00:00:04:10 – 00:00:49:06
Jay Shorr
Welcome to Shorr Solutions, the podcast, and I’m your host. Jay Shorr. CEO and founder of Shorr Solutions. We are a team of national and award winning practice management consultant with experience running a multimillion dollar cosmetic, dermatology and plastic surgery practice. We’re here to share strategies and insights that will help you grow your practice efficiently and profitably. In each episode, we’ll explore the steps and actionable insights to guide you through your journey to increase efficiency, boost revenue, and decrease costs.

00:00:49:08 – 00:01:05:04
Well, welcome to another episode of Shorr Solutions, the podcast, and I’m your host, Jay Shorr. Well, today’s episode is going to focus on the digital patient journey. What does that all mean?

00:01:05:06 – 00:02:06:14
So let’s define what the digital patient journey really is. Well, it’s the process that a patient follows from their initial awareness and information seeking to the treatment and the follow up. The patient journey is long before they even step into your office. So, you know, you may hear we spoken about the conversion cascade before. And in that digital journey while I talk to you about the patient, follows from their initial awareness is what is that initial awareness? Why do they even scroll on your website? Why did it even follow you on social media? What is it? Is there are intermediate need that they have? Well, they want something we just don’t know what that is. They do. So then we have to make sure that we are aware that what they want, we are able to satisfy because their journey, like I said, starts even before they step into your office.

00:02:06:16 – 00:04:42:14
Jay Shorr
So how does a patient find your practice? Oh that’s simple. Well, it’s called the first click. You know, it’s not like when your patient comes in and you say, well, how did you find us? And I hear this all the time. Even what a prospect calls us to work with us is that you find us. They say Google, I’m thinking to myself. Oh, here I go again. Google is not the answer. Google happens to be the foundation that they used. All right. The modality that they use. So it’s a Google search social media PPC paid ads and referrals. Organic I like referrals. The best because usually people will read it to make it decision a lot quicker when they’re referred. So let’s highlight the importance of organic online visibility. Also known as search engine optimization. Now how do we do that? Well, you need a good website vendor. I’ve had clients and brand new clients. I asked him, where do I find you? Who does your organic and your SEO? And their answer is. And they’re very proud. Oh, I do it. And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking it looks it. So what do we do? Find a good website company or a marketing company that really understands organic marketing, search engine optimization for your website. What does that do? That’s what helps you to get from page five to page three to page two to page one. Because I’ll ask you one simple question. And I only ask this because I already know the answer from me and me only. How often do you ever scroll past page two? Unless you’re doing research, I will go deep into the web. Page two. Page three if I’m doing the research. Actually, this was before, like AI and ChatGPT, because I don’t have to do as much research as I used to. But before what I wanted to do was get varying opinions. But if you are a patient and in that journey you’re looking for a good practice, first you’re going to go to the paid pay per click ads, right? Because they appear first. And then I’m going to go to the organic and even Google my business to find out who’s local towards me. And how do you get there? By optimizing your keywords. And in a greeting, online reviews or Google, Yelp and how they influence decisions. Now, many, many years ago, I never used to really take that opinions that other people had to heart the online reviews.

00:04:42:14 – 00:05:38:08
Now, when I want to go purchase something, I’m not as much interested in how many five star reviews you have, because I don’t know whether or not they’re all legit. When I see somebody that’s got a thousand reviews and there’s a thousand 5 stars, I’m a little leery that all your friends and family, many of them are legitimate, but you can’t please everyone all the time. And there’s nothing wrong with a four star other than it brings your ratings down from a 5 started to a 4 star, and everybody wants as high as you can get. So 4.7 or 4.8, that’s not bad in my world. So you integrate your online reviews and how they influence decisions. But more importantly I look at the negative decisions. If I’m going to buy something or have a service, I want to know what was the experience that other people had, because I want to make sure that I stay away from that. I don’t want that same experience.

00:05:38:10 – 00:06:44:23
Jay Shorr
So what’s the importance and the role of targeted ads? It’s the digital ad engagement. Now where are the targeted digital ads? Facebook, Instagram or they call it IG go Google reaching potential your patients. Now you can get paid ads on LinkedIn. But remember that LinkedIn is business to business, not business to consumer. Commonly known as B2B and B2C, respectively. All right. So when you have a paid at a targeted ad into Facebook and Instagram, this is not going to be a lesson on that. But you’re paying X amount of cents or dollars per click when you’re doing these targeted digital ads. You want to tell your message and your visuals to resonate with your brand and your audience, whether it’s geographic demographic, whether it’s age, sex, sexual preference. All right. Because you need to fish where the fish are.

