BPO Make vs. Buy: Benefits of External Marketing Services

WRS Health recently produced a white paper titled, “BPO Make vs. Buy,” which examines new, cloud-based revenue cycle management tools for medical practices. Today, in […]

WRS Health recently produced a white paper titled, “BPO Make vs. Buy,” which examines new, cloud-based revenue cycle management tools for medical practices. Today, in part three of our four-part blog series, we examine the benefits of outsourcing marketing services.

Part 3

TAKE THIS JOB AND SOURCE IT

Remember the days when patients let their fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages to find you? Or maybe you relied heavily on word-of-mouth have patients come to you. These days, with patients flocking to the web to find everything, including their healthcare, it is imperative that physicians market their practice.

A practice must be able to articulate the key differentiators that drive existing and potential patients to them. You may want to attract patients for specific services, such as special procedures, unique testing, related healthcare products, etc., that are both remunerative to the practice and the desired population of the provider(s). Marketing allows a practice to target and communicate with existing and potential patients within the desired marketplace.

You probably don’t have the time or expertise to develop a professional marketing plan. By outsourcing your marketing, you can avail yourself of a professional analysis of your practice’s personal and professional goals, as well as potential opportunities and weaknesses.

You can achieve marketing success by having experienced marketing professionals, who are highly proficient in search engine optimization (SEO), develop a website for your practice. By having a customized, professional marketing plan for your practice, with branded encounter notes and a web site tailored to your specialty, prospective patients can easily find you when searching the web and your practice has a professional and polished web presence.

Additional benefits of outsourcing marketing can include:

  • increased referrals
  • greater online visibility
  • higher patient retention
  • revenue growth

The Blackberry was smart, but the smartphone is brilliant. The same can be said about transcription versus remote scribe services. Remote-based scribe services is the new transcription.

Technology is a big driver in taking transcription and dictation to new heights. Sure, transcription was a useful tool for the dictation of pertinent information, but it was time consuming and inefficient. Transcription has recently seen a decline in use due to the increasing comfort level of using a keyboard by younger practitioners as well as the introduction of higher performing voice recognition solutions, such as Dragon Dictation.

Factors fueling the fire: The need for greater and more accurate documentation, as well as heightened concerns about privacy and security have made the use of dictation not only more viable, they have brought an entirely new solution – remote based scribe services.

A physician’s time is valuable. The time you spend on repetitive tasks such as charting, renewing prescriptions and reviewing test results. This can cut into you time in treating patients. By freeing up time on these tasks, you are freeing up space in your schedule to see more patients, extend the capabilities of your practice and bring in more revenue.

Scribes and virtual assistants are registered and certified medical professionals, often nurses, who are trained to meet physicians’ needs and free up their time while dramatically improving the efficiency of their medical practice. Scribes are experienced so that they provide maximum accuracy and productivity. They cover a myriad of functions, including documenting your patient encounters, following up on patient education, prescription submission, order tracking, and coordinating follow-up activities.