Strategies to Increase Clinic Profit in 2023
While providing quality care to patients is the ultimate goal of clinics, your clinic also needs to get returns for sustainability and growth.
It is easy to think that you can increase clinic revenue by hiring more staff, expanding your clinic size, or offering after-hour services. But those could also increase costs tremendously. Just by applying a simple formula:
profit = total revenue - total costs
Overspending can easily lead to financial loss.
Don’t worry! Here are some actionable strategies to help you attract more patients and improve the efficiency and productivity of your practices, and ultimately improve your clinic’s profitability in 2021
How to increase clinic profit in 2021:
Improve the quality of patient care
Build a robust brand for your clinic
Maintain a strong online presence
Expand services and new revenue sources
Provide staff training
Manage claims process efficiently through digitisation
Go paperless
Reduce cancellation and ‘no-shows’
Review each part of your practices
Invest in technology
Improve the quality of patient care
The key to boost revenue is to increase patient volume. You can effectively achieve so by focusing on your main goal, which is improving the quality of patient care.
We know acquiring a new patient is harder than retaining an existing one, and thus retaining your existing patients is important to maintain and even increase a decent profit margin.
Just as shown by a report on hospital revenue, high patient satisfaction scores greatly boost hospital margins by 50%.
Make sure your practitioners and staff work together to provide a superior patient experience that translates into revenue for your practices. Your doctors should have enough time for patient care and your team interacts with patients compassionately and professionally. Sometimes, professional training on interaction with patients may be needed.
Build a robust brand for your clinic
Branding has become essential for almost every business today. A powerful clinic brand is a key to reaching out to more potential patients and standing out among your competitors. Brand loyalty also builds a repeat patient base that will always go back to you for future treatment.
There is no shortcut to building a powerful brand. Branding is a systematic process about identifying what distinguishes your clinic in the marketplace, communicating your brand identity, and building your brand awareness consistently.
You can have a better understanding from our detailed guide on how to build a powerful clinic brand.
Maintain a strong online presence
Building a strong online presence is highly related to building a consistent brand. Meanwhile, in today’s context, it has become a critical prerequisite for your clinic to be found, which does not only allow the existing patients to engage with your clinic but also helps potential patients to come to you.
The investment in social media marketing can yield impressive return if you do it right. Check out our complete guide on social media marketing for clinics.
Expand services and new revenue sources
Another way to increase revenue is by introducing more products and services. Before doing so, consider what other services or products are compatible with your current ones, and remember that including new services should not compromise the quality of your existing services.
For example, you may want to incorporate in-house pharmacy and lab work into your practices to bring in more patients.
Another way to expand your services is telemedicine, which can be a great complementary part of your medical care services.
Telemedicine is also expected to be an integral part of the future of the healthcare industry. In Bain’s 2019 Asia-Pacific Front Line of Healthcare survey, nearly 50% of patients expected to use digital health tools in the next five years; 91% of consumers said they would use digital health services if the costs were covered by an employer or insurance provider.
Want to learn more about telemedicine? Read our in-depth introduction of telemedicine and its relevant regulations and risks.
Provide staff training
Needless to say, improving the efficiency and productivity of your practices is critical to reduce costs and save valuable resources, whether time or money, to focus on patient care and other business priorities.
The productivity of your staff plays an important part in determining the productivity of your practices in general. That’s why staff training is important.
You should always train your staff to improve their productivity while minimising human errors that can lead to tremendous costs.
Research has also shown that 40% of employees who do not receive proper training will leave their jobs within the first year. Staff training and development can contribute to the stability and long-term cost reduction of your clinic.
Meanwhile, staff training that leads to increased staff efficiency can contribute to minimising staff overtime pay. You can also require your staff to get daily approval for overtime to reduce costs on overtime pay.
Still, pay attention to regularly paying your staff overtime. It might mean your clinic needs some operational changes.
Manage claims process efficiently through digitisation
Before we delve into any other operational areas to improve efficiency, the rising costs and complexity of claim processing should be the first to be dealt with.
There are many steps for a claim to go through even with electronic medical records today. However, digitisation of the claims process, even just partially, helps you reduce significant medical operating costs while improving patient experiences, and thus helps you gain competitive advantages on a path toward full digitization.
For example, by digitising data input and payment process, you can streamline your claims management and effectively boost the efficiency and accuracy of the claims process and your practice as a whole.
Bear in mind, digitisation applied to claims auditing and other areas of your practices does not only simply lower costs,, but also improves patients outcomes and most importantly, enables greater patient engagement in their health and care.
Go paperless
Paperless practices can save valuable time, reduce the costs of supplies and paper, and most importantly, reduce human errors and mistakes made during manual paperwork.
As your physical paperwork piles up, the cost of paper and supplies to print the paper, and even office storage space to keep paper copies increases tremendously. You have wasted much money on paper that could have increased your clinic’s profit.
Relying on paper as an input for your daily operation also requires more time completing routine tasks, which could have been saved to improve your patient care. There are also higher chances of human errors being made during the manual paperwork process, which could easily be avoided by going paperless.
Going paperless indeed requires an initial investment in quality software and some time for your staff to adapt to the new workflow. However, it is an essential step to improve your clinic’s profitability and do more with less.
Read more on why you should go paperless with your clinic.
Reduce cancellation and ‘no-shows’
We understand that a missed appointment that is not rescheduled could cost your clinic hundreds or more bucks.
The good news is that investing in a quality scheduling system can minimise such lose while increasing profitability with automated follow-up appointment tools.
A quality scheduling system that automatically sends appointment reminders and tracks upcoming appointments helps you reduce cancellations and ‘no-shows’ while making sure you run your practice on time.
Meanwhile, you may also want to check your cancellation policy and add a fee for ‘no-shows’.
Review each part of your practices
Instead of working with the same suppliers or vendors, you may need to review and look at each part of your practice to think about cheaper options.
For example, review contracts with your current vendors and consider lower-cost options. Or ask for discounts if you are a frequent customer of a particular vendor.
Invest in technology
Investment in technology helps you reduce costs in a long term. Specifically, an effective clinic management system streamlines your practice and improves your staff efficiency.
Digitalization of the tedious steps that hamper staff productivity and patients’ satisfaction, for example during patient registration, can greatly reduces inefficiencies in your practices and improves your clinic’s profitability.
UNO Technologies brings you a high-quality Clinic Management System with professional and dedicated local customer support teams to reduce your costs and solve your problems.
Conclusion
The competition in the healthcare industry today is getting tougher; profitability is thus something you should never neglect to maintain the sustainability and growth of your clinic.
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to all your profitability problems, the above-mentioned strategies can definitely help you increase revenue while maintaining and even reducing costs.