Top 3 Ways to Lower Team Turnover in Your Weight Loss Practice

There is currently so much focus on the struggle to find great talent that the importance of reducing team turnover in your weight loss practice can be overlooked.

If you have an open position in your practice, you have likely experienced frustration finding talented team members that are willing to work the hours you need at the salary you are prepared to offer. Or, you may have employees who are being actively sought after for other opportunities resulting in the need to make counter-offers that can create angst for everyone involved. Bottom line, recruiting, hiring, onboarding and training as a result of team turnover is costly.

The healthcare industry has been adversely affected when it comes to availability and longevity of quality team members – a predicament worsened by the Covid-19 Pandemic. In fact, Elsevier Health recently researched and compiled their ‘Clinician of the Future’ report with current problems, predictions and ways to bridge predicated gaps in the healthcare industry. These gaps are largely created by the almost shocking finding that 47% of U.S. healthcare workers plan to leave their current role within two to three years.1

To further support this state of affairs, another study shows that ‘if the current U.S. healthcare workforce trends continue, more than 6.5 million healthcare professionals will permanently leave their positions by 2026, while only 1.9 million will step in to replace them, leaving a national industry shortage of more than 4 million workers’.2

Now more than ever, retention of excellent team members is critically important. Here are three proven ways to retain talent and reduce team turnover in your weight loss practice.

1. Acknowledge Accomplishments

While team members may be motivated differently when it comes to loyalty and longevity, knowing that they are doing a good job, a valued member of your team, and actively making a difference for patients means more than you may realize. Yet, acknowledging their accomplishments can be overlooked as the ‘busyness’ of the day takes over.

Studies find that employee recognition and acknowledgement is tied to increasing retention by 41%. In addition, it increases employee engagement by 34%.3 If you have had the pleasure of experiencing this firsthand, you understand the power of taking the time to acknowledge the accomplishments of your team. This sincere communication helps create the high performers you need in your practice.

The main reason acknowledging accomplishments works is simply because it makes people happy and happy team members are much more likely to be loyal to your practice. They also tend to be more positive and likely to go the extra miles for the patients they serve.

Coincidentally, acknowledgement does not need to be a grand expensive gesture. What tends to mean the most is timely, sincere feedback on a job well done. This can easily be done during a one-on-one formal or impromptu discussion, publicly in a meeting, written in an e-mail or ‘old-fashioned’ card, sticky note or quick internal text. Additionally, peer-to-peer acknowledgement for team members going ‘above and beyond’ or simply ‘making a difference’ has been shown to be extremely effective.

2. Build Additional Skillsets

Gone are the days of training your team only for the position they hold today or upon hire. If you are hiring ideal team members, they will not only want to excel today but take on additional challenges and learning opportunities to grow personally and contribute to your practice vision and goals in greater ways.

It is meaningful to them when you are willing to invest in their personal and professional development. This includes mentoring them, providing additional training or certifications via in-house, virtual and in person events, as well as providing team building experiences. Demonstrating a sincere interest in their personal and professional growth tends to increase a loyalty towards you and your practice.

You can accomplish this in a variety of ways. First, you can take the time to meet with your team members and ask them a couple of questions (similar to a ‘stay interview’).
• What do you really enjoy about your position here?
• What is your top one or two frustrations?
• Do you have any ideas/ways to help solve those frustrations?
• Is there a way we can better support you in your position here?
• Where do you see yourself in 1 year?
• Where do you see yourself in 3 years?

Second, when you have new leadership or program development opportunities in your practice, look within first. Determine if there is someone who has an interest and talent for the new position. This also applies to stepping up your social media or marketing endeavors. Often, you will have a creative team member who is better able to capture the success of your patients and the uniqueness of your practice and then showcase it to attract new patients and celebrate current patient success.

Third, once you are aware of your team members goals, continue to support them and, at the very least, inquire about their progress. Investing in your team pays high dividends in the form of loyalty and longevity. And, if they are working towards a degree or passion that doesn’t fill an opportunity in your practice, they become ambassadors for your brand and can often recommend the perfect replacement while facilitating a smooth transition.

