It’s morning in a mall outside of a metro station in Washington, D.C. Josh, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and baseball hat, picks up his violin and begins to play. Classical music, some of the most complex and beautiful ever written for the instrument, floods the air.
Category: Thriving
Life’s good and “efficient,” a common meme in healthcare. But, like a sponge, when conditions change, they can neither change with the times nor change location, at least not until it’s too late.
There is one weird trick and it can be yours and it has nothing to do with belly fat but everything to do with increasing your practice’s or business’s success.
Clickbait. Although the term is often used as a pejorative, it describes an impactful statement that’s designed to grab your attention, pulling you in to click on a web link.
In other words, it’s highly effective communication in the form of a headline.
Forget about whether, in the online sense, the writer is trying to sell you garbage or a true medical miracle. That’s not the point. The point is that the headline works to get attention for the rest of the communication.
What are you doing to get attention for your practice or business? Attention from your referral sources, from your patients, from hospitals? I’m not (necessarily) talking about a billboard next to the Interstate; I’m talking about on any level?
I met someone at a conference; let’s call him “Bob.” He was the head of a hospital-based medical group. He said something like, “Mark, my strategy is to lay low. The less the administration hears from us, the better. The CEO just wants things to run smoothly. If she sees me, it’ll just be an opportunity for her to complain.”
No, Bob, invisibility isn’t the key to business success.
To the contrary, you have to draw attention to what your group is doing for your “customers,” from patients, to referral sources, to facilities: This is what we’re doing. Here is why we’re doing it. This is why it’s good for you. This is why we care. This is why we’re here for you when you need us.
Five weeks from now, some patient is going to decide whether to make an appointment with her family practitioner or to go to the walk-in clinic at Wal-Mart. Five weeks from now, some hospital CEO is going to get a flyer from a large anesthesia group that tells him that his current anesthesia group is disorganized, greedy and lazy. Five weeks from now, someone is going to decide whether or not to create a hospital-sponsored cardiac clinic headed by your competitor from across town.
I’m not suggesting that you can simply draw attention to your practice or business and not deliver a quality service or product.
Rather, I’m telling you that delivering quality in the vacuum of invisibility is like the tree that falls in the forest. Does it make a sound? Who cares? No one is around to hear it.
Make your message heard. Make yourself and what you can do known.
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
What those hospitals are really doing is training more physicians to become hospital-employed or hospital-controlled managers in order to monitor, cajole and threaten the members of the medical staff to follow mandated cost cutting measures.
What are you incentivizing your employees or independent contractors to do? And what if those incentives are driving them to not do other things that are far more essential for your business? Or, even worse, what if those incentives are driving them to do things that are clearly detrimental to your business?
Marcus Lemonis of the TV show, The Profit, says that there are three “P’s” to business success:
Many hospitals have strong brands, as do many medical groups. They didn't just happen, they were developed. Brands are a promise of known value and quality. Think Mayo Clinic versus Next Hospital Before Freeway.
Cutting costs is no way to improve any business for other than the very short term. Instead, the key is to invest in your business in order to expand income
Today more physicians than ever before are opting for factory work. Employment by hospitals. It’s easy. Less paperwork (really?).
In a nutshell, Reinertsen states that radiologists should reconcile themselves to lower incomes and simply focus on quality.
