Importance of Online Patient Engagement

So today, I want to talk about the importance of online patient engagement. Modern practices today really need to ensure that they’ve got this buttoned-down because what’s so common today is inquiries coming in from all sorts of different places.
Even if they’re coming in from offline media, they’re still going to check your website, and they’re still going to have a look at your socials. And so they’re going to be ready to inquire wherever they’re at. It’s also very important for you to be able to take that inquiry and log it into your system really from any channel that might exist.

Course Overview

So, you might have heard a lot of different strategies in order to convert leads from the internet or other sources into appointments.

And one of the things we have done for the last 20 years is offer a course we used to do live. I used to go into practice and deliver this course live. And it would require eight hours of time for the whole team to take off from the patient flow and work with me while we worked through my lessons and did role play.

But now we’ve realized that, actually, with the advent of video and the ability to run training programs on the Internet, we’re able to offer this program entirely online and on demand. And the value of that is that it enables you to not only acquire the information but to practice it with real patients on an ongoing basis.

And that really should address some of the challenges in capturing and converting patients online because you can learn a whole bunch of stuff from me, but unless you’re actually employing it in the real world, it tends not to stick, and that’s something we realized was one of the deficits and the weaknesses of the live program. It takes you out of the work setting as opposed to having you actually in the work setting learning and then trying things. That was a better way to go.

Course Goals

So, the main focus of the course has been and continues to be addressing your conversion rate goals. And what is a conversion rate? Well, simply put, it’s the number of leads I get from any source that I’m able to convert into appointments.

Nowadays, these appointments could include Zoom appointments, virtual appointments, and face-to-face appointments. I would even argue that converting someone to a webinar is also a form of conversion. We understand that a significant portion of business growth comes from adjusting these conversion rates. When you effectively optimize these conversion rates, you end up spending much less on ineffective marketing. This, in turn, allows you to allocate more resources to impactful marketing.

And this is truly what it takes to succeed and excel in today’s digital era. The practice that invests the most in acquiring patients within the market is bound to come out on top. Therefore, you need to ensure that you’re not only spending your resources wisely on marketing but also capitalizing on that advertising expenditure by achieving high conversion rates that generate revenue for your practice every single day.

Course Content

So, what’s in the course? Well, we start the course off by trying to understand lead cost. How much is a lead worth?

Because I believe that if people don’t understand what a lead’s worth, they’re not going to pay as much attention to actually converting that lead, which is essential for your practice. So we understand the value of a lead, and then we understand the different impacts that different conversion rates make on your practice results. And so people are walking away with a set of business skills to comprehend how they fit into the overall picture of practice success.

And then we go over the typical challenges that healthcare professionals face on the phone when trying to convert leads. These challenges are inherent in the industry itself, as well as in the overall concept of processing leads and converting them into appointments. This is true across all industries.

Then we discuss a bit about how to respond to leads in an omnichannel world. How do you take a Facebook conversation happening on a Facebook page and convert it into a phone call, and then move that onto an appointment? How do you do the same thing on Instagram? How do you do the same thing on Google My Business?

So really, we have so many leads coming from various sources. We need to have a system that allows us to process those leads and convert them for our primary goal, which is engaging in slightly longer and more synchronous conversations.

And then what we do is we show people how to identify leads, gather essential data because it’s not just good enough for someone to call you and ask you what the price is and then hang up the phone and move on elsewhere until they find a price that suits them better. What’s more valuable is to get lead information and engage that person in a conversation after you have understood their needs and then propose a solution to them. They might then be able to justify the price.

And then really part of that is ensuring that we’re not so much selling and projecting our own ideas and our own products onto people, but rather asking questions. And when we ask questions, we generate more trust because when we’re listening, the prospect believes rightly so, that we’re interested in what their issues are, what their pains are, and what their ideal outcomes are.

And when we know that, then we’re in a much better position to communicate a solution to them. And now we’ve gained their trust that the recommended solution is based on the needs and the outcome wishes they have. So it’s considerably more effective when having a conversation like this.

Practicality and Benefits

So, as part of the course, I try to really ground it in the real world as much as possible because after experiencing so many different scenarios in cataract or intracardiac surgery practices – whether it’s people calling in and objecting to the price, or whether it’s people calling in and having time challenges, or whether it’s people calling in and having bad experiences elsewhere, and you have to overcome those and give them a sense of hope that they won’t experience a negative situation again with you – or even dealing with fear and risk questions and things like that.

So I provide actionable strategies in that course on how to address those very common real-world examples of patient concerns that they bring to you. I believe that taking information and appointments from somebody who already has everything figured out? Well, that’s kind of easy, right? An online booking system can do that.

What I try to teach is how to deal with issues when they’re unexpected, and how to deal with issues that are outside the norm. And these real-world examples really help you with that. We also give you access to bonus lessons that involve really understanding how to role-play effectively, right? If you, and how to measure your progress. Many courses stop short after they give you the skills. They don’t necessarily provide you with ways to practice and also the ways to measure your outcomes. And this course does both.

And it ensures that we’re not solely focused on you learning the material, but also on applying it in a real-world setting. So that’s what’s included in the course. On top of that, we provide you with all the visual aids you might need in order to process leads. We offer selling aids that you can have on your desk, allowing you to jot down things as you’re interviewing a lead, and take notes on the answers to common questions you might be asking.

You can then organize these notes into a database. Furthermore, if you integrate it with our Hattie database, you’ll discover that Hattie has been designed as a CRM system that aligns precisely with what I teach in the courses. So, if you’re using both, then you’re in an excellent position. However, if you’re solely utilizing our courses, that’s perfectly fine. You can use any other CRM to make it work. Nevertheless, I believe that having both components is the real killer app – a combination you can leverage to achieve better conversions over time.
So, since we started delivering the course live and also delivering it online, we’ve had many course participants – surgeons who own practices, patient liaisons who handle patients every single day – come back to us and give us really good feedback on what’s changed and what really works.

And by and large, we’ve received a tremendous amount of positive feedback in terms of how this course really, really helps people do a job that they were never really trained to do. Some people who are real experts and have been doing it for many, many years find that these courses tend to remind them of many things they’ve forgotten.

So it’s useful to reorganize the information so that people have it at their disposal and are able to use it on a day-to-day basis, not forgetting the things that actually worked for them in the past when they were doing them well.

Anyway, I invite you to listen to stories from some of our customers who have experienced the course and who have something to say about.