#7 Marketing and Branding
#23 Referrals IN – Referrals OUT
How do you keep track of the referrals coming into or going out of your practice? Do you have a system in place? It is important that you have control and an understanding of where your patients are coming from as well as where they are going. Most offices ask the patient “How did you find us?” and that goes on the intake paperwork, but at the end of the week or month can YOU go back and see instantly where all your new patients come from? Here is why setting a system is important both for the referrals coming IN and the ones going OUT.
Referrals IN
Tracking referrals coming into your office is critically important to your practice growth and it gives you a yard stick to measure your marketing and outreach efforts. You have to know what MD practices are sending patients, which ones were in the past and now are not and finally which ones have never sent one in the first place. Sometimes there are practices that you have never reached out to, but they have sent a patient because they “heard of you”, those are the practices that I drop everything to go visit. You also need to make sure that when an office is referring and it starts to slow down, those are the “hey, we haven’t gotten anyone from Dr. Scott in a while” types. You need to be aware of the trend, this goes for Lawyers too…
Referrals OUT
This is just as important and allows you to keep track of the VALUE in your practice. Remember, value is not just in what you are billing on services, it is the actual patient and the referrals you make. Take imaging referrals [MRI for example], do you even know how many scans you have referred out of your office? Do you know the VALUE of those referrals? That is important especially when you are going to ask the MRI company to sponsor an event, if you don’t know your value, they will down play it. What about to medical specialists? Keep track of these things so that you are in control.
Here are the grids that we use in our office. You can modify as needed, click to download.