patient communication Archives

Making Remote Healthcare Trends Effective for You and Your Weight Loss Patients

Posted on June 6, 2023 by Karol Clark

Remote healthcare, especially for weight loss management, has emerged as a relevant and sought-after approach to care. Successful implementation requires contemplation, the right mindset, and effective tools.

June, 2023 marks 10 years since the American Medical Association recognized obesity a complex disease. As a weight loss professional, you understand that obesity is a complex disease that carries with it a wide range of health problems such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, sleep apnea, certain types of cancers and more. Thus, it is no surprise that, while in-person weight management treatments continue to be important, new technologies such as telehealth, wearable devices and mobile apps offer opportunities to enhance obesity care, while improving access to care.

While remote care is not for every patient or practitioner, when utilized properly, it can provide an effective and convenient way of providing education, real-time monitoring, counseling, support, and accountability.

Below are some of the emerging remote health care trends impacting nearly every aspect of obesity treatment by weight loss practitioners and their teams.

Virtual Consultations and Telemedicine

Telehealth consultations have become increasingly popular, offering a convenient and accessible way for healthcare professionals to connect with their patients. For weight loss management, virtual consultations allow you to conduct initial assessments, discuss goals, provide personalized guidance, and track progress. By leveraging video conferencing tools, you can maintain regular contact with your patients, offer timely support, and address any concerns they may have.

Wearable Technology and Mobile Health Apps

The integration of mobile apps and wearable devices has transformed the weight loss journey for patients. These tools enable individuals to monitor their physical activity, track their calorie intake, set goals, and receive real-time feedback. As a healthcare professional, you can recommend reputable apps and devices that align with your patients’ needs. By reviewing their progress remotely, you can provide personalized recommendations and adjust strategies to ensure effective weight loss outcomes.

Virtual Support

Support groups have long been recognized as an essential element of successful weight loss journeys. Remote healthcare now enables the creation of virtual support groups, connecting individuals who share similar goals and struggles. By facilitating online forums or video conferences, you can foster a sense of community among your patients. This support network will offer encouragement, motivation, and a platform for sharing experiences and challenges, making the weight loss process more enjoyable and effective.

Remote Monitoring & Data Analysis

Remote monitoring devices, such as smart scales and blood pressure monitors, enable patients to track vital health metrics from the comfort of their homes. As a healthcare professional, you can access this data remotely and analyze trends to gain valuable insights into your patients’ progress. By identifying patterns, you can make informed decisions, offer personalized interventions, and celebrate milestones. Regular remote monitoring empowers both you and your patients to take proactive steps towards achieving their weight loss goals.

Continuous Education & Communication

Remote healthcare allows you to stay connected with your weight loss patients through various digital channels, such as emails, chat platforms, or patient portals. Utilize these communication channels to provide continuous education on nutrition, exercise, and behavior modification strategies. Sharing relevant articles, videos, or webinars can help your patients stay motivated and well-informed throughout their weight loss journey. By being readily available to address questions and concerns, you can foster a strong patient-provider relationship, ensuring their success.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing remote healthcare by enabling advanced data analysis, diagnostics, and personalized treatment recommendations. AI-powered algorithms can analyze large datasets, identify patterns, and make predictions, aiding healthcare professionals in diagnosing diseases, identifying risk faction, and optimizing treatment plans. These technologies enhance the accuracy and efficiency of remote healthcare, leading to improved patient outcomes and more informed decision-making.

The implementation of remote healthcare trends in weight loss management opens up new possibilities for healthcare professionals and their patients. Embracing telehealth consultations, mobile apps, virtual support groups, remote monitoring, and continuous education can significantly enhance your ability to support your patients effectively. By leveraging these tools, you can empower individuals to take control of their weight loss journey, achieve their goals, and ultimately lead healthier lives. Embrace the power of remote healthcare and witness the transformative impact it can have on your patients and your practice.

If you are looking for an all-in-one platform for implementing such remote healthcare education and communication services, you can learn more at https://www.pronexinc.com/

About the Author: Karol Clark, MSN, RN, is a best-selling author who has a passion for helping physicians integrate effective, profitable weight loss services and retail sales into their practice while improving patient outcomes and enjoying the journey along the way. Her use of non-traditional (easy to implement) medical marketing strategies, along with her dedication to a positive ROI makes her a uniquely different and sought-after weight loss business consultant. Karol is the CEO of Weight Loss Practice Builder and the exclusive membership program for weight loss practitioners, www.BariatricBusinessAccelerator.com. She has more than 20 years of experience working with surgical and medical weight loss physicians and their teams helping them simplify creation of a profitable and enjoyable bariatric practice.