3. Clear Communication

Ambiguity creates confusion, misunderstandings and often a great deal of dissatisfaction. Your team needs – and wants – to understand your vision, practice goals and how they fit into the bigger picture. Essentially, they need to understand what ‘success’ looks like for their position and how they can contribute to make a positive impact. This starts in the interview process and continues through onboarding and ongoing communication channels.

Communication creates positive (or negative) human interactions. In your practice, clear communication ensures that your team has the information they need to perform well and helps them prioritize to minimize inefficiencies. However, this is not just about one-way communication. It is about creating an environment – and expectation – that allows and encourages your team to share their ideas, questions, and suggestions. When your team members are engaged, they are more productive and tend to stay longer with your company.

While you may not want to share everything, it is important to be as clear and transparent as you can with your team in good times and in challenging times. As a result, they are better equipped to celebrate the good times and problem solve in challenging times.

In addition to these three ways to lower team turnover, some other impactful initiatives include: critically evaluate your hiring process to ensure you are hiring the right people in your practice; review compensation and benefit packages and update as necessary; support a healthy work/life balance; be inclusive; demonstrate your company values while expecting the same of your team; and cultivate respect.

It all comes down to your team feeling valued, supported and able to contribute their talents for practice, team and patient success.

Another way to support your team is through an all-in-one online (customizable) system to calm the chaos of tracking your patients from inquiry to surgery, improve your conversion from inquiry to established patient, and streamline all patient communication in one HIPAA compliant software solution. For more information or to schedule a free practice assessment, click here.

1 https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1242490/Clinician-of-the-future-report-online.pdf
2 https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/healthcare-workforce-shortage/
3 https://teamstage.io/employee-recognition-statistics/

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 Can PatientFlow® Improve Efficiency, Patient Satisfaction and Profitability in Your Weight Loss Practice?

You take such great care of your weight loss patients.  Now may be the time to give your weight loss practice an honest examination to see where you can update your operations for improved business health and longevity as well.

There are many choices and decision points for anyone losing weight as well as anyone running a successful business.  These choices and decision points can become overwhelming – especially if you lack a clear vision of what you want most or – more commonly – have too many complicated tools and strategies at play.  Yet this happens all the time both in life and in business.

What are the possible consequences?  Inaction or implementing too many strategies at once, poor follow-through, lack of progress, wasted time and money, recurring daily chaos, and blurred vision regarding a solid strategy that will bring you the results you desire most.

In your weight loss practice, each of these potential consequences tend to cause frustration for you, your team, and often, your patients.  For most weight loss practitioners, primary frustrations usually revolve around human resource issues, acquiring new patients, converting interested patients into established patients, improving patient engagement, payer mandates/decreasing reimbursement, overlapping technology with poor integration and/or obtaining meaningful metrics.  Can you relate?

Some specific questions you may be asking when you experience such frustrations include:

  • Is this marketing campaign working or is it a waste of time and money?
  • Why do we have lots of leads and yet my schedule isn’t full?
  • How many potential new patients do we have in the pipeline?
  • What holds people back from scheduling their first appointment?
  • Why do we have so many different software systems and data bases?
  • Why don’t patients seem engaged, understand what their next step is, and feel educated about what to expect and next steps?
  • Why don’t we have more online reviews?
  • Why can’t I get a simple snapshot that shows who is interested in our services, how they found out about us, where they are in their approval process, who is ready for their consult, and who is falling through the cracks?
  • Why are we so ‘busy’ and yet profitability isn’t what it should be?

 

If this sounds familiar, the best place to start is to stop or pause.  Take inventory of what is working well and determine the root cause of your primary frustration(s).  Beware though, because all too often, you may be tempted to double down on what really isn’t working because it seems like your only path or the only path you know.  As a result, you may feel as if you just need to do more, hire new team members and work harder.

