Top tips to enhance visibility

‘What is the profitability of your clinic?’ Clinic owner: ‘I don’t know…my turnover for the year is….’

Knowing your turnover is great but if you don’t have a handle on your outgoings and what’s left (profit) and you don’t have the visibility to see trends or red flags, it makes it very difficult to manage your business pro-actively. And you as the clinic owner may often just be ‘taking what’s left’ instead of earning fair remuneration.

If you have a limited company, it is also important to make sure you do not draw more dividend than you are legally allowed to.  Whether a sole trader or limited company you need to make sure you have enough money set aside for tax (we recommend you have a separate account that you transfer into every month)

We encourage our clients to keep their accounts up to date on a monthly basis at the very minimum, go through their profit and loss report, compare it to previous periods and interrogate anything that doesn’t make sense.

If you deal with insurance companies, case management companies and other third parties it is also important that you make sure you submit your invoices in the correct way and as soon as possible and then keep a track of payments received, chasing those not paid on time. If this is not monitored, it can easily turn into a stressful situation where payment has not been made and you don’t know how you are going to pay salaries at the end of the month. Put a system in place to keep on top of this!

Should I stop seeing insurance patients?

This is a question raised and topic of conversation spoken about A LOT. The answer is it depends! We do encourage our clients to increase the ratio of self-paying patients to insurance patients but there are occasions when it makes sense to have insurance patients. What do your numbers tell you?

On investigation you might find that whilst you don’t get paid your full rate for the insurance patients, they might become self-paying patients for some of your other services that makes having the stream of insurance patients coming to you worthwhile.

Scenarios where you might want to question continuing to treat insurance patients might be where you are running a waiting list for self-paying patients; or you are fully booked and not getting to spend as much time working on your practice as you need to and could see less patients for the same or more revenue generated. (This might mean you stop seeing them but not necessarily your whole team)

You might also be fed up with all the paperwork, the low rates and decide to stop…

Take time to look at the numbers, gain actual visibility rather than just a hunch and decide.

‘I just need to get more new patients through the door…’

If you need to attract more patients into your practice, make sure you know the average spend of each patient coming into the practice. This will help you determine whether the spend (of money and / or your time) is worth the number of patients you are likely to attract in each marketing initiative you undertake.

This might be a reflective exercise if you’ve never tried something before, but you might be able to get an idea from the person providing the marketing service, or similar businesses who have used their services, as to how successful they find certain marketing initiatives

You might also not need as big a flow of new patients through your door as you think. It is important to make sure you are servicing the patients already in your care or on your database. I don’t mean over-treating them. I personally think that, for many clinicians, there is more of a risk of under-treating patients than over-treating them.

It is more expensive to get a new patient through the door than it is to look after your existing ones.