Sustainable growth is the key to success when operating a private practice. To accomplish this task, practitioners must find a balance between new client acquisition, business processes, and setting healthy boundaries.
If you’re contemplating how to scale your psychiatry practice, keep these seven core considerations in mind.
Putting the Right Technology in Place
Automation is a powerful tool for enhancing productivity and encouraging sustainable growth. Consider what tools you have in place currently and what challenges you still face regarding productivity and time management. Determine whether your current medical office software fulfills your Psychiatry EMR needs.
Implementing programs like RevenueXL can help you automate client onboarding, streamline paperwork, and simplify payment processing. By having a centralized portal for managing your practice, you can open up countless hours to take on more clients.
Hiring the Right Team
Having the right team in place goes a long way when trying to scale your practice. You must have an engaged team of employees to interact with clients and manage those tasks that can’t be automated. Find someone you trust to handle the tasks you delegate while interacting with the utmost care and compassion.
You may also want to consider opening space for other practitioners within your practice. This strategy can help you handle more traffic without additional effort on your part.
Knowing When to Outsource
Many psychiatrists see the value of working with a virtual assistant to handle simple tasks, like email correspondence, scheduling, insurance processing, and marketing. The benefit of working with a virtual assistant is that you can scale their commitment to your business, keeping your costs in check.
Another benefit of outsourcing to a virtual assistant is that you don’t have to deal with the nuances of becoming an employer, as VAs are contract workers with businesses of their own. This solution is ideal for psychiatrists who prefer to run a small practice.
Exploring New Opportunities
When evaluating growth opportunities, think outside the box. Look at low-hanging fruit or opportunities that don’t require a lot of legwork in new client acquisition. For example, psychiatrists who focus on treating the youth may discover an opportunity to treat their parents as well.
Another consideration is adding specialized services to your practice and expanding your team. If any of your clients struggle with stress eating and self-esteem, you could open your doors to a nutritionist or dietician. Conversely, you could offer space to a specialist in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) if that’s a service that’s in demand. Think of the options beyond expanding and filling your existing client roster.
Creating SOPs and Policies
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) and clear policies remove doubt and help empower your team to work efficiently. They also streamline the onboarding process when you expand your team or outsource to make space for new growth.
Outline how each aspect of your business is run from start to finish. For example, you could have step-by-step SOPs about processing insurance claims with the various providers and how information is collected from new clients. The clearer and more defined your processes and policies, the smoother your practice will operate.
Determining the Point of Diminishing Returns
To effectively scale your business, you’ll need to determine your point of diminishing returns. Financially speaking, this could pertain to the point at which outsourcing work costs more than the revenue it generates. Professionally speaking, the point of diminishing returns is where you get so busy that you aren’t able to give each client the same level of service.
Ideally, you’ll scale at a sustainable rate that prevents you from reaching the point of diminishing returns in your practice.
Setting Aside Time for Self-Care
Finally, you don’t need to work crazy hours or push yourself to the limit to scale your business. It’s vital to practice what you preach and set aside time to practice self-care.
Focus on how you can implement automation and outsourcing before expanding your work hours. With these seven considerations, you can generate sustainable, profitable growth without diminishing your quality of service.
A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.