Physician Referral Marketing

Physician Referral Marketing

Physician referral marketing is often the number one source for specialists to get patients in the door. It’s also one of the most neglected aspects within a practice.

Like anything else in your practice, you should be monitoring the activities surrounding your physician referral marketing, and you should be investing in its success.

When did you last evaluate who is referring to your practice?

You should know who is referring to your practice, and you should also be nurturing those relationships. Many doctors ‘know’ who is referring based on their daily activities, and a general sense based on observation, but they haven’t compiled any data to evaluate trends.

It is ideal that you create and maintain a list of referring practices and providers, and segment them onto categories based upon their level of referring.

Then, you need a plan to maintain your top referrers while increasing those referring offices that are not sending as many patients as they could.

Outreach is Key

Most doctors won’t visit their referral sources themselves, and many fail to send anyone at all. While it may seem intrusive, or desperate (it’s not), the reality is that outreach works. Whether you pick up the phone, stop by in person, or schedule a lunch or other social interaction, that time investment will pay off in the long run.

Who Does Your Outreach?

There are many ways to approach your community outreach. You may hire someone to act as a dedicated physician liaison, or you may utilize someone in your office and add this duty to their weekly tasks. Or, you may take it upon yourself as a specialist or administrator.

But you must do something.

Contact us to discuss how we can help you enhance your community outreach. Our support services includes:

  • Needs Assessment
  • Budgeting
  • Job Descriptions
  • Training & Development

Create Specialized Marketing Materials for Medical Professionals

The marketing materials you use for patients won’t necessarily benefit your referring providers. You need to create materials that focus on the needs of the referring offices, and how you can help them and their patients.

Furthermore, these materials should educate the referring offices as to what you offer. We’ve seen referral sources in the same building as a specialist, yet they were sending patients elsewhere for certain services for one reason: they didn’t know their patients could get that service from the specialist whose office was in the same building, and even on the same floor.

Schedule a free consultation with our team of physician referral marketing experts to review examples of what we’re doing for our clients.

Consider these Real World Challenges

If you open an office in a new market, how are you going to break the referral habits of referring providers that have been sending patients to an established competitor?

Likewise, if you’re the established practice, how do you protect your relationships from an ambitious group who recently opened shop?

Or, what if a hospital purchases a group, or groups, that have been referring to your practice for years, and now they can no longer send patients your way?

What if your top referral source retires or moves?

Can we help you reach  your goals?

Schedule a free consultation to discuss your goals and how we can help you grow your business.

What do you do next?

These types of challenges require a customized approach.

Reach out to our skilled healthcare marketers and consultants to discuss how we have approached these challenges for practices around the country.