Clark Wiederhold
2/1/22

Increasing Patient Demand: 3 Simple Tips to Grow Your Urology Practice

Discover these three simple tips for increasing patient demand and growing your Urology practice as a busy physician and business owner.

As a physician and business owner, it’s safe to assume your time is limited. And while your time is limited, you know patient demand is an investment your practice needs to make.

But how do you make time for it?

Here are 3 simple ways you can increase patient demand right now! 

1. Find out why current patients love you and double down on that

Knowing why current patients choose your practice and what they love about it is the key to attracting new ones! Plus it helps you find out how you’re doing as a Urology practice and where there are growth opportunities.

Whether you just opened, or you’ve been in business for decades, patients have opinions about your business. Gathering feedback about those opinions and perspectives can open the key to understanding how to accelerate your patient demand.

There are many ways to gather patient feedback: 

- Ask patients directly about their experience as they check out

- Send a quarterly survey with an incentive for completion

- Perform individual patient interviews with those willing to talk with you

How you gather these insights isn’t as important as the act of doing it. And once you have some patient feedback, it's important that you let patients know you appreciate their feedback and how you're putting their feedback into action. If they see you implementing some of their recommendations, they'll feel heard, understood, and are likely to tell their friends.

2. Generate more patient reviews

Whether it’s fair or not, your patient reviews are being used by prospects as a key factor in their decision to book an appointment. At every touchpoint, encourage your patients to leave a review wherever you choose to focus online (eg. Google Reviews).

We have a different article where we talk about how easy this can be with a tool like Birdeye Reputation Management - but at the end of the day, the staff and leadership have to be bought into this practice even though many providers loathe the idea of trying to play by the Google rules.

an example of Google Reviews for Urology practices

Remind patients how important their feedback is to the success of the practice. If the patient has not yet provided a review, the next stage is via email. This request and patient review link can be easily automated and sent through a template.

Finally, you can remind them via phone call. Your team should have a follow-up call scheduled anyway, so have them incorporate a review request into the conversation.

3. Be social on social

Social media is a big driver of the word of mouth marketing that we've all grown to love over the years - but it's more than that. It's a gathering place, a place where people learn and get entertained. That means most of your patients are likely there, too; it’s never been more practical to include social media as a part of your patient demand strategy.

The platforms you choose aren’t as important in the beginning and depend on your patient audience, region, and what you’re naturally good at. The four boxes to check for most businesses are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But your Urology practice can certainly select one or two and go all-in. 

In addition to setting up your accounts, you’ll want to think about the type of content your practice will post, how often you will post, and which staff members (if any) will have admin access. Of course, you can monitor which channels and posts get the most engagement and then change your focus accordingly.

Your overall investment in patient demand is up to you and your practice.

As with any patient demand tactic, these “simple” tips can be expanded on if your Urology practice makes the time.

But the good news is this: you get to choose your level of focus and these are effective tactics you can deploy now!

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