick to the same formula that got you through fifth-grade math class, though, you should be on the right track:<\/p>\n

    Understand the problem that you need to solve, provide\u00a0a correct\u00a0answer, and show your work!<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n

    Want to learn more about how Spruce can help you delight and retain your patients and their employers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    We help practices pick and exceed exciting goals,\u00a0all while collecting the data needed to prove it for the long-term.<\/p>\n

    Get in touch with us<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If you run an independent medical practice, such as a direct primary care (DPC) clinic, then you know how hard it can be to grow your patient base. In fact, we’ve heard this from so many of you that we wrote two full eBooks on the topic: one about\u00a0directly attracting new\u00a0patients and another\u00a0on\u00a0how to land employer contracts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"slim_seo":{"title":"The Absurdly Simple Way to Show Your Clinic's Value to Patients and Employers - Spruce Blog","description":"If you run an independent medical practice, such as a direct primary care (DPC) clinic, then you know how hard it can be to grow your patient base. In fact, we'"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[29,30,36,27,32],"different-template":[],"class_list":["post-1094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-practice-improvement","tag-direct-primary-care","tag-dpc","tag-employer-contracts","tag-patient-satisfaction","tag-practice"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"different-template","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/different-template?post=1094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}