Too Many Patients - How to Solve the Problem

Practice Momentum - Healthcare Marketing Solutions
Too Many Patients - How to Solve the Problem
25:23
 

 

Too Many Patients – how to deal with the problem

Having too many patients may sound like a wonderful problem to have, but just ask those practices in that situation currently and I’m sure they will tell you it’s not such a great thing.

 

So just how do you deal with too many patients?

In this blog, I want to help you understand what the problem is and what you can do about it to minimise the negative impact of Too Many Patients.

Patient numbers are always a bit of a juggling act. You need to have enough of the right kind of patients to create a thriving practice. Too few and you're going to struggle financially, too many, and you've got a whole heap of new problems.

If too many patients are wanting to access your services, that's going to have a negative impact on you, your patients, and the rest of your team.

The impact on you

You’re not going to have enough appointments to fit these patients in. So you're going to start squeezing them into these appointments that don't exist. You know, the ones at the start of the day, during your break, during your lunch, at the end of the day, and maybe even rolling over into days you would not normally be wanting to work. And as you squeeze more patients in, you start creating more administration. That's got to be done some other time. You end up doing your administration in the evenings, on weekends, or during holidays, all that time when you should be away from your practice, recharging, or having fun with your family and friends.

What happens then is only the essential stuff starts getting done in your practice. Everything else starts to fall by the wayside. And sometimes even the essential stuff starts to get dropped.

Pretty soon you’re going to then start questioning, why am I doing this?

This is not what I want.

This is not how I want to feel in my practice.

This is not how my team wants to feel working with me.

 

You end up creating this downward spiral of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and stress.

The impact on your patients

New patients are going to be waiting longer to get to see you. Most people are going to be coming with an acute problem. Waiting is not on a new patient’s agenda. If you’re asking them to wait 2 or 3 weeks that is not going to get your relationship with them off to a good start.
For those existing patients who are used to being able to easily access your services, well waiting is not on their agenda either. So, they are going to become frustrated with this more limited access to your services. They're going to become vocal about that, and in turn, that is going to come back to your team and your team are going to start to feel that's the stress of that situation.

For both new and existing patients if you’re rushing appointments. If you’re squeezing patients into these other appointment slots that don't usually exist. If you're running late or running long with your clinic, patients are going to start to feel this squeeze and inevitable poorer quality service. They're going to start to feel less valued as paying customers. There are going to start voting with their feet. Now that might be a good thing (yeyy fewer patients), but only if they're the kind of patients you are happy to let go. If these are your dream patients, you don't want those people leaving.

Patients experiencing a less than optimal service are also likely to start leaving less positive reviews online, and that's going to negatively impact your reputation. And that is going to take time to manage and a long time to come back from.

Hopefully, you can see that too many patients is not necessarily the positive thing that you might feel it would be in your practice.

 

What is the cause of too many patients?

Generally, too many patients is caused by ineffective marketing. Marketing that is not filtering out the patients you don't want to see. But it's not just your promotional marketing that's a fault here so it isn't such a quick easy fix as stopping marketing for a while!

Don't forget marketing is made up of the seven Ps.

  1. Your Product
  2. Your Pricing
  3. Your People
  4. Your Processes
  5. Your Place
  6. Your Promotion
  7. Your Proof

The full picture and reason you are sinking under the weight of too many patients in your practice is not just down to poor promotional marketing. Too many patients in a practice is the symptom of one or more of five of these Ps not being used properly.
The problem of too many patients is most likely to happen when your people (or a lack of them), product and service, pricing, processes, or your promotional marketing are not being managed strategically.

 Many practices take a random ad hoc approach to working through their 7 Ps - if they even know they exist!! The result is chaotic, un-targeted, and unstrategic marketing that basically just opens the flood gates to everyone with any kind of problem in the local area.

 

Too many patients – the solution

Step 1. Ownership

If you take ownership of the problem, you can be the solution. Because the problem is largely marketing, then you have created the problem, so you are the solution.

If you point the finger away from yourself, blaming other people or external situations you immediately make yourself powerless to create a solution. That is not where you want to be.

If you take ownership of the problem, you are already ahead of many practitioners in this situation.

So, take ownership, step one ✅

Step 2. Understanding what you need to achieve

To improve the too many patients problem you've either got to increase your capacity so you can see more patients or reduce your patient numbers.

