Running a healthcare-focused business can be tricky. The quality of your services is of the utmost importance if you want people to leave your offices healthy and happy; high-quality work is essential to develop loyalty among returning patients and encourage word-of-mouth recommendations of your work. All this being said, you’re also running a business, which means you need to think about a slew of non-health factors, including profit. The following will explore a few things you can do to help your business thrive and grow without sacrificing the quality of your work.
Marketing Strategy
If one of the reasons you’re not thriving is a lack of patience, a new marketing strategy might help you. This is especially key for businesses with long stretches during the day without one visiting the office. In particular, marketers from Inbound Medic recommend developing a patient-generating system. This might include content marketing, whereby you produce content that answers common questions in your field people might have, updating your website, improving your paid marketing schema, especially your ability to measure how effective targeted ads are, and focusing on search engine optimization.
Data Security
While you might not immediately link data security to profits, you must understand how much a hack can cost. Nearly seven billion dollars was lost last year due to cybercrime, and the rates of hacking and other means of data theft are only expected to grow. To make matters more severe for you, medical businesses are commonly targeted because of the vast amount of personal information they collect. Beyond this, companies with serious cyberattacks tend to lose potential patients and customers, and people are beginning to wake up to the importance of data security. Take the time to make sure yours is top-notch. If an attack is intense enough, you could lose a huge amount of money or even have to shut down for days or weeks completely.
Employee Satisfaction
When you have top-tier employees, you want to keep them. All across the Western world, people are leaving their jobs; the action has been so swift that the media has begun to term this event the great resignation. Keeping stellar staff will help keep your quality of service ideal and save you a ton of time and money associated with hiring new staff and training them. Focus on providing an environment that is healthy and conducive to wellbeing:
- Humans need windows to get natural light while indoors; no windows can produce symptoms of depression
- Including plants in the workplace where you can (staff room and waiting room) improves air quality and boosts mood
- Have reasonable hours that are predictable enough that staff can develop daily schedules and keep their circadian rhythms optimal
- Offer people appropriate benefits so that they don’t need to worry about things like the exorbitant cost of a chipped tooth while they’re supposed to be working
- Cultivate an environment where chatting with colleagues is acceptable
- Avoid micromanaging
Track Supplies
One of the easiest ways to trim your costs is to track supplies. Knowing how quickly you use up things like pens, paper, and staples can help you plan and order supplies in bulk. Tracking also discourages staff from mindlessly digging another box of pens out of the supply closet when there are probably fifteen in good condition inside their desk.
Ask Your Staff
If you have people working for you for a while, chances are they see things you don’t. In a business, everyone has their tasks, and often, they don’t look too closely at other people’s work unless it affects theirs. Ask your staff about redundancies or areas of waste. They might surprise you.
Expand Your Hours
Contrary to the first point above, if you find your appointments full for the foreseeable future and are losing potential patients because of this (not everyone wants to wait three months for a consultation), you may want to consider expanding your office hours. Yes, you’ll have to hire new staff to cover the hours, but if people are looking to your competitors because you’re fully booked, expanded hours can turn into business growth. Of course, do adequate market research to ensure you’re selecting the right hours.
The above list should have given you a few ideas about increasing your profits without sacrificing the quality of your work. It’s a good idea to revisit these concepts every few months to see if things have changed or if there’s room for improvement.
