Case Study 2: Prepare for Rapid Growth
Our results
Automation = More Patients Served!
400% more patients serviced by identifying the bottlenecks and planning for intentional scale
Project Overview
One of our Functional Medicine clients is a virtual practice where he helps patients from various states in the United States. When he came to us, he was a one-person show with a part-time admin and was looking for ways to diversify his revenue so that the income generation wasn’t only on him as the only practicing doctor. The problem was that he had a lot of people seeking to work with him, but he had no real system to convert them into patients based on his schedule. He was typically booked out two months in advance, resulting in a high cancellation rate.
In addition, he had an EHR system which worked for him and his admin, but it was too convoluted and scattered to bring on other practitioners. There was no centralized database to act as the patient portal — some patient-related tasks were in the EHR and some were in other, non-integrated systems.
How We Helped
Step 1:
Our first goal was to offload the doctor’s repetitive, time-consuming tasks. We supported the team in creating an automated educational series (eLearning) that would support in-clinic consultations — almost like a private tutor for their patients. This saved significant staff time, provided much better patient results, and created another revenue stream for non-patients. It was also deployed to support people looking for an effective detoxification program and converted new patients to the clinic at a rate of approximately 25%.
Step 2:
After developing this eLearning solution for his patients, he found that he could scale the practice with more practitioners and teach these new doctors his treatment plan approach. This allowed the business to scale by 300% in less than 2 years.
Step 3:
Now they had a different problem: the business was larger than they could handle because they didn’t have systems in place to support the volume of patients. We provided mentoring and business consultation to ensure all processes were outlined and mapped out to improve training and quality of care, and helped the team establish Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for every aspect of the business. We focused on the process of patient acquisition first and then hired a Patient Care Coordinator to help nurture and book those patients in the schedule while deploying other methods to minimize the cancellation rate.which ensured all points in the process were tracked, the information captured was accurate and HIPAA-compliant, and the clinic could reconcile cash flow and patient actions.
Step 4:
We then expanded the SOPs to all processes within the practice which supported the admin team and gave the clinic an easy system to bring on and train their new team of practitioners. In year two we brought on a number of practitioners to reduce the load on the main doctor and to attend to patients promptly as the referrals came flooding in.
In Summary
There are three main foundations to any business: attraction, conversion, and fulfillment. To scale successfully, it is important to consider which of these is preventing growth. Once it’s clear where the bottlenecks are, then we can develop the process and support it with proper technology which allows for growth.
