How to See More Patients in Your Practice

Underutilized capacity in a medical practice results from broken systems. For you to see and bill for your time with patients, eight stages must go completely perfectly. If one stage contains a constraint, your patient volume will suffer. The key to seeing more patients is to understand these stages and ensure they are healthy parts of your business. 

The path to seeing patients

To see more patients in your practice, a patient goes through the following journey:

1. Problem Recognized: Does a patient know there is a potential treatment for their pain? Are you attempting to educate potential patients? 
2. Patient Finds You: When patients search for a medical service provider, do they find your practice or a different one? 
3. Patient Attempts Conversion: Does your website establish trust and a clear path to making an appointment? 
4. Your Practice Answers: Does your practice answer the call? On average, practices miss 42% of phone calls. 
5. Appointment Scheduled: Did you have a convenient appointment time available? Did your staff convert the patient or unintentionally send them to your competitor? 
6. Appointment Attended: Did the patient show up for their appointment? Or are no-shows and cancellations wasting space on your schedule? 
7. Treatment Conversion:  You identified a treatment for the patient and they have agreed to the treatment. 
8. Get Paid: You will be able to be paid for your services only after all of these perfectly executed stages. 

What is getting in the way? 

Like a patient who gradually adapts to worsening symptoms, practices often don't notice how they're making it increasingly difficult for patients to access care. You wouldn't design a restaurant that makes customers jump through hoops, yet many practices unknowingly do exactly this.

To identify what is getting in the way of your current systems, begin by asking yourself questions about each of the stages above. 

1. What patient and staff complaints have I heard about each of these stages? 
2. What data points do I currently or should measure that could help me understand the health of the stages? 
   
   1. Example: 
   2. Missed calls
   3. No-show and cancellation rate 
   4. Phone call appointment conversions 
3. What goals do I have for my practice directly affected by constraints in these stages?

Why can’t I just get more patients? 

When you have a broken system, it is like having a broken water pipe. You can turn the faucet on, and some water might come through, but without repairing the pipe, you will be stuck at a certain pressure, no matter how much water you need. 

To bring more patients into your practice, you must repair the system that keeps you from reaching the eighth stage - billing for your services. If you don’t, money spent on advertising and marketing will not produce the return it should. 

Identify Your Constraints

If you are looking to increase your patient throughput, download the resource below for getting started in identifying what is holding your practice back. 

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