How to Increase Patient Volume with Your Current Resources

Increasing patient volume with your current resources can be challenging, especially if you focus only on getting an increase in new patients. Nothing wrong with doing that if you know how to, but taking this as the only measure can limit your success.

The first thing to know is that patient volume is a reflection of many factors coming together: personal service to patients, quality of treatment, effectiveness of techniques used, the treatment experience as different from the treatment techniques, etc. All of these directly affect the patient volume: patients that are too sore from a previous treatment will tend to skip a session or two, patients who are not aware of their progress will lose interest in the treatment, patients who are indifferently treated by staff will make excuses and reduce attendance, etc.

The same factors can also affect new patient volume indirectly: dissatisfied comments to the referral source will discourage the referral source from referring, patients who are not extremely happy with the experience will not refer their friends and family and if they are not rehabilitated from the original complaint, they might not even go back to the physician who referred them!

So, the techniques are simple: measure your results objectively, inspect areas which are not doing well and fix the problems that may affect patient satisfaction. And these you can do with your existing resources!

I have had clients increase their income and profitability on these techniques alone. With the same volume of new patients, they were able to increase patient volume by increasing patient satisfaction. See, these patients were already there!