Creating a Patient Referral Network

local marketing offline marketing referral marketing referral network Mar 14, 2022

How to Create Your Patient Referral Network

Many healthcare practices rely heavily on other local healthcare professionals and associated businesses for new patient referrals. This is a great way to create a steady flow of new patients into your practice, but not that many practices set about doing this in a strategic way that will mean that these will become long lasting, mutually beneficial, professional relationships. People often come at this with a random list of people and some random activities.

I want to show you how you can do this in a much more strategic way that will result in much stronger, longer lasting, and more mutually beneficial relationships.

How a Patient Referral Network Works

Basically, you need to work to develop a small cohesive network (not a random list) of other local people who already have the eyes and ears of large numbers of your potential dream patients BUT also whose dream clients, members, or patients could be your existing patients.

These could be :

Other healthcare professionals
Sports clubs or team coaches
Self-care business owners like beauticians or hairdressers
Personal trainers
Social group managers
Large local employers

Hopefully, you get the idea.

Next you work hard, investing time, energy, money and attention into nurturing your relationship with these people. You support them in their business and organisations, and they support you in yours.

You can support each other with:

Cross referrals
Educational support – you could help train their team in some way or educate them about what a podiatrist or chiropractor really does
Practical support – you could share business know-how and experience
Emotional support – you could help them through a rough patch or celebrate when things take off

N.B. As I have said this all takes time and energy, so choose the people you’d like to include in your network wisely and keep the number small. That said, these are people who could potentially have a big impact on your life and in your business, so it's worth the investment to build these strong relationships.

A Little Note About the People

The people you want in your patient referral network need to be professional people who feel in some way aligned to you, either professionally, personally, emotionally or through their values & ethics. You don’t need them to be your new best friend, BUT there needs to be some connection for a real long-lasting relationship to work.

Secondly, you need to have mutual professional respect. If in general terms they don’t particularly rate the work of say podiatrists, or you don’t really respect the work orthopedic surgeons do, then that relationship is not going to work. You need to both be in a position where you can confidently cross-refer people, knowing they will be well looked after and where you genuinely want to support this person in their business or organisation.

Where your patients are concerned, if you can save them having to hunt around for a solution to a problem that you can’t help them with, and that person turns out to be a great help, the patient will think you are both heroes.

A little warning

These are people who you want to develop a long and successful relationship with. Do not fall into the trap of just viewing them as a new patient conveyor belt. Prepare to invest in nurturing these relationships.

Managing Expectations

You also both need to understand what the other wants or expects in terms of service and care for the people you are referring. This needs to be a conversation you have so that you can be sure that you are both going to be happy making those referrals. Otherwise, it could become a very one-sided process, which is not a recipe for a long-standing referral relationship.

Some relationships may be much less formal, while others may be more structured, so you need to be clear on things like the system of referral, appointment availability, exchange of information & follow up reporting (both with patient consent), etc.

Discuss the process & then where possible, plan to exceed it. Give each other total confidence to keep referring.

The video on this page will take you through - How to Create a Patient Referral Network in 12 Steps

For my 12 steps to creating your patient referral network press PLAY on the video.

Once you've watched the video you have it, my thoughts on how you can create & run a patient referral network. Please take these ideas and create your own version that will work well for you. But whatever you do, do it in a strategic and professional way so that everyone benefits from being part of it and your patients benefit from high quality referrals.

Thank you soooo much for taking the time to stop by my healthcare marketing blog today.

I really hope you found value in spending some time here today.

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Until next time

Thank you