By Suzanne Dewey, Forté Partners, LLC

Referral development is an art. While the healthcare industry is not at the forefront of the economic spiral, there may be residual impact on your practice. This is a good time to focus on referral management to help bolster your volume. There is a special touch in referral development that done with consistency can help make your practice busy and growing to your specifications. Fortunately, the art form of referral generation is not only for the gifted. With habitual and systematic communication efforts, any physician can master referral development.
 
In most cases, you wouldn’t send an ill patient home without a treatment plan. You also don’t want to begin your referral development efforts without a plan on what you are going to do, how you will do it and who will be assigned specific tasks. Since the new year is still young, this is the time to get your team together and outline a monthly plan for the remainder of the year. You might want to include some overarching tenets to help everyone focus on making sure the patient’s experience is a good one—making sure they are treated beyond their expectations and maybe beyond the usual “adequate” service.
 
Of course, you might wonder what your patients or referring physicians do expect. And asking them is the best way to discover how you are doing. In healthcare, providing good clinical care is an essential focus but because patients cannot judge your clinical capability the same way they judge the service they receive, you might be surprised to find out what patients value.  
 
To improve your service and outreach, you need to know what makes your patients or referring physicians happy and what makes your service worthy of that “word of mouth” recommendation. You can do periodic surveys or you can create quick follow-up questions to your service to find out what they value. Hint: When it comes to “marketing” your practice or generating more patients, the most important element is the actual service you provide: The service IS the marketing.
 
Many physicians think advertising is the key to generating more referrals. While this may be one vehicle, it is best to leave that element to a time when your practice is flush with money. Advertising is expensive and often does not return the expected results. In healthcare, people still choose their physicians and medical services based predominately on word of mouth referrals. They will listen to Aunt Millie or their primary care physician long before they call the number the radio ad spouts. Generating word of mouth buzz is another article, but here are a few ideas to get your plan started:
 
·     Speak at your local civic group
·     Start a blog on health issues or your specialty
·     Write a health column in your local newspaper
·     Join the local chamber of commerce
·     Offer a health open house with some other complementary practices
·     Utilize social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
·     Provide a CME course at your hospital
 
Access and communication need to be the foundation elements of your referral program.  Whether with a new patient or new physician, you want to make sure they feel welcomed and have an easy time reaching you. For that new referring physician, you absolutely want to make sure you follow up with your consult before the patient gets back to him or her. Make the referring physician feel like the star when it comes to the patient. If they feel good, they will most likely send more patients your way. You can set up an e-mail consult system to make sure this follow-up is systematically done.  
 
Nurture these relationships by communicating and keeping track of what is important to them. The more you nurture and habitually communicate with your patients and/or referring physicians, the more robust your practice will be.
 
About the author:

Early in her career, Suzanne Dewey served as the senior administrator in charge of marketing, public relations and development at Tobey Hospital in Wareham, Mass., where she initiated the first marketing department and physician relations program. She has worked as a special consultant to the Massachusetts Hospital Association, facilitating physician leadership groups. As a consultant with Corporate Health Group since 2002, she held a long-term engagement with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center working with Network Development on physician relations and service-line development. Suzanne launched Forté Partners in 2007; she remains a strategic affiliate of CHG, continuing to focus on business development and marketing.

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