Doctors and Dentists Must Find New Ways of Medical and Dental Advertising to Locate Quality Patients

Professionals in the healthcare industry have to rearrange their clinical and dental advertising strategies by trying more innovative techniques to bring in more quality patients to their offices.

Despite the hardships the sputtering economy has taken on nearly everyone financially, many medical professionals are looking to find good, quality patients that may need their medical expertise. As the overall economy edges toward a faltering recovery, quite a few dentists and doctors still discover that they are needing a sufficient quantity of patients to sustain their clinics. This, through no fault of their own, is due to the fact that many people lost their healthcare and dental insurance coverage along with their jobs and are unable to maintain their regularly scheduled appointments. Thus, many doctors and dentists wonder if there are any good, viable patients remaining who might be trying to find the quality care they are able to provide.

To begin with, it is best to establish what a "good" patient is from the viewpoint of dentists and doctors. Most medical and dental professionals want patients who will ultimately take responsibility for their personal health and fitness by taking precautionary measures. This would involve taking note of a doctor’s suggested advice and making more conscious adjustments to improve their own health by eating better diets or by quitting smoking and reducing alcohol intake. A dentist as well as a doctor values someone who is prepared to learn about his or her medical ailment to enable them to take the most appropriate action to make the essential changes to enhance their overall health and well-being. Additionally, a good patient is the individual who values the doctor’s time by arriving as scheduled for an appointment, or at least, phoning in advance if he or she cannot make the appointment.

Physicians and general, in turn, must be practical by understanding that things are all different these days than they were a decade ago. The previous techniques that were used to build and maintain their clinics before, now need to be revised to be able to secure the caliber of patients that they want. To be truthful, even during a bad overall economy, there are many quality patients out there to be found.

"The medical industry is much, much different than it was several years ago," confirms Mr. Helmut Flasch, a health and dental practice management specialist and the director of Doctor Relations, Inc., a medical and dental consulting organization based in Canoga Park, California. "It is consistently changing. The individuals that medical and dental providers are searching for are out there and they are also searching for reliable doctors. However, you need to bring them in by providing a thing that differentiates you from your competitors," he says.

Mr. Flasch states that regardless if a solo doctor could acquire a majority of the patients in his city, it wouldn't be feasible to think that he could service them all anyway. Even when business in a certain area is down by 20 to 30 percent in general, there's still at least 70 percent of business remaining. "Physicians believe that would certainly ruin a practice, and they would end up being correct if the excess percentage was distributed to each clinic within an affected region. The good thing is, that can’t occur in a free market society," states Mr. Flasch.

Mr. Flasch reiterates that dentists and doctors should set themselves apart from the other physicians in their community, but traditional medical and dentist advertising is not effective since too many physicians already utilize that method. Plus, using old-school dental advertising ideas simply by mailing out numerous flyers is not just cost-prohibitive; it only brings in a single patient at a time.

"There are techniques to reach thousands of people utilizing the same budget and amount of time a doctor might have designated for standard advertising and marketing that would probably have only hit 500 mail boxes," says Mr. Flasch. "Also, a dentist or a doctor can make use of another organization's campaign from an unrelated industry to showcase his practice for virtually nothing." This process is referred to as "Un-advertising" and it involves a beneficial exchange between a doctor and his local neighborhood.