What to do when you open a clinic
Troubleshooters
Our troubleshooters Sue O’Gorman and Hannah Browning give more doctors some smart advice to help make their new venture a long-term success.
QWe have just opened a new clinic. What are the key areas we now need to focus on to ensure we develop sustainable revenue growth?
AYou have spent months, possibly even years, in bringing to life your vision of setting up a new healthcare facility.
The last few weeks will have been especially hectic as you push towards the opening date.
The clinic is now open and you can breathe again . . . not quite!
The hard work now starts in making your clinic or hospital financially viable.
How to start?
It would be much easier if there was a logical order and single priorities at a time, but in the real world of business, this isn’t the case.
This, therefore, means that you will need to focus on multiple areas and it will be dependent on your own set-up to understand which needs prioritising first.
One of the benefits of starting out is that you will hopefully have some team members that are not yet fully utilised. It is important to understand their skill sets, even if they don’t relate to their main role.
Being able to delegate tasks and set projects for your team at this early stage will help you to manage your workload better but also add interest for them when patient numbers are low.
Patient journey
Starting out as you mean to go on is one of the main benefits of a new organisation. There are no pre-existing behaviours or expectations: you get to the write the rule book.
Being able to survive in the competitive world of private healthcare means that your patient experience must be excellent.
It is worth spending time in the first few weeks going through all the various patient journeys.
This is down to:
The details of the forms a consultant may use to request a test;
How much the test will be and how payment is made;
How this is logged on the computer system and patient record;
How does the referer get the results and what happens if there is an urgent diagnosis.
Going through the journey to this level of detail will help to iron out any issues and ensure that the experience for the clinicians is equally as good as for the patients.
Clinician engagement
Consultants are cautious with change and take time to commit to a new practice location. So it is important that you have a strong consultant engagement strategy if you are to bring doctors on board.
Be clear on what the offer is for consultants and why they should want to work at your clinic.
Consultants generally look for three things when considering a practice:
- It needs to be safe for them and their patients;
- You need to be easy to work with;
- It needs to be financially rewarding.
Having robust clinical processes and an experienced and confident team will help to reassure consultants on the safety of the practice.
Working hard on your processes will make it easier for the consultant, medical secretary and pat-ients to deal with your facility.
Things will inevitably go wrong at the start. However, use these errors to learn and improve so that everyone sees you are serious about providing excellent customer service.
If your business plan expects consultants to move their whole practice to your location, then, unfortunately, you may have a problem.
Consultants will rarely move all their practice to a new hospital, with most treading cautiously to see first whether it works for them and their patients.
It will take time to bring consultants on board and there needs to be an understanding that the clinic will generate patients and not just rely on consultants moving business to them.
Digital marketing
Your marketing efforts should have started prior to opening with a brand, website and social media all in place.
Work with your marketing company to create a plan for the next three months that has a clear budget with an expectation on return.
This needs to be realistic both in terms of what you can invest but also how much it will generate and how quickly.
No one has a magic wand, and it does take time to build a new brand and generate patients from it.
Relationship management
A valuable project is to get your brand out directly into the local market. Look at who your potential referrers are and create a plan to engage with them.
This may involve going to see them and taking some information, inviting them to an event or holding an education evening. Bringing people on site is a great way of them seeing the facility and gives you an opportunity to show them your vision.
Expanding this to patient events will not only give you content for social media feeds but also create a positive word-of-mouth reputation.
Depending on the space you have available, offering a meeting room to local groups also gives you an excuse to engage with a new audience and helps you to embed into the community.
Team-building and culture
The delivery of the patient experience will only be as good as the people you have. So it is critical that you spend time with your team to build positive relationships and to start creating a culture that puts excellent patient care in the centre.
Train your team to understand how the whole patient journey works and how their part is dependent on others and vice versa. This should prevent silo working and give you greater flexibility if you have a team that can cover multiple roles.
This is not something that will ever be ticked off your ‘to do’ list and needs continued commitment to ensure the positive culture is embedded and clear to everyone who has contact with the clinic.
Sue O’Gorman (left) is director of Medici Healthcare Consultancy. Email: sue@medicihealthcare-consultancy.co.uk.
Hannah Browning (right) is director of Beyond Excellence Healthcare Consultancy. Email: info@beyondexcellenceconsultancy.co.uk.
