Tracking Referrals

Over the past few months you felt like you’ve hemorrhaged money on marketing your practice.  You signed up to do a newspaper column and ad, upgraded to a “new and improved” look in the phone book, invested in a website and some new marketing brochures, bought your staff their own professional business cards, gave a lecture at two of the local schools and visited several local PCP offices in your area.  Whew…very impressive!

Developing a good marketing plan includes creating a sensible budget and if you’ve earmarked 5% of your gross income towards marketing, you should also be tracking the ROI (return on investment) for those dollars.  Many times, when we ask doctors the question, “which of your tactics were most productive?” we get blank stares.  Oh, they’ll make an attempt to guess, but the truth is, unless a reliable tracking system in place, that return is only speculation and as a result future dollars are in jeopardy of not appropriately being allocated.

It is simple to track your referrals.  Use the built-in systems that your software offers, or track them manually:

• First, make sure your new patient registration form asks the question: “Who referred you to our office?” Very important!
  
• Next, probe their response to that question.  In other words, clarify that “my brother” didn’t really mean “my brother visited your website on the internet when he was searching for a podiatrist.”  In this case, the referral reflects the website, not the brother.
  
• Create a referral check-off sheet either on paper or in Excel.  At the top of the sheet, list all potential referral sources, such as: doctor referral, other patients, lectures, website, newspaper ads, telephone book, Insurance, other , etc., as well as a welcome letter sent and a thank you letter sent column.
  
• As each new patient presents to your office, place their names in a column down the left side of the referral sheet and a check in the column that represents how they were referred. e.g.:

• Check the appropriate column after you’ve sent that patient a “welcoming” letter.  This letter is your opportunity to formally welcome them to your practice, introduce them to your services, your patient hours, your website, your staff…anything you desire. You’ve got their ear.  Use it wisely.  It’s best if you can send it by email so you can insert a link directly to your website, encouraging them to visit.
  
• Check the letter sent column after you have acknowledged and thanked the person who referred them to your office via mail, email or fax and encourage their continued referrals.
  
• It actually would be beneficial to go one step further in tracking your doctor referrals.  Keep a separate listing of each of them by name.  It is good to know which doctors are referring a great deal of patients (so you can appropriately thank them by formal letter at the end of the year) and which are not (so you can make every effort to contact them and build -or mend- a better relationship.)
  

At the end of each year, you can take the statistics from this system and create an annual referral report and run year-to-year comparisons that will indicate your marketing strengths and weaknesses, your ROI and practice growth.  Your staff can easily take control of this task, start to finish.  Rely on guesswork no more…start tracking today!