It sounds simple I know but there are a lot of factors at play here.

 

I’m going to go through each of the five different areas of marketing that could be causing the problem, to help you get clarity on what you need to do next.

 

People

So first, let's think about your dream patient. Are you clear, like super laser-focused, clear on who your dream patient is? Understanding who that person is is a great way of filtering out all those other people that you don't want to see more of in your practice, but without knowing who your dream patient is, you can't implement that filter. You can't turn patients away. So, first things first, you must figure out who your dream patient is. If you haven't done that work, yet there will be a link on this page to a document that can help walk you through that process.

The other people we need to think about in this section are you and your team. To see more patients, you've got to create more capacity. And that is either going to come from your team who can either see the patients for you and free up your time so you can see more patients, or you have got to create more time in your calendar by working longer hours and working differently. So, let's talk about your team first.

Currently recruiting new clinical staff in certain healthcare practices is very difficult but is there a way you can start to look at this differently?

Could you:

  • Take on a student in your profession who could come in at a very low level and support you part-time in doing some of the basic rudimentary stuff in your practice to free up some of your time
  • Could you take on an apprentice through an actual apprenticeship program?
  • Recruit other practitioners by creating an exciting opportunity not just advertising a “job”
  • Recruit part time, job share administration support, remotely or in person
  • Employ a cleaner or maintenance support on a short term or ad-hoc basis to see what you can move from your to-do list

If recruitment is currently tough in your sector you must get creative with your solutions.

Start to think about how you get more team members or improve the training of the team members that you've got so that you free up more of your time and improve your practice capacity to treat more patients. Or you've got more hands on deck who are qualified to treat more patients and the administration and the running side of the practice can go to somebody else. You can outsource your marketing. You can outsource creating videos like this. You can do lots of things to get rid of some of that work off your shoulders, so your time is freed up to see more patients.

 

 

Product

In short, this is your service, and how you and your team deliver it.

How can you do that differently to create more availability in your practice?

Well, we've already talked about creating more hours in the day by taking on more people or working longer hours. But there are also other ways of doing it by working differently.

Virtual appointments

The patient's first filter conversation (to make sure you can help and that they see the right practitioner) could be done virtually, along with initial information gathering and recording, some follow-up appointments including some assessments could also be virtual. These kinds of appointments are going to be quicker, shorter, and take up less time inside the practice so that you've got more free time to see people in person. Also, some of these virtual interactions do not need to be done by clinical staff, providing your administration team is well trained.

Restructure appointment timing

You can restructure the appointment times so that you can squeeze more people into your day by more accurately allocating time to specific appointment types. So rather than allocating every patient say 30 minutes for every appointment, understanding more exactly the time it will take for each kind of appointment means you can schedule more effectively.

Alternatively, you could try overlapping appointments. I've seen this in hospitals in Australia where they overlapped their patient appointments by between five and 10 minutes because some, they knew will run short and they could get the next patient in because they are already waiting.
It might sound a bit strange but if people know that that's the system, most are very happy to sit and wait.

Restructure appointment delivery

 You can also restructure how you deliver your appointments. I've seen this done in optometrists, dentists, dermatology clinics, and in a well-woman clinic and done very, very well. The difference from a typical one-on-one appointment is that with this system you are seen by a team. The whole team is part of the process. Somebody greets you, checks you in, and gives you a bottle of cold water. Then someone else comes and checks your history, making sure all the relevant content is contained in your patient records. Then you are seen by the clinician you've come to see. They take you through your assessments, diagnosis, and treatment plan. Generally, they will deliver some form of treatment but not always. Then after that, somebody else does the wrap-up and books your follow-up appointment.

It becomes a team effort whereby you are all seeing the patient at a different point in that process.

One word of warning. I've seen this done very well. I've also seen this done very badly where it felt to me like I was a sausage in a sausage factory, nobody cared. I was faceless. They were faceless. Nobody introduced themselves. Nobody attempted to build a relationship with me. And so, if you do go down that route, be very careful to train your team members, to engage and be very personable and very personal with each patient. Get to know them, call them by their name, understand their problem, and be caring, so I still feel the value that you are providing. I don't feel like I'm on a production line.

So that’s how you can restructure your actual appointment delivery by sharing that case between other people in the practice and not all those people need to be clinical.

