Both Shaun and I have been traveling a lot over the past 6 months. We are now delivering seminars in cities across the United States and Canada and while it is great getting out of the office it hasn’t left a lot of time for us to write. So this month we decided to post a sneak peek into the New Patient Course. I hope you find it useful.

You have worked hard to become the best possible physical therapist and private practice owner - now it is time for you to have the practice of your dreams and to have the freedom to achieve your goals.

In order to do that you must have new patients and marketing is the key to a sustained volume of new patients. But what are the correct steps to take?

Marketing your physical therapy practice is essentially communicating with the outside world. Sounds simple enough, you want new patients and so you send out newsletters, e-mails, birthday cards, holiday cards, and informal “thinking of you” letters to current and former patients as well as “thank you” notes to doctors who send referrals. You visit doctors and buy lunches in the hope that it will result in more referrals but there is no guarantee.

As our clients learn in the New Patient Course, typically what happens in most practices is that they have a certain patient volume or ceiling that they consider is all they can treat because of the current staff situation. This results in a patient volume that looks like a rollercoaster. New patients go down so you have to go out and build relationships and meet with doctors. New patients go up and you stop doing the actions that resulted in the increase of new patients because now you are treating.

As time goes on, the practice statistics take on an appearance of going up and down, up and down, up and down over a period of years. Since many practice owners may be commonly used to the rollercoaster and were not completely certain as to why the statistics went up to begin with, they are not surprised to see them fall.

The solution to this is simple and it is based on knowing how to correctly staff your clinic not just on how to market your practice.

Here is something interesting…

If you were just starting a new physical therapy practice and you are the first staff member as the owner/PT, the office manager/receptionist/administration/collections is the second person you hire and typically the third person is a PTA. The third person you hired in this scenario is your first mistake in private practice. Ideally, the third person you should hire is someone who drives in business into the organization, doing whatever is necessary. Typically, it is an omitted step. So how does this manifest itself in most practices? What happens is, the numbers are down, and the PT/owner has to go run out and try getting referrals. So whom do you go see? So whom do you go see? Do you see the doctor who likes you, and is sending you a lot of business or the person who is sending you a couple of guys? You go see the one who is sending you the most business already. You get the scenario of a large practice depending on four or five doctors! 60% of the people who attend our New Patient Course have lost a major referral source within the last 6 months, or there is a threat of one. Doctors who do not refer you business do not like you! Plain and simple. Don’t take it personal. They may simply not know you but regardless of the reason if they are not referring to you then they don’t like you. The doctors who do refer a lot of new patients to you do like you and when you go to see them they like you more. So how do you break this cycle?

The question you must ask yourself is this, if you could increase the number of new patients into your practice without having to go meet with doctors who don’t like you and if you could do it with out actually having to do it yourself, would you? Let us know.