Marketing Your Direct Care Practice
There are your standard marketing practices – materials you’ll use to tell your patients about the services you offer. These materials come in many forms, such as brochures, business cards, and websites!
You’ll need to choose an EMR that fits your clinic – and wouldn’t it be awesome if your EMR integrated the enrollment process with your website? If you use the Atlas.md EMR, it can. You can put a snippet of code right on your website and your patients can enroll themselves, on their own terms, whenever it’s convenient for them.
But there’s more to marketing your Direct Care practice. The most important thing you can do is get in the right mindset so you can educate your patients on all the services you have to offer. Realizing just how much it benefits them will boost their understanding of your clinic’s value, making it nearly impossible for your patients to turn away.
You didn’t go to school for marketing, but it turns out that’s part of your job as a Direct Care physician. Don’t let that scare you, though, because you have exactly the skills needed to market your clinic: compassion, knowledge, and a desire to truly help your patients.
You’re a doctor… and a marketer!
According to Alex Lubarsky of Health Media, there’s more to great marketing than just doing great work. You have to teach, too.
“Understanding marketing is crucial. If educating the public about your service is not incorporated into the cost of doing business, if it is something that comes as an afterthought rather then top-of-mind, true success will always be just around the corner French-kissing your competition. You will either learn to embrace marketing or you will always be at the mercy of those who do.”
Lubarsky says healthcare is suffering most from this often overlooked marketing technique. And that’s why docs are so out of touch when it comes to how healthcare actually works.
“With what is the ultimate insult to the health care industry, by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, all controls of the helm will be placed in the hands of a few ‘selfless’ politicians. Most doctors will capitulate to the virtual subjugation by an emboldened, oppressive system that will have them working in the proverbial cubical, as third-party bureaucrats slowly kill independent George.”
But allow us to stop the out-of-control spinning that is the healthcare system. Lubarsky reminds us what Direct Care docs all around the country stand for every single day. With every extended visit, every house call, and every personal patient conversation they have, this is what they’re thinking:
“It’s not about money. It’s about freedom, and it’s about practicing medicine that touches your soul, makes you excited to go to work, and doing it on your own terms, not to mention, makes some kind of an impact in the sobbingly-sad and epidemically-deadly health statistics of generation Y and her children.”
By educating patients on their health rather than prescribing meds and sending them out the door, Direct Care physicians are doing the very thing Lubarsky suggests, and then some. They’re educating while doing great work. Like so many other things with the Direct Care model, those involved can have the best of both worlds.
What's next?
Now that you know where to focus your efforts when it comes to marketing your Direct Care practice, it’s time to dive deeper into how you’ll create that value. The next lesson does just that! Keep reading to find out how to create value for your patients.
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