How to Increase Referrals for Your Weight Loss Practice

Posted on May 8, 2023May 8, 2023 by Karol Clark

Referrals are an effective strategy for attracting new patients and growing your weight loss practice.

Having a consistent stream of new patient referrals is a great compliment to you and your team. Sometimes it may feel as if referral patterns are already established within health systems and medical groups. However, there are always opportunities to influence positive referral patterns for your weight loss practice.

Referral Sources

To start, it helps to determine your current and potential referral sources. This allows you to identify missed opportunities as well as what is working well.

When you consider your current and potential referral sources, think about where your patients seek advice or information prior to finding you. Most commonly this includes:

Patients/Word of Mouth: Patients who have had a great experience are likely to tell others and openly share their positive opinions.
Family & Friends: It is common for patients to ask trusted family and friends for their opinion regarding practitioners and related weight loss services.
Online Research & Reviews: Online research and reviews tends to be one of the most common ways people will discover you and your weight loss services. Patients tend to search for services, read online reviews, check credentials, make comparisons (and often decisions) before they ever reach out to you directly.
Other Physicians and Specialists: Referrals from other physicians and specialists is one of the other common sources of patients for many physician practices. This is more likely to be the case if they see repetitive positive weight loss outcomes experienced by their patients that utilize your services.
Drive-By: While location isn’t necessarily important for every specialty, it can be very helpful for weight loss practitioners since it increases awareness for those who have weight loss top of mind. When they see your signage on a regular basis, you readily come to mind as they contemplate their care decision.
Hospitals and Clinics: Depending upon your location and how active you are with your local hospitals and clinics, they can be a good source of new patient referrals.
Insurance companies: Insurance companies can refer patients seeking weight loss to a physician practice, particularly if they are in their network of providers.

All of these can be great referral sources for your weight loss practice. If you aren’t documenting exactly where your patients are finding you, begin there. This data is invaluable in order to determine the most impactful actions you can take moving forward and measure the impact of your efforts.

How to Increase Referrals

The process of obtaining referrals, processing referrals, thanking referrals, and nurturing your best referral sources often gets put on the back burner (or taken for granted). You are busy! This makes it easy to be bogged down with the day-to-day operations of your practice or get overwhelmed with determining how to create an efficient referral system. It is often easier to simply accept whatever referrals you get instead of actively seeking additional quality referrals.

The actions below will help you and your team accelerate your efforts when it comes to obtaining more referrals and growing your weight loss practice.

1. Back to Basics: While likely second nature for you, it is important to ensure that you and your team review the basics of what creates effortless and natural referral patterns. The basic ingredients include:

Provide Outstanding Patient Care: The foundation of your weight loss practice is your outstanding patient care. Delivering personalized, compassionate, and effective care to your patients leaves a positive impression and creates a natural desire for them to share their experience with others who seek the same outcome.

Establish Positive Relationships: Your patients remember how you made them feel throughout their journey to better health. Getting to know them on a personal level and providing the education, support and accountability they may or may not realize they need goes a long way.

Facilitate Desired Outcomes: Help your patients set realistic goals that guide them to their desired outcome. Provide them with the tools and resources they need to attain long-term success. When patients feel empowered and informed, they are more likely to appreciate your expertise and accountability. This also increases the likelihood of them sharing their positive experience and referring others who desire similar outcomes.

Involve Your Team: Your team is your reputation. They are also the best resource for establishing and systematizing your entire referral process. While one person may oversee the referral system, everyone plays an important role in making it successful.

2. Identify Your Ideal Referral Sources: It is important for you to determine your best referral sources. For weight loss practitioners, this typically includes successful patients, referring physicians and some local groups. For your patients, in addition to having ‘referral’ prompts such as literature around your office about how to refer friends/family and testimonials on your walls, you will want to identify what patients you (your team) wish to approach for a referral. The best time to ask for a referral is typically when they are the happiest. For surgery patients, this is usually at 6 months, 9 months or 1 year. For medical patients, it is when they are ecstatic about their results and telling your all about the positive impact weight loss has had on their life. For referring physicians/groups, select those that want/need their patients to lose weight such as prior to a surgery to improve safety and enhance the patient’s outcome. This tends to be plastic surgeons and orthopedic surgeons as well as bariatric surgeons if they do not have an established medical weight loss program. For local groups/businesses, select ones that are looking for educational offerings/programs and have the demographic you desire to serve.