00:06:45:01 – 00:08:05:05
So let’s talk about website and landing pages. Well first impressions matter. The design and the functionality of your website is really important because the user experience and the mobile optimization, because remember, more than 50% of the people that are scrolling to look at things online are doing so with a mobile device. I don’t care if it’s an iPhone or a Google phone, or it’s an iPad or a tablet, but it may not necessarily be a PC. Or it might. So the importance of clear call to actions is what you need to drive conversions. You may hear the term CTA. It’s a call to action order now buy now, call now. It’s these little buttons. We even do it in our advertising because you want that call to actually be front and foremost in front of the prospective buyer. All right. To drive your conversion. Because remember you have spent money in in the conversion cascade all that does is increases your visibility and your marketing to hopefully get people to click to visualize your site. And yet you haven’t made any money yet. Why? Because you haven’t brought the person into your office and into your practice.

00:08:05:07 – 00:08:48:16
Jay Shorr
Let’s take a quick break. I want to tell you about our conversion Cascade 2.0 online course. In just a few hours, you and your team will learn how to attract more patients, convert more consults, and turn new leads into loyal patients all at your own pace. Along with lifetime access, you’ll receive downloadable tools such as phone scripts, marketing checklists, and conversion tracking tools to help improve your sales and customer service skills. And as a special thank you for being a podcast listener, use Code podcast to get 20% off. Click the link in the show notes to sign up today.

00:08:48:18 – 00:10:36:02
So let’s talk about lead capture mechanisms. There are forms on your website. There are chat bots. Chat bots really important. Sometimes they’re really annoying, but other times if you don’t want to call or it’s too late or whatever the reason is, you may be able to get an answer from the bot consultations and they can be used to capture patient information. And there are automation tools that follow up with leads properly, whether it’s email or texting. So when we talk about chat bot and AI patient care coordinators, all right. There are systems out there that when somebody goes to your website that they will be able to pick up, knowing that you’re on the website and communicate with you. And if it’s trained properly, and I don’t mean just generic answers that it’s showing properly to your practice, it’s going to be able to answer the questions that anybody normally would have and send it back to their phone. There’s a whole myriad of actually phone number that will text back to be the number of your practice or any designated number that you choose. So for example, AI has this program and there’s a company out there called podium, and they have this woman in the esthetic space called Avery, and she is an AI patient care coordinator that helps drive business to your website. So you need automation tools that follow up with leads promptly, as I say emails and SMS texts. And that can be drip campaigns. And if they don’t respond, then they contact them again and again.

00:10:36:04 – 00:11:12:16
Jay Shorr
Now, I don’t know how many of you do virtual consultations, whether it’s telemedicine and virtual consultations that are shaping patient engagement. I love virtual consultations in our business. I don’t have a console that’s not tele. What I mean by tele, it’s a video, a virtual consultation in a prospective client. I love to be able to ensure understand it. So if you’re able to get somebody to do a video consultation with you, shape the patient engagement so that they see you, they hear you and they trust you.

00:11:12:18 – 00:12:09:04
And then you have that educational content. I’ve said this so often, I’m an educator, I teach at the university, and all of our blasts have education and not as much sales. The reason is education sells. And if you can educate people that trust you, that you are a trusted resource, then they’re going to want to buy from you. So how do you do that with your digital content? Whether it’s videos, blogs, have webinars, podcasts just like this. And in our podcast, what we do is we have the audio version to the people and listen to it when they’re walking the dog or just going out for a stroll or, killing time. When you’re going from point A to point B in your vehicle so that you can listen. And we also do them for video so people that can see me. And then we provide personalized treatment recommendations based on patient inquiries. Education sells.

00:12:09:06 – 00:13:54:18
Jay Shorr
So let’s talk about scheduling and booking systems. There seems to be a seamless appointment scheduling system. And there are digital scheduling tools that allow patients to book and reschedule appointments easily. Now remember, a lot of times in old patient confirmations, we used to call and hopefully people answered the phone, but now with the age of this texting, I love it when I go in to make an appointment at any one of my medical providers. They want to give me the appointment card and I said, oh no, no, that’s okay. And I put it in there and it will contact me a little. Let me know a day before I check my schedule, an hour before whatever. But there are systems that actually will call you a couple of days ahead or the day before. And it is press one to confirm, two to cancel, three to reschedule. And I like that because first of all, it gives me the option to confirm. And if I don’t want to call somebody to reschedule, it gives me the option to do that as well. But you can also integrate this with your practice’s EMR to avoid overbooking and ensure accurate scheduling, because you could only schedule for times that are available. We use a system in the business world called Calendly. So what ends up happening is if we give you a link, you can go on to the link and you can make an appointment with us that ties to our schedule, either individually or with multiple members of our team or as an entire team. And it will only allow you to make an appointment for those times that are available. And I spoke about the automated reminders and confirmations because you can send them via text or email. And what does it do? It reduces no shows very, very important.

