Want to save time growing your healthcare practice? Here, we’ll review how you can grow a profitable healthcare practice using automation strategies.
Most practices are busy treating patients, and don’t have time to manage marketing or advertising campaigns. Between treating patients, maintaining CE credits, and staying informed on latest health trends in medical journals, you don’t have the time to ask your patients for reviews or referrals. But, without these, your practice will struggle to grow with new patients.
Many successful dental, medical and healthcare practices have implemented technology to automate various marketing and administrative tasks in their practices to lower the burden on their staff so their team can focus on delivering the best experience for patients in the clinic.
Top 5 Healthcare Marketing Automation Strategies
Here, we’ll review the top 5 healthcare marketing automation strategies you can use today to automate your healthcare practice growth:
- Automatically collect existing patient reviews
- Automatically collect new patient referrals
- Automatically collect new patient web leads
- Automatically collect all digital marketing leads
- Automatically collect and analyze patient feedback
1. Automatically Collect Existing Patient Reviews
Your reputation determines your success. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research (2013), “90% of customers said that their buying decisions were influenced by online reviews.” How many times have you chosen a new service provider based on their online reviews? Your patients are doing the same.
Once a user conducts a search query online for a search term, such as “Vancouver dentist”, or “walk in clinic near me”, many users will search Google Maps for a dental or medical clinic that’s geographically close to their work or home, then they’ll click on the website with the highest reviews first. So, both the quantity and quality of the reviews matters to attract their attention and encourage them to click on your website first.
Patient reviews are third-party validation or ‘social proof’ that validates your healthcare services. Potential patients are influenced by online reviews when deciding which dental or medical clinic to visit. But, asking patients to provide a review can be easy to forget for a busy health practice. Even if your team remembers to ask in-person, your patients will often forget to write a review when they leave your clinic.
You can solve this problem by using technology, such as Optiimus Reputation and Review Management, which automatically asks your patients for feedback after every visit or purchase. Once your patient completes their visit at your clinic and is checked out at the front desk, our automation tool sends out an email or text message to your patients asking for feedback. Their responses are then posted to any online reputation website, such as Google Maps.
But, where should you post your patient reviews?
The most popular review platforms that your patients already use include Google, Facebook, Yelp, RateMDs, Healthgrades, Vitals, Better Business Bureau (BBB) and others. It’s helpful to encourage patients to post reviews on the platforms your patients use the most. But, once your patients post their reviews, your team needs to respond to each and every review. This helps improve your online reputation, but also your local SEO.
Google determines how to rank your website in Google Maps using various factors, such as your online reputation on Google, your website and third-party review sites. Google evaluates your review quantity, recency, velocity, diversity, authority, format, and sentiment to determine where to rank your website in Google Maps.
But, Google’s ranking factors are not just about collecting, but also responding to each and every review. If you’re getting a lot of reviews, it can be time consuming to monitor and respond to each review, on every single platform. But, not responding to the reviews hurts your search rankings.
Optiimus provides one central hub for you to monitor and respond to your online reviews on over 200 third-party review websites, such as Google, Facebook, Healthgrades, RateMDs, Vitals, Better Business Bureau (BBB), and more. If you’re too busy, our team can manage reviews and respond for you, helping you grow your stellar online reputation.
90% of customers said that their buying decisions were influenced by online reviews.
Dimensional Research
2. Automatically Collect New Patient Referrals
One of the most powerful strategies to grow your healthcare practice is through new patient referrals, which is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. The Nielsen Norman Group conducted a global survey (2013), which found that:
“Word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, often referred to as earned advertising, are still the most influential, as 84 percent of global respondents across 58 countries to the Nielsen online survey said this source was the most trustworthy.”
Your patients trust the recommendations of their friends and family more than any form of advertising. But, asking your patients to provide a referral can be easy to forget for a busy healthcare practice. Even if your team remembers to ask, most of the time your patients can’t think of a referral to provide on the spot.
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus Patient Referral Program, which automatically asks your patients for a referral after every visit or purchase. Our referral marketing system can ask every patient, or only the patients most likely to refer, based on their patient experience feedback.
When you ask your patients for a referral, most of the time they can’t think of who to refer to your health clinic. If you only ask once, patients won’t be able to provide a referral on the spot. If you ask too often, this strains the patient relationship.
Let technology automate the asking for you. But, instead of asking your patients to think of a referral on the spot, we provide your patients with a referral link to share through email, text message, Facebook and Messenger. Referral marketing leverages your patient’s existing social networks to collect new referrals from any channel.
New patient referrals come from multiple channels, such as phone calls, voicemails, text messages, emails, website forms, live chat, social media, and more. This makes it difficult to stay organized and to monitor the source of each new referral. Not having a digital patient referral program can be difficult to manage manually.