3. Systematize Your Referral Process: Predictability comes with established systems. You and your team need to make it easy for patients and other providers to refer patients to you and your practice. Involve your team and make sure someone takes ownership for setting up the system and tracking results. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Since some people are more traditional and others more tech savvy, it helps to provide both written and electronic ways for the referral to be made. What is simple for THEM is what will get done. You can tie in an incentive if you desire. If you do, rewarding both the person referring and the person referred is a nice gesture. However, most referring patients and practitioners do not expect something in return for sending you a referral – often a simple written ‘thank you’ means the most.

4. Showcase Your Results: Another great way to obtain more referrals is to showcase the results of your happy patients. For patients, if they are happy enough to refer other patients to you, they are likely more than willing to write an online review that can be showcased online as well as in your office with their comments and photo. Always obtain their permission. For referring physicians, be sure to communicate regularly to them regarding the progress of the patients they have referred to you. Send them a kind thank you note as well.

Building a strong referral program takes time and effort. However, it is a valuable tool for growing your practice. You can also automate the process by leveraging technology. If you are interested in learning more about how to leverage all-in-one software solutions that simplifies your efforts, feel free to schedule a no pressure informative demo by clicking here.

About the Author: Karol Clark, MSN, RN, is a best-selling author who has a passion for helping physicians integrate effective, profitable weight loss services and retail sales into their practice while improving patient outcomes and enjoying the journey along the way. Her use of non-traditional (easy to implement) medical marketing strategies, along with her dedication to a positive ROI makes her a uniquely different and sought-after weight loss business consultant. Karol is the CEO of Weight Loss Practice Builder and the exclusive membership program for weight loss practitioners, www.BariatricBusinessAccelerator.com. She has more than 20 years of experience working with surgical and medical weight loss physicians and their teams helping them simplify creation of a profitable and enjoyable bariatric practice.

How to Streamline Patient Care & Education in Your Weight Loss Surgery Practice Without Losing Your Personal Touch

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Karol Clark

Do you ever feel like you are saying the same things over and over to your weight loss surgery patients, yet have avoided streamlining your education and other functions of your practice because it may seem too impersonal? Here are some effective ways to streamline your education and patient care while improving engagement.

As a busy weight loss practitioner, your time is one of your greatest assets. This is also the case for your entire team. And, while education is an integral part of a successful outcome for your weight loss surgery patients, wouldn’t it be helpful if you could provide the perfectly timed education and accountability your patients need while saving you and your team time? It has never been as easy as it is today. This applies to streamlining your patient care process as well without losing your personal touch.

While it may take some time to set your system up, it is well worth it. Streamlining your patient care and education can improve patient outcomes, increase patient satisfaction, improve office efficiency, create predictability, and reduce your overall costs.

Below are five ways to streamline your patient care and education while maintaining your personal touch:

