Building an email database for marketing purposes can be an area of great challenge in ophthalmology practice management. Using email to communicate with patients and potential patients is a powerful marketing tool, but how do you build your initial list, and how can you make it – and your practice – grow?
Start With Your Patients
Begin by using email as part of your day-to-day routine. Let patients contact you via email for non-urgent questions. Use it to schedule and confirm appointments. Many (though not all) people find email more convenient than using the telephone for this purpose, as long as communications are timely. Consider including a real-time electronic scheduling system integrated into your website that allows your patients to schedule visits any time of day or night. Patients will need to provide you with their email addresses in order to take advantage of this.
Word-of-Mouth
If patients love your practice, they’ll let others know about it. Make it easy by sending them educational information that they will want to forward to other people in the community -friends, families, and neighbors. People want to provide useful information to people they care about, and this is a way to facilitate that.
Your Website
Your website will showcase your practice -your experience, philosophy, and style of interacting with patients. Your website is also a good tool for building your email database. Include a simple opt-in form so that potential patients can sign up to get relevant eye health news and information from you. Sometimes just asking is all it takes.
Incentives
Offer an incentive for potential patients to opt to receive your emails. Incentives can take many forms. You can offer people a newsletter or other useful information that they want to receive, for instance. For those who are interested in a specific eye condition, you can offer information on current research in that area.
Marketing in Tandem
Clearly, no matter how effective it is, email won’t be everything you do to market your practice. You still have brochures, yellow pages listings (whether online or on paper), business cards, and professional partnerships that bring you patients. Be sure that your website is clearly listed on all of your other promotional materials, and you have just given potential patients an easy way to find out more about you.
Ultimately, building an email database as part of your ophthalmology practice management has the same goal that all of your marketing does: building a relationship with your patients. Marketing your practice in this way becomes a public health service rather than a sales strategy -and your patients will reap the benefit.
Archive for the ‘practice management’ Category
Ophthalmology Practice Management – 5 Ways to Build Your Email Database
Saturday, September 4th, 2010Mge Management Experts Provide Effective Dental Practice Management Consulting
Saturday, August 21st, 2010“Although dentists want to focus on their patients’ dental care, they are distressed that much of their time is spent dealing with insurance companies and business administration,” says Gregory Winteregg, DDS, Vice President of MGE: Management Experts, Inc. (www.mgeonline.com) and an expert in dental practice management consulting. “As a result, the vast majority of the 174,000 dentists practicing in the United States are frustrated and professionally unfulfilled.”
Further, Dr. Winteregg says that, while dental schools do an excellent job teaching dental students about state of the art procedures and equipment, they fall short when it comes to teaching business and communication skills. As a result, dentists often become dependent upon a business consultant to guide them in practice management. “MGE: Management Experts takes a different approach,” says Dr. Winteregg. “By training dentists in business technology, communications, and human resources, they are empowered to efficiently run their practices, which positively influences their bottom lines.”
MGE trains dentists, their office managers and staff on subjects ranging from marketing, case acceptance, organization, management, financial planning, and leadership. Collectively, MGE’s entire training program is called the MGE Power Program. In a statistical study conducted at the end of 2005, MGE found that the average client starting the Power Program had average monthly collections of $37,000. Within three months, clients increased monthly collections by an average of 31 percent, while after two years, the average monthly collections increased by 132 percent. “After five years, the average MGE Power Program client is collecting $123,500 per month,” says Dr. Winteregg. “That’s an increase of 232 percent!”
Although almost 90 percent of dentists own their own practices, they often have only basic knowledge about everything from staffing their offices to marketing their services. “As a result, dental practice management is often inefficient and ineffective, which negatively affects dentists’ professional satisfaction and profitability,” says Dr. Winteregg.
Dr. Winteregg should know, as he spent eleven years in private practice as a general dentist before turning to MGE to help him streamline and build his practice. As an MGE client, he found the principles and tools he needed to have his practice become one of the top four percent of practices nationwide. “I discovered that the keys to growing my practice were learning how to effectively market for fee-for-service new patients so as to stay out of HMOs and PPOs, to hire the right people to staff my office, and to learn how to communicate with my patients to increase comprehensive treatment acceptance,” says Dr. Winteregg.
Within two years, Dr. Winteregg decided to dedicate his career to helping other dentists thrive, and joined MGE as a partner with Luis Col?n, a leading national executive trainer and speaker.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment growth in the field of dentistry will not outpace the average growth of other professions or industries in the coming decade. “Because dentistry is not a high-growth profession, dentists must be proactive in building and streamlining their practices,” says Dr. Winteregg. “In today’s environment, the cornerstone is to attract fee-for-service patients and those with traditional insurance plans, and to avoid the reduced fees and time-consuming overhead that comes with being a member of an HMO or PPO.”
MGE: Management Experts, Inc. guides dentists through the maze of business administration hurdles, human resources challenges, and communication barriers that often prevent dentists from feeling professionally fulfilled and reaping financial rewards. Dr. Winteregg concludes, “We’re committed to providing professionals with the tools to develop sound dental practice management. Time and again, we’ve found that when dentists have these tools in place, they not only feel enormous professional fulfillment, but the monetary rewards flow effortlessly.”
How you Can Benefit From Using Medical Practice Management Software
Monday, August 16th, 2010Medical practice management software is available to let your practice run more smoothly by offering services like organizing patient data, billing and insurance payments, and setting up meetings, to name a few. While some are buying MPM software for the first time, some are looking for software that fulfills the HIPAA or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
It’s a very big decision to purchase medical practice management software and one that has to be paid attention to. If the ideal software has been chosen, you will notice that productivity improves and employees are more efficient, resulting in improvement in the quality of care given to patients and decreasing the chances of fatal mistakes occuring. It can also mean long-term cost savings. Doctors have easier access to data, and insurance claims are paid quicker when done electronically.
The software should be in fulfillment of HIPAA requirements. The second factor that you should consider is the user-friendliness of the system. Though numerous good features are available, doctors and employees may have difficulty handling the system. This can be a big stumbling block that may waste time and resources rather than improving efficiency. The best way to be sure that the medical practice management software that you have chosen is easy to use is to test it yourself. You can do this by finding out what type of systems your physician friends use and by checking them out. It will help if you try out software used by other physicians in your specialty. You could also involve the staff who’ll be handling the software to try it and give their opinion. You have to determine the ease with which appointments can be made and patient records accessed and determine if it’s easy to customize. Check out the scheduling, billing, and security inclusions of the software.
You can also go online to know the type of software available, their inclusions, and the costs associated. Select a few providers that are reputable and ask them for a demo and get quotes. By trying out the different systems, you can choose the medical practice management software that’s user-friendly, within your budget, and has all the features you require.
You can either go for application service providers or client-server services. Each type of system has its own merits and cons. Go online and look up both kinds if you’re unsure of what to go for. If you are on a budget, then the application service provider system is ideal, as you just need to pay a small setup fee and then pay monthly installments for it. Client-server systems are ideal if you want reliability and flexibility and if money isn’t an issue. When the correct MPM software is selected, your practice will operate more smoothly and efficiently than it used to.