Referrals are a vital part of growing your practice—even more so during these challenging times. Patient referrals. Professional referrals. Where do you find them, how do you get them, how do you keep them and more!

I would like to offer you an information-packed white paper all about referrals. This Practice Builders’ white paper is a valuable resource designed to help you answer some of the most critical questions in health practice marketing today… because every healthcare practice needs more referrals. Depending upon your practice type, you may need more from patients, from other practitioners or both.

After 30 years’ experience with over 15,000 practices, Practice Builders knows how to generate and retain patient and professional referrals. We’ve even developed specific marketing tools to help you achieve these goals in your own practice.

To download your free copy of “What Every Healthcare Practice Must Know About Gaining and Retaining Referrals:

http://www.ahcpublications.com/files/PBO/whitepaper.pdf

Regards,

Joel Ellis
President
Practice Builders

Train Your Staff Increase Your Practice Revenue

Looking for affordable ways to increase your practice revenues? One of the most effective and least costly ways is to train the people who answer your phones and the people who represent your practice to professional referrers to better represent your practice’s unique benefits.

Practice Builders is one of the very few healthcare marketing companies to offer comprehensive staff and practice representative training programs. Our training services are among the most robust and effective in the healthcare marketing industry. Staff training is also a critical source of revenue for your practice. It’s been estimated that the average healthcare practice loses $50,000 to $55,000 every year due to lost telephone tracking and appointment-setting opportunities. Staff training addresses:

• Phone Skills Training
• Tracking New Patient Calls
• Successful Internal Marketing
• External Marketing Strategies
• Onsite Customer Service Skills
• Increasing Patient Retention
• Optimizing Use of Marketing Materials
• Understanding the Basics of HIPAA

Practice representative training programs are specifically designed for healthcare practices seeking to increase their professional referrals and build long-term referral relationships. Practice rep training includes:

• Setting Up Your Key Referrer Program
• Tracking Return On Investment (ROI)
• Tactical Planning and Implementation
• Marketing Practice to Physicians and Businesses
• Current Follow-Up to Practice Rep Training

To learn more about our real-world revenue-generating training programs, call Practice Builders today at 800.679.1200. Learn how your office staff is handling incoming phone calls and how well they are tracking each call to see if one of our training programs can help.

Sincerely,

Joel Ellis
President
Practice Builders

How to Use Public Relations to Your Marketing Advantage

As the name "public relations" implies, this marketing tool includes methods and means by which an organization or individual (your practice or you) seeks to promote a favorable relationship with the public (your target audience of potential new patients and/or referral sources). Public relations (PR) methods and means may include such tactics as:

• Press releases (newsworthy announcements)
• News & feature stories
• Radio interviews
• TV appearances
• Special events (e.g. health screenings or health seminars)

What are you doing that is newsworthy?
Healthcare is among the most popular and sought-after news topics in America. Hardly a nightly TV news segment passes without some bit of health-related news being presented to viewers. These stories often cover new treatments, new medical technologies and new ways of coping with various diseases. But they also present stories about doctors, dentists and physical therapists donating their time to worthy health causes in their communities or helping sick and needy people overseas (e.g., Doctors Without Borders, etc).

Many practitioners give to their communities. Many more do pro bono work here and abroad. And all too often, the public never hears about the terrific humanitarian work being done by these hard-working, dedicated individuals.

Public relations can be more cost-effective.
Anyone with money to spend and something to sell can run an ad. And that is often the tactic you resort to when you want new patients for a particular treatment or procedure. Of course, advertising has its place in your marketing mix but PR is often less expensive and more effective at building your credibility and gaining trust.

With PR, you don’t pay for space or airtime as you would with a print ad or TV spot. A typical TV news segment, for example, might be 3-4 minutes long. That’s 3-4 minutes of airtime you don’t have to pay for. Compare that to a typical 30-second TV commercial that may cost thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands (depending on the size of your market).

A simple press release, properly written and presented, can often generate much better results at a fraction of the cost of a print ad. If your story is picked up, there’s a much better chance that it will be read and believed than any paid print ad.

To learn more about what public relations can do for your practice, call 800.679.1262 today. You have nothing to lose and many new patients to gain.