With a growing need for medical and healthcare services, there is always a great benefit to expanding a healthcare business. Here are five simple tips to expand your healthcare business.
Social media
The first tip to help expand your healthcare business begins with a question, “are you on social media?” Because if the answer is yes, then you’re already on the right path. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool in today’s information age. People, especially from the younger generations, practically consume media and information exclusively from social media. Just go ahead and ask people where they get their news. Is it from newspapers? Watching the news? Chances are, they get something as basic as news from social media.
This also works in advertising and branding. Social media is the place to be. In a competitive industry such as healthcare, having a social media presence is imperative as it is a big way of telling the world you exist. Having a social media presence is an easy way for people to find you, learn about you, and hopefully get interested in you.
Technology
We are in the age where businesses that do not conform to modern technology will be left behind. Just like Kodak not getting into digital photography, or Nokia staying the same, your decision to ignore the changes in technology can be detrimental to the future of your business. An easy way to expand, and just to stay competitive, in the healthcare business is to embrace and integrate technology into the business.
How can this be done? Technology integration doesn’t have to be too complicated in your healthcare business, as Stoneridge Partners explains. The necessary technology should just be what people already expect from businesses. For example, the most basic form of technology that a business can get is to just have a website. Nowadays, having a website for a business should be the prerequisite as almost everyone looks things up online. Having no website for your business won’t help at all as people will just look up other similar businesses that do have websites.
Aside from having a website, it has to have some functionality to it as well such as having a portal in the website that allows people to set appointments. This is a very minor form of technological integration that people may not necessarily especially appreciate, but something they would very much notice if it isn’t there.
Another way to embrace technology include sending sms reminders for people who have set appointments. These are also far from the most complicated technology present, but still a highly effective form of integration. Another way is to simply send lab results or related materials via email. This not only makes it more convenient for the employees, but also for people who do not have to go back to simply get the results.
Online reviews
If it hasn’t been clear yet to this point, it is extremely imperative to make use of current tools and platforms for businesses to be successful. An easy tip for expanding your healthcare business is to get into online reviews. Online reviews are basically reviews and experiences of previous patients that are visible to everyone on the internet. Though this may seem daunting and scary, it is by far one of the best metrics and tools by which to get more people into your healthcare business.
Again, in competitive markets, people want to do research before deciding where to go. If people do extensive research through reading reviews just to decide where to have lunch, they would also do the same for more important matters such as deciding where to get healthcare coverage, laboratory tested, or a doctor’s appointment.
There are numerous online platforms for reviews for physicians and having a high score or rating is necessary. Whenever you get a low rating, especially if you have a recurring complaint, it is important to nip that in the bud. Use the review platform for improving your service.
Expand your services
The number of services that your business offers greatly affects the number of people you can attract. In healthcare businesses, expanding services can include the addition of physicians of different specialties. For example, while an obstetrician-gynecologist can cater to women and expectant mothers, the addition of a pediatrician can invite those women back once they have children.
Another way to expand healthcare services within the same line of industry is by putting up a drugstore. Especially if the drugstore is connected to a hospital or a clinic, then the addition of a drugstore is an easy and convenient addition.
You can also expand the services of a healthcare business by adding testing capacities in the laboratory. A medical laboratory routinely processes samples and tests them for various parameters and diseases. Having the ability to test for more of these will greatly help attract people looking for those particular services.
Expand the market
Ultimately, expanding the market for your healthcare business will be the goal of expansion. So how can a healthcare business expand their market? This is actually pretty common and there are numerous ways to do these.
Expanding the market can simply mean getting your name out there. Notice how many businesses host running events? Charity events? All those different events attract different kinds of people and expose them to your name. For someone who is just interested in joining running events such as 5ks, they may not have heard about your business before, but they will surely be familiar with your business after.
Conclusion
These are just a few of many tips that you can follow to expand your healthcare business, but these already go a long way. Simply having a social media presence, being timely with technology, and actively expanding services should be more than enough to begin your journey towards expansion.
Throughout the year, our writers feature fresh, in-depth, and relevant information for our audience of 40,000+ healthcare leaders and professionals. As a healthcare business publication, we cover and cherish our relationship with the entire health care industry including administrators, nurses, physicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, and more. We cover a broad spectrum from hospitals to medical offices to outpatient services to eye surgery centers to university settings. We focus on rehabilitation, nursing homes, home care, hospice as well as men’s health, women’s heath, and pediatrics.