1. Create Educational Assets: Creating standardized educational assets for the education and guidance you and your team provide every day. This includes assets such as webinars, videos, e-books, PDF guides, purposeful automated e-mails or a combination. A great use of such assets is timed distribution to your patients at just the right time in their journey to keep them informed and your practice top of mind. It is also a great way to address commonly asked questions, while anticipating their needs every step of the way. You can even leverage your content by putting your pre-operative and post-operative education into an actual book and use helpful tips from your content in your social media marketing plan to attract new patients. Leveraging your content in such ways also saves you time, increases the consistency of your message, allows your patients to review the information when convenient for them, and allows you to track their progress – all while setting your practice apart from your competitors. Start with creation of one type of asset and if desired, you can create additional educational assets that can be available in various learning formats. Then present them electronically or in person to your patients at just the right time before or after surgery. Automation, mixed with personal contact has been found to be extremely helpful.
2. Maximize Use of Technology: Technology can be frustrating at times. However, when you find what works for you and maximize its use, it can transform your life and practice. Technology is also an expectation of most patients who have grown accustomed to the convenience of online scheduling, patient portals, engaging video education, prompt text support and everything in between. Finding a solution that combines everything in one, easy to use HIPAA compliant application, simplifies the process even further. Some specific technology applications you can find included in one integrated software solution includes:
1. a. Patient Lead Tracking: Track the lifecycle of your patients from the moment they find out about you and your services. Keep them engaged and educated every step of the way.
2. b. Telemedicine: Offer the convenience of telemedicine appointments for those who prefer this type of visit as appropriate. Telemedicine can also increase your reach and ensure your patients keep up with their follow-up appointments.
3. c. Online Registration: Integrating online registration functionality helps improve demographic data accuracy, office efficiency and timely onboarding of new patients.
4. d. Ongoing Communication in One Location: All of your communication is in one place so you aren’t looking for phone messages, texts and e-mails in more than one inbox. Keep your entire team up to date and follow-up with your patients more efficiently.
5. e. KPI Tracking: You can monitor the progress of your patients with real-time dashboards and outcome tracking instead of multiple spreadsheets.
6. f. Patient Education: You can augment your in-office education with automated (or fresh off the press) educational materials delivered to your patients in your portal, via a membership site, your educational app accessible from anywhere as well as conveniently via secure e-mail or text.
3. Optimize Use of Your Patient Portal: Patient portals are an excellent way to provide access to educational materials, appointment reminders, health records, and obtaining any required documentation prior to submitting authorization for surgery. It is also a great way to keep patients informed of updates and providing ongoing support or links to convenient applications you use.
4. Train Your Team: Include your team on selection and implementation of any new technology. Your team will likely be an integral part of your educational asset creation. They should be aware of – and assist with creation of – your communication plan. Maximize the use of team talents and let them help create and document your implementation systems.
5. Measure Outcomes: As mentioned earlier, streamlining your patient care and education creates data points that are easier to track. You will know where your patients come from, actions completed at every step of your patients journey and key performance metric reports. And you can find these real-time metrics in one convenient location.

Your patients want and need streamlined care and patient education. You and your team need added efficiency and a way to track key performance metrics for your practice and your patients. Creating such a system will benefit all involved while allowing more time for your ‘personal touch’.

If you are interested in learning more about an effective all-in-one software solution for your practice, it’s time to learn more and schedule a demo by clicking here.

7 Ways to Improve Patient Conversion from Inquiry to An Established Weight Loss Surgery Patient

Posted on January 9, 2023January 10, 2023 by Karol Clark

Conversion rates for your weight loss surgery practice go beyond your marketing campaigns. Your focus must also include efficiently converting qualified leads into new weight loss surgery patients. Fortunately, there are ways to simplify this process for your patients and your team.

Imagine attracting qualified patients, knowing exactly where they are in their process to becoming an established patient, improving patient and team satisfaction, while increasing your surgery caseload. Yes, this is possible for any weight loss surgery practice – including yours. Best of all, you can do it without having to use any complicated Excel spreadsheets.

As you know, there are many steps a patient goes through from initial inquiry to their decision (and follow-through) to have weight loss surgery – with you. Understandably, it can become very overwhelming for them and for your team. This shows up in a variety of ways.

For the Patient:

Multiple inquiries
Various ‘starts and stops’ to the process
Confusion regarding their best option
Impatience (sometimes mis-directed anger) with the process
Lack of follow-through
Excuses as to why weight loss surgery won’t work for them even if they are an ideal candidate
Missed appointments
Misunderstandings regarding next steps, required education and fees
Cancelled surgeries
And more…

For Your Practice:

Overwhelming number of phone calls/e-mails/texts from patients
Difficulty tracking patient progress and getting everything required for approval in one place
Wasted time and energy
Confusion regarding how or lack of means to attain true conversion metrics
Cumbersome shared spreadsheets and reports that never seem to be up-to-date
Duplication of efforts due to lack of interoperability amongst multiple non-integrated software systems for marketing, tracking & documenting patient education and care coordination.
Unproductive time chasing telephone, text and e-mail communications with the patient
Less primary weight loss surgeries than expected/desired
Team burnout
And more…

It is time to tame the chaos and improve the patient flow process for your team and your patients. While this doesn’t happen overnight, the benefits are well worth your strategic (and measurable) efforts.

However, before we address 7 strategies you and your team can implement to get started or fine tune, it’s important to address your patient conversion metrics.

Patient Conversion Metrics

Understandably, your patient conversion rate from inquiry to surgery is one of the most important metrics to track in your weight loss surgery practice. However, it is often is one of the most misunderstood and poorly tracked metrics for many practitioners and their teams.

Your conversion rate quantifies potential bottlenecks that can occur throughout your patient process. It is your window of opportunity for figuring out why patients are – or are not – following through so you can make appropriate course corrections and pathway improvements.