00:13:54:20 – 00:14:54:12
Offer digital payment options, mobile payments and credit cards so that if people owe you money or they want to pay a hit for the treatment and they can, there’s a digital payment option that you can do, whether it’s on their phone or on their computer, and they can pay for it by either using a direct draft of the bank account or to a credit card. Use these digital platforms for financing options as well, because people love other ways to pay other than having to pay cash or write a check if people accept checks anymore. But offering the digital payment options really today is the way to go. I use it all the time, whether I’m paying people, whether I’m using the Venmo or I’m using Excel. Some people use square, other people use Apple Pay, you know, do it as you wish, but offer multiple options. So this way people aren’t limited to just one option.

00:14:54:14 – 00:16:04:12
Jay Shorr
Now let’s talk about post a point with follow ups, the digital follow up. Use automated follow ups, emails and text messages to ensure that you have continued patient engagement. It’s just another way for the patient to know that you’re staying on top of them. They might not necessarily be buying each time that you do the follow up, but it’s not out of sight, out of mind. Send patient satisfaction surveys and feedback loops to improve future digital experiences. Because if you do a great job, people will tell you you do a great job. If they don’t do it in your office to do that patient satisfaction survey, it’s going to get lost in the shuffle. So we roll the dice and we have a certain percentage of the patients that will do it. Send them a link to your patient satisfaction survey and hope that they’ll answer it. You can also offer a premium for doing a review. However, you cannot do a premium for offering a positive review. All right, that’s buying the review and that’s illegal. But you can offer some type of a premium for people just to do a review. All right.

00:16:04:14 – 00:18:13:17
And then let’s talk about retention strategies because you need to keep a CRM customer relationship management tool that can help you maintain relationships and encourage repeat visits. What is a CRM do? A CRM means that it comes in one bucket from the initial call, and then, depending upon the nature of that call, what happens? It goes into another bucket for follow up and another bucket for scheduling and another bucket for the treatment and another bucket for post treatment. Now, I just shared the 4 or 5 different buckets of the journey where they did book,, but there’s also where they didn’t book. And for example, the drip campaign means that you continue to follow up. So what happens? It goes from the initial call bucket. It goes to another bucket. They didn’t book, but you may have had the consult. It goes to another bucket. Make sure that you keep on top of them. Keep in touch with them and people will say to me, well, how many times do you keep calling before you start up? My age old answer is until they tell you, don’t call me anymore, all right? Because I get calls from perspective clients, whether it was in my former medical practice one. Now, I met you two years ago. Three years ago, I met a gentleman, a physician, an internal national conference three years ago from Canada. And he calls us 2 or 3 weeks ago. And this is I met you at this international conference in Columbia. And, you know, you impressed me. And he just starting with us next month. And it was amazing to me. And I thought, well, why didn’t you use then? And he says, well, I just wasn’t ready. I read a clip yesterday online, actually, it was on Instagram. That was really interesting. And it said when a patient or a client tells you they can’t afford you, it doesn’t mean that you’re too expensive. It means they can’t afford you. So I want you to think about that because lowering your rates isn’t always the answer.

00:18:13:21 – 00:19:29:21
Jay Shorr
So let’s talk about key technology in the digital patient journey. AI, automation and CRM systems. You heard me mention Podium. This is sponsored by Podium by the way. But they have an AI patient coordinator. They have automated systems they have patient reviews, they have text messaging and they have a CRM all in one bucket. There are other companies out there to do that. But I can tell you that all in one bucket, they have an amazing platform. And by the way, they also have phone systems now, patient portals for easy access to medical records, payment history and future appointments. If you allow a patient to be able to lock in, log into a portal for easy access to all this stuff. I know my primary care physician has a portal for me to log into every time I go there every three months for bloodwork just to make sure and check in my baselines, I’m able to see all of my information. I’m able to see messages that the doctor’s writing to me. I’m able to write back to the doctor. I’m able to make appointments very important that your system has things like this automation, automation, automation it’s all in the digital world.

00:19:29:23 – 00:20:24:01
And in conclusion, the benefits of the digital journey are the ability to go online as a patient and be able to schedule, to be able to pay, to be able to leave a review, to be able to have an AI patient coordinator that knows your system, the ability to be able to do everything and meet the people in the practice. And I always encourage full integration for patient satisfaction in your practice, because when you have an all in one, ladies and gentlemen, the digital patient journey will work to your success until our next edition of Shorr Solutions: The Podcast. Thank you for spending a part of your day with me today. Good luck. And as always, God bless.

00:20:24:03 – 00:21:02:07
Jay Shorr
Don’t go anywhere just yet. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure to subscribe so you never miss the latest insights. New episodes are. Released every two weeks. For more valuable information and. Resources to elevate your practice, sign up for our E! Newsletter. You’ll get the latest industry updates, expert tips and exclusive strategy straight to your inbox. Also, don’t forget to follow us on social media at Shorr Solutions. If you’re ready to take your practice to the next level, schedule a free consult with our team today. Thank you for joining us on Shorr Solutions: The Podcast.