Know your niche

The final way of looking at your product differently is to start to think about a niche. This goes back to our first point where we talked about the people and the patient. Understanding who your dream patient is means that you can deliver a bespoke service. Your product becomes tailored to that patient so that they really feel the value in it. They see all the videos you're producing, the clinical expertise, the equipment that you've got, and the way you deliver your service is really geared to them, and so they really feel that value.

So, if you can niche and deliver enormous value for that niche, you can charge a higher price and therefore see fewer patients to get this equilibrium of patient numbers versus revenue in the practice.

You just need some mechanism of starting to filter out patients. If you identify a clear niche that enables you to say, “Ah, that pathology that you've got, I'm really sorry I can't help you, but here's” and make a referral. Here's somebody that you can go to, who can help you with that problem.

So, start to think about your product and how you could deliver it differently so that you can either see more patients or you can see fewer patients but they still feel enormous value so that you can still generate the revenue you need in order to sustain your business.

 

 

Processes

The processes in your business can really help you improve your too many patients' problem. Here are a few ideas.

Set boundaries

Set them and stand by them. What I mean by that is, think about the office hours that you want to work, and don't go beyond that.
Within that say, I’m going to have a 45-minute lunch break. These become non-negotiable things backed by your personal needs - I need to get outside. I need to get some fresh air. I need to go walk around. Whatever it is, you need to start setting those boundaries in your practice and enforcing those boundaries so that you are not tempted to squeeze these patients in which then causes all the problems that we've been discussing already.
So make sure you've got your office hours set up, and if somebody comes wanting an appointment outside those office hours, you refer them elsewhere to another practice that, you know, works Sundays or, Wednesday evenings, or whenever it is the patient's looking for an appointment.

Say No

You do not have to see every single patient that comes to your practice. You need a system in place to triage all your new potential patients who inquire, to make sure they're the right patient for you. Have you got the skills, the equipment to get the right patient outcomes, or just the desire to see this kind of patient? If they're not somebody you feel you’re the best person to help, you refer them elsewhere and you make sure you've got a list of referrers, you can send them on, so they're getting a good quality referral and not just getting a door slammed in their face.

Review your rebooking policy

We've already talked about the potential for review appointments to be done virtually, to save you time and space inside the practice. But are there other things that you can do to support your patients for longer in between appointments if they do need to be coming back to see you?

You can give them more self-help support so that they can treat themselves or more preventative stuff that they can put into play that is going to mean they do not need to come back as often, which means you're going to reduce the demand on your time in your practice.

Stop asking everyone for referrals

The last process to think about in relation to patient numbers and the kind of patients you're seeing is to stop asking everyone for referrals. You want to attract more of your dream ideal patients. So, if your standard process is to ask everybody for referrals that needs changing. Asking everyone isn’t quality assured, you only want to be asking your dream patients for referrals. They are likely to be connected to more people like them so these are the people you want to ask.

Similarly, you want to be asking specific healthcare providers or selected local business owners for referrals. You want to encourage the kind of person who is likely to be sending you quality referrals, not just anyone.

So, you don’t want to have a process in your business where every clinician asks everybody for a referral. You want to be very specific about who that person is that you want to be attracting as your patients so that you can quality assure those patients that are coming in.

 

 

Pricing

Now, this can sometimes be a controversial subject inside healthcare because I know quite a few people who feel that raising your prices in this industry is unethical.
disagree for various reasons, but that's a whole other blog post, so for now I just want you to focus on one thing.
If there is an increase in demand and reduction in supply, then economics 101, if I reach back to my, A level economics at school, says raise your prices. That's the standard next step.

But there's one thing that I want you to really understand about raising prices. A lot of practitioners worry that raising their prices will drive all of their patients away and they won't have any left. In the 10 plus years that I've been doing healthcare marketing, I've never, ever, ever seen that happen. Even in instances where clients have raised their prices significantly by 30%, we have not seen a mass exodus of patients.

So, first, raising your prices is a great idea if you’re in a situation where you've got a problem with too many patients, but I want you to understand that raising your prices is highly unlikely to reduce your patient numbers significantly. Yes, a few patients will vote with their feet but most will stay, so price rising is not the wholesale answer.