Understandably, not everyone is an ideal candidate for weight loss surgery and some may not have the insurance benefit and/or want to pay out of pocket for surgery. However, if screened properly, these should contribute to a small percentage of your non-converting metric.

So, what is a good patient conversion rate for your weight loss surgery practice? Honestly, you should not settle for a percentage less than 75%. In fact, with a solid qualified patient acquisition method and an efficient system for patient conversion to surgery, a higher percentage is possible.

How to Improve Your Weight Loss Surgery Conversion Metrics

If you want to improve your weight loss surgery conversion metrics, below are 7 strategies that will positively influence your results. These are essential for short- and long-term success.

Get the Right Team on Board & Clearly Communicate Your Desired Outcome: The surgeon is a critically important part of your process. However, it is your team that creates the initial and ongoing relationship that guides patients across the (sometimes intimidating) bridge from their first inquiry to initial consultation with the surgeon. Your team contributes significantly to the ‘vibe’ in your practice that not only attracts patients but makes them feel sincerely valued and want to stay. Your team also wants to do a good job. In order to do so, they need to be aware of your specific surgical goals and be invited to participate (and lead) a streamlined process. They need to help you reverse engineer what is necessary to get to your goal. When included, they become a much more active participant and their efforts become more of a mission rather than a job. This reverse engineering typically includes:
1. Who is your specific ideal patient?
2. What is your desired weight loss surgery volume?
3. What is your current conversion rate?
4. How many qualified leads do you need to meet this volume based on your current conversion rate?
5. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your current patient acquisition and conversion process?
6. What can/should be changed in your process to make your goal a reality?
7. What is the plan to make this happen?
Attract the Right Patients: It is impossible to attract the right (your ideal) patients if you don’t define this in the first place. The messages and advertisements you share should ‘speak to’ these people specifically, address their greatest frustrations, show how the transformation they desire is possible, and why you are the best option for care. This relates to all types of online and offline communication such as your website, your social media, your blogs, your videos, your brochures, and your testimonials/reviews.
Simplify the Patient Inquiry Process: The next step is helping people know the next (easy) step to move forward with you and your practice. Commonly called a ‘call to action’, you are giving them instructions such as ‘click here’, ‘ask questions here’, ‘watch this webinar’, ‘text us’, ‘contact us’, ‘join our challenge’, ‘download our free guide to weight loss surgery’ or similar. Patients seeking weight loss surgery are researching all hours of the day and night. You need to show up and have an easy way for them to contact you or access more information about you and what you offer.
Personalize Your Prompt Follow-Up: We live in a world of immediate gratification. Healthcare consumerism has made this a desirable factor for patients as well that cannot be ignored. Luckily, this is where you can combine your personality with technology so you, your website, your social media, your webinars, and customized follow-up messages are available 24/7/365 without overtime for your team. Of course, reaching out personally is a desired and required action, but in this way patients are not delayed in finding out more about you and their next steps to becoming your established patient.
Systematize Ongoing Patient Tracking & Communication: Particularly in the field of bariatric surgery, you tend to follow the same steps and say the same things over and over. Fortunately, it has never been as easy as it is today to automate the process of tracking new patient leads, getting them started on their journey, engaging them in the process, informing them of their ‘to do’ list and next steps while continuously nurturing and educating them along the way.
Leverage Technology for a Seamless (and Enjoyable) Process: Manual processes may work up to a caseload of about 150 surgeries/year but after that (and even with this caseload), automation will ensure a good patient flow and care coordination, less patients ‘falling through the cracks’, increased patient satisfaction, and an ability to grow your caseload. It is best with one seamless system but integrations to a systematic patient flow system can fairly easily be integrated into your current EMR.
Monitor Your Metrics: What you measure tends to improve. This includes key performance indicators you assign to your team. While you likely monitor metrics closely for billing/collections and budgeting, tracking your referrals and patient conversion metrics (among others) cannot be ignored. No matter what size your practice is, metrics matter.

It is important to take proactive measures to ensure you can accurately track qualified leads from initial inquiry to weight loss surgery. The strategies outlined here can help you significantly improve your conversion metrics and help you attain your weight loss surgery practice goals with greater predictability and peace of mind.

If you are looking for an all-in-one online (customizable) system that tracks everything in one place that you, your team and your patients will love, the ProNex, Inc. team can help. For more information or to schedule a free practice assessment, click here.