Who is Your Ideal Patient?

Who exactly is your ideal patient?

This could be a combination of:

• What type/s of patients you can help most,

• Who you and your practice staff enjoying helping the most, and/or

• Whom you are able to make a healthy profit on to enable a sustainable practice for yourself.

Targeting your ideal patient may be difficult in some cases, depending on factors such as your speciality, your location and your referrers. In addition, if you are in the initial stages of building your private practice, you are unlikely to have the luxury of being fussy about patients.

Regardless though, any time spent on identifying your ideal patient type or types, should reward you many-fold with happier, more fulfilling work that may also be more financially rewarding.

Once you determine this, how do you better attract and retain more ideal patients?

What do you need to do in terms of increasing your proportion of ideal patients? This could include:

• Most importantly – clarifying who your ideal patient type/s is in as much detail as possible.

• Checking your marketing (e.g. website) is laser-focused towards your ideal patients.

• Redesigning your patient experience towards your ideal patient. This is their whole experience, perceptions and feelings from their first point of contact with you through to any follow ups and ongoing care. You may even wish to survey a few ideal patients you identify to ask what is most important to them, what their patient experience was like and make any changes accordingly.

• Improving your relationships with existing referrers and letting them know the types of patients you are best able to assist:

  • How can you make it easier for them to refer such patients?

  • How can you make them look better in the eyes of these patients?

  • How can you make the post-referral follow up care easier for them?

• Developing good relationships with potential new referrers who have a higher proportion of your ideal patient type/s. The same considerations as existing referrers apply, but you will need to clearly articulate why they should refer such patients to you. What else can you offer them? e.g. providing education sessions and lunch on areas of interest to them that also combine what you do best for your ideal patient type/s.

We may explore this further in future newsletters. In the meantime, please give this further thought and feel free to contact us for any help with this from Doctors Wealth or our network of professionals.

Even a small increase in your number of ideal patients could have amazing benefits for you, your patients and your practice!