The tide may be starting to turn. There is an increasing volume of patients searching online for access to private healthcare and it is therefore more important than ever for you and your practice to be accessible to patients. Patients are struggling to access NHS doctors, and reassurance and accessibility to a consultant is a lifeline to many at the moment.
Here are our recommendations to keep your practice “alive” to enable you to hit the ground running when we are out of lockdown:
1.If you aren’t already, start offering virtual consultations. You have most likely been doing this already in the NHS and so know that it can work very well.
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- Amend your website to let patients know
- Contact the private hospitals to let them know you are offering this service
- Contact the insurance companies to let them know – many insurance companies are actively looking for consultants to offer this service as they have patients waiting. Most insurance companies are paying their standard rates for telephone consultations.
- Amend your out of hours answerphone message to say you offer virtual consultations and ask they to leave their details.
2. Make sure your phone is answered 9am to 5pm everyday. Answerphones are not ideal and you are very likely to lose new patient enquiries – they will simply move on to the next consultant who does have their phone answered.
3. If you had to cancel patients already booked in for consultations, ring them to ask if they would like a virtual consultation instead – some will, some won’t, but most will appreciate you getting in touch with them
4. If you had to cancel patients booked in for surgery – ring them to ask how they are, let them know you are still thinking of them and that you will be back in touch as soon as you are able to resume surgery.
5. Any new patients who enquire about your services, first offer a virtual consultation. If they aren’t keen on this, then create a database of patient details so you can call them to arrange a physical consultation as soon as you are up and running again. This will mean you have a ready supply of patients to fill your clinics.
6. Keep in touch with new enquiries every few weeks to say they haven’t been forgotten and you will be in touch in due course – they will appreciate this and stay loyal to you.
7. Keep in touch with your referrers to remind them you are offering virtual consultations, eg the private hospital facility bookings office a, local GPs. They may well be looking for consultants to refer to.
8. Finally, take this time to get on top of your admin. We have had many new consultants signing up for our billing and collection services over the past few weeks after they realised their current invoicing and chasing processes are not working and they have SO many invoices unpaid.
Sally Barr
[email protected] or call 01403 241484
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