Having the Right Procedures

To succeed and prosper in today's market you must build your practice in alignment with the dignified, time-proven principles and procedures of success and prosperity. As you do so you must shun gimmicks, embrace the power of honesty, and build your practice upon a foundation of truth. Many of my colleagues don't agree. They believe that to succeed you must:

• Process new patients immediately.
• Treat patients early in the morning, during lunch, evenings, and weekends.
• Embellish findings to increase the patient's perceived need for care.
• Memorize scripts.
• Purchase expensive patient education equipment.
• Advertise and market in ways beneath the dignity of a doctor.
• Increase perceived influence by practicing in an expensive office, living in a pricey neighborhood, wearing expensive clothes, and driving a high-priced car.
• Put patients on year long contracts, reduce fees, offer family discounts, etc.

Suggestion:?To build a practice full of patients who stay, pay, and refer, you must learn the dignified, time-proven procedures of success and prosperity. Start today by:

• Being more thorough while taking a history and doing an examination.
• Being more clear, concise, and truthful about your treatment recommendations.
• Using only ethical, dignified patient processing and management procedures.
• Using only ethical, dignified advertising and marketing procedures.

Truth:?Many doctors feel angry when they think about the craziness their colleagues have embraced as practice-building procedures. They feel angry because they believe it is more difficult to build their practice because they are being lumped in with doctors who are doing these questionable things.

Bottom line:?To succumb to the gimmicks many call practice-building procedures, is a sure fire way to extinguish the passion you had to become a doctor, lose sight of the dreams you had for your practice, and experience burnout which is causing some of our best practitioners to leave the profession. How tragic. How unnecessary!