Creating The Medical Doctor Database

Starting to build your MD Database STARTS with the MDs that are already seeing your patients which includes Primary Care Physicians (PCP), these can be doctors board certified in Family Medicine or Internal Medicine, Pain Management MDs, Surgeons, OB/GYN/Midwife, Physical Therapist, Acupuncturist or any other health professional.  We are going to start with the PCP since that is the easiest way to go, once you have an infrastructure to be able to share reports then I will show you how to do it for all providers.  We will go one step at a time.  

I want you to sit with your staff and go through your EMR database and search all the NEW CPT codes for the previous 90 days, so if it is March 31, go back to January 1.  Your software should be able to run a report based on DATE OF SERVICE and CPT CODE, you will run 99202, 99203 and 99204.  That will give you a list of all the NEW patients in that time frame. The next step is to search their intake forms, your notes or the EMR system to see if the PCP is recorded.  If it is great, if not you are to ASK the patient when they return, if they are not currently under care don’t stress about it, we just won’t include them right now.  Once you have the MD or practice name, then instruct your staff to create a database using MS Excel to catalog the important information such as MD Name, Address, Phone, Fax and Email.  You will NEVER have all that information at the beginning, just like in sales and business in general, the goal is to create a comprehensive and detailed list over time.  There is LOTs of value in that and it will come into play as we expand your marketing processes and will be a VALUE ADDED component if you ever sell your practice.

If you are starting out and do not have many new patients that is ok too.  Instead of searching your database, you will search the BC/BS Provider Manual in your area, every MD takes BC/BS unless they are a concierge provider.  You will be able to search by specialty and then group by address.  There is no right or wrong way to create the database, just create it is it is easy to update and maintain.