5 Tips for Expanding Your Clinic
You think it’s finally time to expand. After all, your clinic has been booming, with regular patients coming from multiple locations and leaving satisfied with their care. You might also feel like you’ve peaked in the amount of revenue a single clinic can generate when it’s limited in size, staff, and capacity.
1. Create Loyalty
The next right step would be to either make your clinic bigger and introduce a new variety of services that attract new patients or open a new location altogether. Either way, you need to be well-prepared for your expansion. Otherwise, the results might be more negative than positive.
Before you start expanding your capacity and services, make sure you have a loyal and interested patients base. Satisfied patients who feel listened to and taken care of are more likely to come back to your clinic than patients who weren’t as enthusiastic about the quality of service you provide. Instead of guessing and estimating how your patients feel about your clinic, consider asking them for reviews both online and through feedback forums—online and offline—that could help you improve your clinic and services.
If possible, encourage your patients to share what they love about your clinic with their social circle. This approach could generate social credibility, making it more likely for patients looking for a clinic in the area to favor you over the competition. If you’re thinking of expanding, ask patients where they come from, and if a good chunk of them drive a long distance to reach you from a certain location, consider expanding to that location.
2. Expand the Team
Unlike with retail business, you have a limited capacity of services you can offer patients per day. If you’re looking to increase your regular intake of patients, you need to plan ahead and make sure they can receive adequate care from professional healthcare providers. Unfortunately, hiring is a lengthy process, especially in an industry that’s as sensitive as healthcare.
Whether you’re offering additional services or opening in a new location, you need to have staff options ready before the announcement. One way to avoid the high probability of mistakes made by new employees is by implementing specialized training for all fresh recruits. Every employee can be trained for their task, from how they handle and treat patients to your clinic’s infrastructure, layout, and software. You can also divide training through guided seminars with a few of your older employees and printed manuals or videos.
3. Implement EHR Software
If your clinic was limited in size and patient flow before the expansion, you might’ve been able to get by without relying on specialized software. But now that you’re expecting more patients in general or offering a new variety of services, specialized software could mean the difference between a successful clinic with satisfied patients and an uncontrollable mess.
Implementing EHR (electronic health records) software can drastically speed up processes and make work much easier for your team by automating mundane background tasks. EHR software offers many advantages and would allow you to expand more efficiently. For instance, it ensures all patients’ records, files, and documents are secure during transfer and that care providers can access them with ease digitally through their company-issued tablets, desktops, or smartphones.
4. Create a Strategy
You shouldn’t go into expanding your clinic blind. Create a foolproof strategy that covers all aspects of the expansion. This can be anything from budgeting to figuring what new service you’re looking to offer and what equipment or additional staff members they may need.
Having a plan also allows you to find areas where things could go wrong and plan in advance. It also keeps all of your team members informed on new processes. That way, you can reduce your chances of a failed expansion and sail smoothly into your new clinic.
5. Strong Marketing
The main purpose of expanding your clinic and services is to help more patients. But you can’t do that if they don’t know you have a new location in the first place.
It’s important to look into how you’re going to market your expanding clinic to current and new patients before you even start. There are countless ways you can start marketing your new projects to clients. You can start with social media and email newsletter marketing and move to Google ads and sponsored posts on popular healthcare-oriented websites and blogs.
Take it One Step at a Time
Anything from expanding your current array of services to an opening in a new location takes a lot of work. It’s important to take things one step at a time and plan ahead. That way, you can ensure everything runs smoothly, and your clinic comes out on top.
