Physician Referral Marketing Tips for Liaisons
Every day primary care and specialty providers are referring out their patients, if it’s not to you it’s to your competition!
Physician referral marketing is taking those referrals and directing them to your practice generating a successful consistent patient base and higher practice revenue. Establishing a relationship with your local healthcare community is vital to your private practice.
Referring doctors and primary care providers are more likely to refer to a physician they know and trust. Primary care providers or PCPs have a large and loyal patient base.
These patients are long-term and rely on their primary care doctor to provide services and resources best for their health. All PCPs are referring out every day to specialty physicians and practices.
If they are not referring to you, they are referring to your competition, which means you are missing out on a patient referral source and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for your practice every year.
Referring physicians are the vast patient majority referral source for your practice; simply put they are the lifeline of your private practice. How do you build a stronger referral relationship with doctors in your area?
Make a Physician Referral Marketing Plan
Not all referrals are created equal.
A good physician referral manager will identify your current referring physicians, and past referring doctors, target new doctors, and practice referrals.
After you have identified your referral history establish benchmarks and goals. This will help you organize physician liaison strategies and better focus your efforts. It will also help you identify patterns and some additional insight to help with the dialogue that you will need to have.
Establishing a Relationship with Referring Doctors
This might be surprising but specialists and surgeons do not always have a good reputation with primary care providers, because they feel that once the referral is given the patient’s care is not always communicated back to them.
It is important to understand that when those internal medicine physicians, primary care doctors, urgent care doctors, pediatricians and other PCP’s refer they trust you with their patient’s care.
When meeting your referring doctors you are there to build a relationship of confidence and trust. Learn about their needs ask questions and listen to what is most important to them when it comes to patient care. Ask them about their practice to learn more about what they see and maybe you can build some mutual referrals.
Educate them on your unique approach and the treatments you provide. Lastly, provide a direct line of communication and marketing collateral to help specifically with referrals.
Read this to learn more about building relationships with referring doctors in your area.
Building On Your Physician Referral Relationships
Just like any relationship or business network you need to dedicate time to your referrals.
Follow up after your visits and make sure they do not have any additional questions or simply just to thank them for a recent referral. Make sure they are happy with the care you have provided their patients.
Build a relationship with the referring practice office staff so that when the physician is not available you are familiar with his staff and you can work closely with them as well. Maintaining this form of personal communication will help grow your physician referrals while keeping you up to date with the referral process and local practices.
Click to learn more about our physician liaison marketing program and training.
Track Your Efforts
You’ve worked hard growing your network and meeting with primary care providers and specialty referrals, start tracking your success! Healthcare marketing is always an ongoing effort but now compare your progress to your previous benchmarks. With your new physician referral information, you can continue to focus your efforts and hone your strategy to meet your goals and grow your patient revenue.
Physician Referral Marketing Strategies Wrap Up
Getting involved in your healthcare community allows your practice access to a network of healthcare experts that you can easily communicate with and trust.
Relationships with local doctors in your area can only improve your practice’s success in striving for the best healthcare treatment for your patients.
Physician referral marketing establishes a strong relationship with referring physicians, builds new patient referrals, maintains a consistent patient base, establishes marketing benchmarks and goals, provides top “customer service” for your referrals, tracks your efforts, provides insight into your practice, and grows your practice revenue exponentially.
Remember primary care providers are referring out every day if it’s not to you it’s to your competition and you are missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
It is important to have a strong and structured referral doctor marketing program for your practice and experienced individuals to execute the program.
Need help with physician liaison training? Check out Physician Liaison University.