Yet, when you stop or pause long enough to take a fresh look, specifically at your ‘patient’s life cycle’, it usually becomes obvious where you need to focus your energy.  This focus also tends to conveniently solve many issues or frustrations instead of just one.  Fixing your patient life cycle improves overall efficiency (time and cost), ensures higher patient satisfaction (team satisfaction too), and creates greater profitability.

Your weight loss patient life cycle – which you need to create purposefully – includes a variety of important phases:

  • Awareness: finding you and your practice in a very noisy marketing world
  • Trust: learning more about you, what you offer and your expertise/authority; public proof of your outcomes in the form of online reviews and testimonials; and relatability/understanding of what makes you different from the many choices readily available
  • Expressed Interest: reaching out to learn more and get to know you even better
  • Conversion to Established Patient: deciding you are the right choice for them
  • Engagement & Ongling Education: remaining engaged with your services (call, text, e-mail, opt-in, direct message online), education, content
  • Transformation: attaining their desired outcome/transformation
  • Lifetime Client & Referral Source: desire for more of your services/products and gladly providing online reviews,  and referring others to you who desire a similar transformation

 

Bottom line – your patient life cycle is at the core of creating your successful weight loss practice.  So, it is critical that you have the ability to track each and every step in one place (and even use as your EMR or integrate with your EMR).  Sound too good to be true?  It is possible with PatientFlow®.   I know this because my team and I have experienced this firsthand and I see this transformational software product making a significant difference in many weight loss practices across the United States.

If you are on a never-ending hamster wheel with too many systems – or no systems – in place and are unable to efficiently track every step of your patient life cycle in one place, there is a better way.

PatientFlow® is an online application that helps you conveniently and efficiently guide and track your prospective new patients from expressed interest through every aspect of your customized patient experience (pipeline) outlined above.  It provides you with a convenient way to securely communicate with your patients via all forms of communication (even directly from your website), track your marketing efforts; customize/streamline your workflow; engage, educate and track patient progress; and obtain real-time custom reports/metrics that matter most.

Here are three specific positive impacts PatientFlow® can have on your practice:

 

Efficiency

When you have every step of your customized weight loss patient workflow systematically delivered and tracked in one place with ability to automate personalized communication to keep your patients engaged and on track, efficiency sky rockets.

  • Your team is no longer looking for ongoing patient communication as they ask questions or follow-through with pre-surgery requirements in separate e-mail, text and phone messages.
  • Your team is no longer sharing and updating Google sheets or Excel spreadsheets trying to keep up with the hundreds of patients in your pipeline.
  • You can systematize insurance requirements for all of the payers you accept and your patient can automatically receive a checklist that can be updated in real-time for them and your team to track.
  • The number of calls to your office decreases because patients know what to expect and everyone can quickly communicate securely in one place rather than playing phone tag.
  • You have everything in one place when it comes time to submit patient information for insurance authorization.
  • Documents can be easily added to your EMR or integration is also possible for automated updates between systems.
  • Your education can be in one place and shared automatically or personally with your patients.
  • Reports are available real-time so you can identify any bottlenecks and understand the health of your patient pipeline at a glance.

 

Patient Satisfaction

When patients know exactly what to expect they tend to manage their own expectations better and feel more secure in their weight loss journey with you and your team.  With less surprises and easy/open communication, you can anticipate their needs and more easily provide them with the WOW experience they appreciate and enjoy.  Their satisfaction is higher and you have less complaints.  All of this tends to improve team satisfaction as well.  In fact, through PatientFlow® you can also obtain real time patient satisfaction reports and more easily obtain online reviews and testimonials.

 

Profitability

When your practice is efficient and your patients are loving their journey and getting the results they desire most, profitability naturally increases.  You are also not paying for multiple software solutions which makes a positive impact on your bottom line.  Happy patients, more referrals, higher team productivity and lower costs all add up to more predictable profitability for you and your practice.

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.

 

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.

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

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.

  1. 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?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.

 

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.

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