What it will do however is to start qualifying the new patients coming in, ensuring that they are people who see the value in what you are offering and are prepared to pay the price that you are asking for that service. So, you're going to get better quality patients coming in, but also, it's going to give you more money in the practice so that you can reinvest in the business, which means you can start providing a high-quality service with different equipment and facilities and those kinds of things. It's going to give you money and confidence in the business that you can start to develop your business in a very specific way. So, raising your prices is not about reducing the numbers. It's about increasing and improving your cash flow so that you can reinvest in your business with facilities and equipment, but you can also employ more people, new people, better people, all that kind of stuff so that the service you're providing is a higher quality service so that the dream patients that you are attracting will really see and feel the value in the service that you are delivering.

So, raising your prices is part of the too many patients’ solution, but not the sole answer.

 

 

Promotion

This is the P that everybody thinks about when we're talking about marketing. This is the thing that people go to first. So, what you need to do with regard to your promotion in order to help you solve the too many patients problem is to stop marketing to everyone.

We've already identified the importance of having an ideal or a dream patient. And when it comes to your promotional marketing, you need to get strategic. You need to focus on that dream patient. You want to make sure that your website, your social media, and any advertising that you're doing is really homing in on that particular person and the problems that they've got that you can solve so that you start filtering out some other people that are not your ideal patients. They start deselecting themselves because of the content and the marketing you’re putting out because it's focused so clearly on a specific dream patient.

 Also, when you're getting strategic with your marketing, think about pathologies and the kind of pathologies you want to see more of and make sure they are featured in your marketing too.

Ultimately you need to make sure you're talking very specifically to some specific patient groups. Then when you’re putting together your social media profiles and your website, make sure the content on there is focused around these dream patients and these pathologies and nothing else, nothing broad, nothing general, be very, very specific. So that everybody that lands on your website is going to be able to say, yes, this is me or no, this is not me.

That way they're going to select or deselect themselves based on the marketing you are putting out.

Don’t sit back and stop

One final thing I want to say is, please, please, please do not stop doing your promotional marketing because you've got too many patients. When you’ve got too many patients it’s very tempting to sit back and take time away from your marketing, but every practice is naturally going to lose patients over time.

  • You solve people's problems, so they leave
  • Some people die
  • Some people relocate
  • Some people go to another practice because they prefer the service there

There are several reasons why people will stop coming to your practice, but they will stop coming. It's going to happen, so please don’t stop your marketing.

Something else I see sometimes is that practices close their books. They say, no, we're not taking on any new patients at the moment. They close their books, and suddenly they're in a situation where they've got zero new patients coming in, none.

For a small moment in time, it works well because this overwhelm of too many patients dies down and you can then play catch up and manage the cohort you've got down to a manageable level. But then that number keeps dropping because of natural wastage. Then suddenly you need to open the doors again, you need to start actively marketing again. This takes time so there will be a lag before the next wave of new patients start coming in again. You create this, very stressful and unhelpful rollercoaster of new patient numbers. They go up, you stop marketing and close your doors. They fall and you panic market. There’s a lag, they keep falling, you stress. They slowly go back up. The numbers get too many again and you stop. You create this very stressful rollercoaster. What you really want in your practice is a never-ending wave of little humps going up and down over time. You want a very steady, controlled trickle of dream patients coming into your practice.

So, when you’re at the point where you've got too many patients, get very strategic with your marketing, put that filter in place so that new patients coming in are being triaged and quality assured, so they're the right patients for you and you are the right practice for them. Then you'll start to iron out these roller coaster highs and lows of new patient numbers, which makes being in practice much less stressful and is better for everybody, and it stops this feast and famine cycle

So please, please, please do not stop your marketing or close your doors if you are currently struggling with too many patients.

 

If you are struggling with too many patients take a look at those five P's in your own practice and see if you can see where the problem might be stemming from.

As I say, it will probably be a combination of some of those things. Use what you have learnt here to make informed changes and reduce the stress, reduce the overwhelm and start managing the situation.

Don't just panic and put your head in the sand, takes steps to deal with your too many patients' problem.

 

Thank you soooo much for taking the time to stop by our Practice Momentum blog today.
I really hope you found value in spending some time here today.

 

I’d be so grateful if you could spare me just another few minutes (please say yes) to share your thoughts and anything that struck a chord with you from this blog. Just type straight in the box at the end of this page. I’d love to hear from you.

Oh and please use the social share buttons if you think other people you know might benefit from seeing this.

Until next time.

 

Close

50% Complete

Two Step

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.