Optiimus builds digital referral programs that collect and organize all of your referrals from every channel and notifies you about each new referral. We’ll automatically send a thank-you note to your patient for sending you a referral. You can monitor and reward each patient referral with a gift or incentive (if possible) to thank your patient and encourage more referrals.
Word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family are still the most influential, as 84 percent of global respondents said this source was the most trustworthy.
Nielsen Norman Group
3. Automatically Collect New Patient Web Leads
75-90% of all online healthcare queries are handled by AI chatbots.
EIT Health
The purpose of most digital marketing and advertising campaigns is to drive traffic to your website. This traffic is potential new patients that may be interested in your dental, medical or healthcare services.
A well-established healthcare website attracts a lot of traffic from potential new patients. Some of these visitors may have a quick question, but don’t want to call or email, as it’s too cumbersome or time consuming. Many of your website visitors would prefer to chat using live chat software.
Live chat software connects your website visitors to your front desk team, providing great customer service while increasing appointment bookings. Website visitors can ask questions about your health clinic, services, practitioners, and more. This new line of communication provides a convenient patient experience, alleviating their concerns before booking an appointment.
But, many website visitors will ask similar questions, which slows down your team’s productivity. They’ll ask questions related to your dental or medical services, hours of operation, insurance coverage, parking availability, and more. These repetitive questions can be a time burden for your already busy team.
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus AI Chatbot, which provides an AI chatbot that’s been engineered to interact with healthcare patients. Our AI chatbot answers your patient’s frequently asked questions and guides visitors to book an appointment. Your team can monitor the chat, jump in, or let the AI chatbot answer questions and book appointments.
AI chatbots are growing in popularity, especially in healthcare settings. According to EIT Health (2020) about 75-90% of all online healthcare queries are handled by AI chatbots.
The main benefit of using AI chatbots is that they provide additional sales and customer service support – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. They work like an extra employee – even when your clinic is closed on evenings and weekends.
Your website can automatically capture your website visitors’ information using our live chat software to ensure they stay connected to your practice. Every conversation starts with their name and phone number. This captures a new patient lead so you can follow up when they’re ready to book an appointment.
When your website visitors are chatting with your front desk team, they may leave your website before booking an appointment. Once they leave your website or close their Internet browser, the online conversation ends.
Optiimus keeps your website visitors engaged with your team online on your website, or offline when they leave your website. Using business texting we route messages to their mobile phone so you stay connected, completing their appointment booking.
4. Automatically Collect All Digital Marketing Leads
Your dental, medical and healthcare marketing activities generate new patient inquiries for your health services. Each patient inquiry, or lead, is considering booking at your clinic, which could result in new business revenue. But, if the patient inquiry is not responded to promptly, or slips through the cracks, the patient may book at another healthcare clinic.
Only 27% of leads ever get contacted.
Forbes
Well-balanced digital marketing campaigns generate new patient inquiries from many sources, such as phone calls, voicemails, text messages, emails, website forms, live chat, Google, social media, and more. It’s common for any busy healthcare practice to miss any of these new patient inquiries, to not follow up promptly, or to forget to check these platforms.
You’re not alone; according to research conducted by Forbes and published on Forbes, Inc. and Harvard Business Review “only 27% of leads ever get contacted”. This is a huge waste of marketing and advertising budgets!
Furthermore, according to Harvard Business Review (2011), “our research indicates that many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads,” as the average response time was 42 hours. They find the “results are especially shocking given how quickly online leads go cold.” They conclude that:
“Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus Healthcare CRM, which captures and monitors new patient leads, the marketing source they came from, the date and time of each interaction, which team members they interacted with, the treatment type requested, the outcome of each interaction, as well as notify your front desk instantly with a phone call for every new online web lead – allowing you to respond to and book each lead immediately.
Your existing practice management software does have a CRM built-in, but that’s only for your existing patients. In addition to existing patients, you also have a large number (i.e. hundreds or thousands) of potential new patients, or leads, that haven’t been captured in your existing CRM and won’t be until they book an appointment. In the meantime, if you don’t organize these leads in a database or CRM, many of these leads may slip through the cracks, which would be an inefficient waste of your marketing budget.
Our HIPAA compliant healthcare CRM automatically captures all patient inquiries from every channel and organizes them for you without any data entry from your team. Your team can follow up with each new patient promptly, book more appointments and make efficient use of your marketing budget.
In addition to making efficient use of your marketing budget, a CRM for organizing and managing your marketing leads is an effective strategy for improving your marketing results.
For instance, many potential patients will call your clinic, but will not book an appointment. What’s the reason the caller didn’t book? It may be related to your treatment services offered, price objections, scheduling conflicts, clinic location, or other reasons. Understanding the caller’s reasons for not booking an appointment is valuable information for your practice.
Our healthcare CRM uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to listen to each call and monitor the outcome. We provide valuable information for your practice, such as the outcome of each call and the reasons for not booking. This information helps you improve your practice or services to better reflect your patient’s health needs.
In addition to phone call analysis, our healthcare CRM provides AI analytics that captures what you care about the most: new patient appointments, staff performance and your advertising’s ROI. Our CRM captures new patient leads from any digital marketing channel, measures the appointment booking rate of each staff member, and transcribes each call to provide coaching opportunities for your team.
Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
Harvard Business Review
5. Automatically Collect and Analyze Patient Feedback
A 5% increase in customer retention rates can result in a 25-95% increase in profits.
Bain & Company
One of the best ways of growing your practice isn’t just to focus on attracting new patients, but to also focus on retaining your existing ones.
It’s generally less expensive to retain an existing patient than to find a new one. In their famous book published by Harvard Business Press, Bain & Company found that “a 5% increase in customer retention rates can result in a 25-95% increase in profits“.
But, how do you improve patient retention? What are some of the most common reasons that patients are leaving your healthcare practice?
There’s always going to be a natural attrition of patients and customers in any business. According to Statista, the average patient retention rate in healthcare is 77%, which results in an attrition rate of 23%.
Some of this attrition is natural or unavoidable, but some of this attrition is avoidable. According to a survey by Esteban Kolsky, founder and principal of thinkJar, “only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest churn,” or leave without saying anything.
To avoid having patients leave without saying anything, it’s helpful to capture their feedback so you can identify any problems to resolve before they escalate and drive further patients away. The easiest way to capture patient feedback is through patient surveys.
One negative interaction with any person on your team can result in your patients not returning, telling others about the experience, or writing a negative review online. Not knowing how your patients feel about you or your team can result in problems escalating, impacting your practice.
You can ask your patients about their feedback in person, but many people are polite in person and will be more candid and honest in surveys. Also, it’s difficult to collect feedback from every patient while also completing their dental or medical treatments, or to get a big picture perspective of your entire practice from verbal feedback.
You can solve this problem using technology, such as Optiimus Patient Surveys, which sends your patients a survey after their visit, either through SMS text or email, for them to complete from the comfort of their phones.
You can manually send out surveys at any frequency you choose, but if you automatically send out surveys to each patient as soon as they check out of your clinic, they’re more likely to respond because the experience is fresh on their minds.
Their responses can be saved and stored in a digital database, which we can then analyze using AI technology. Instead of reading each response manually (there could be hundreds or thousands), our AI technology can aggregate responses to provide sentiment analysis and look for trends. We identify positive or negative trends, areas of improvement, and turn negative feedback into opportunities to improve your patient’s experience. Turn your patient feedback into actionable insights with our survey program.
The average patient retention rate in healthcare is 77%.
Statista
Best Automation Strategies in Healthcare: Conclusion
Many successful dental, medical and healthcare practices are busy treating patients and delivering amazing patient experiences. As a result, they don’t have time to manage the daily aspects of their marketing campaigns.
You can implement technology to automate your marketing tasks to save you and your team time, make efficient use of your marketing budget, and improve your marketing return on investment (ROI).
Optiimus can automate your healthcare marketing growth by automatically collecting existing patient reviews, automatically collecting new patient referrals, automatically collecting new patient web leads, automatically collecting all digital marketing leads, as well as automatically collecting and analyzing patient feedback from surveys.
Focus your time on treating your patients and automate your healthcare practice growth.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is healthcare automation?
Healthcare automation is the application of technology to complete or automate repeated tasks without human interaction in healthcare settings, like hospitals and medical clinics. Automation in healthcare is becoming increasingly more prevalent, as organizations seek to automate administrative tasks in order to focus time on critical healthcare functions.
What are the benefits of automation in healthcare?
The main benefits of automation in healthcare include improving the efficiency of completing routine tasks, reducing operational costs, enhancing patient safety, increasing accuracy of healthcare treatments and medical procedures, as well as better utilization of resources, leading to overall improved quality of care for patients.
What will be the main goal of most automation strategies?
The main goal of automation in healthcare is to improve efficiency, accuracy and speed in business processes and administrative tasks, leading to increased productivity and reduced operational costs.
What is an automation strategy?
An automation strategy is a framework that provides healthcare organizations with a comprehensive and integrated approach to automating business or healthcare processes. Automation conducted at the operational level is often referred as Business Process Automation (BPA), while automation conducted using hardware or robotics is often referred to as Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
What is an example of automation in healthcare?
Examples of automation in healthcare include using AI chatbots to answer questions and book appointments, patient scheduling and appointment reminders, customer relationship management (CRM) software, as well as automating marketing activities, such as sending out review and referral requests, capturing and analyzing patient feedback in surveys, and more.
What are two ways that an automated system can be used in health?
There are many ways to create an automated system in healthcare, including:
- Patient intake and onboarding
- Appointment scheduling and reminders
- Electronic health records management and data sharing
- Sending out patient review and referral requests
- Asking for feedback through patient surveys
- Providing customer service using AI chatbots
- Billing, payments, claims and insurance processing
