Healthcare Companies: Here’s How the Competition is Stealing Your Patients

If you run a healthcare company, there is no denying that, if you want to be as successful as possible, you need to attract as many patients as possible. The problem with that is there is so much competition in the healthcare industry that it can be difficult to attract those people who would otherwise naturally be your ideal customer.

If you want to ensure you can beat the competition, one of the most useful things you can do is to work out how they are stealing your patients in the first place. By doing this, you can then change your own business so that you are better able to compete in your niche, and hopefully, steal a few of the competition’s patients yourself. 

With that in mind, here are some of the most common ways other healthcare companies are likely to be stealing your patients right now:

They’re using the latest technology

It’s 2022 and as such, patients expect their healthcare professionals to be using the latest cutting-edge tools of the trade whether that be online consultations or artificial intelligence. If you aren’t currently using the best modern tools available to you, then your patients will naturally be attracted to competitors who are making use of Digital Health Experts to improve their practice and offer their patients more. 

Of course, you can easily change this by investing in the state-of-the-art tools available to you. Yes, it will cost your company a fair amount of money, depending on the exact nature of your business and the tech tools available to you, but your investment will quickly repay itself when you are able to better compete with other companies in your industries and attract many more patients. 

They’re great at online advertising

One thing that many healthcare businesses are not very good at is attracting positive attention online. So, many healthcare business that are good at search engine optimization can quite easily corner the market.

It’s understandable that you might not know a lot about choosing the perfect keywords or advertising on Google because you are so focused on providing high-quality medical services, but you don’t have to do your own marketing. There are numerous digital marketing agencies that specialize in boosting online traffic to healthcare companies and the sooner you are able to hire one of them to work in your digital marketing campaign, the sooner you will be able to compete in your niche and stop the competition from stealing all of your patients.

They focus on customer care

The people you take care of may be your patients, but they are also your customers, so it goes without saying that you need to give them a good customer service experience. If you don’t spend much time at all ensuring that your customers are happy, perhaps by ensuring the information you provide them with is as clear as possible or that they can get in touch with you to make inquiries or appointments with ease, then there is a very strong chance that you will lose them to a rival company who does take customer service into account.

If you are a clinician, you probably have a great bedside manner, which means you are probably thinking this does not apply to you, but you are not the only person your patients will have to deal with. They will also be talking with receptionists, admin staff, billing and accounts administrators, and so on. If even one of these people is a bit off with them, unprofessional or otherwise objectionable, it could lose you patients. That is why you should ensure that all of your employees, who may end up interacting with patients, have customer service training alongside any other training they require.

They have testimonials

Most people do not want to take a chance with their health, and this means that they want to choose the healthcare company that appears to be the best. Right now, most people will look up the company or healthcare professional they are thinking of using on the internet. If the reviews are good, they will take a chance, if they are not, or if there are no reviews to check out, they will go elsewhere.

If you don’t have any testimonials or reviews available online, your competition, who do, will be able to effortlessly steal your patients from under your nose. Sok although it can be pretty uncomfortable to put yourself on rating sites like RateMDs and HealthGrades, it is something you’re probably going to have to do if you want your business to thrive, and if you really are good at what you do, you have little to worry about in terms fo potentially negative reviews.

They seek feedback

The best healthcare businesses are the ones that listen to the patients, Not only do they listen to the patients, but they act on the feedback they are given to improve their services. If your competitors are doing this chances are they will have improved their companies to be more effective, efficient, and patient-friendly, which means they will be a much better prospect for patients than you, if you have not.

Luckily, this is easy to rectify by asking your patients to fill out questionnaires or by providing a suggestion box at receptions. Periodically review the feedback and if something keeps coming up, pay attention and do what you can to change your business so that it is more in line with what your customers actually want. This is by far one of the best ways to retain your existing patients while also attracting new ones who are looking for a caring healthcare provider.

As you can see, there are a number of factors that could be causing you to lose out on revenue to your competition, if you can rectify them and maybe go above and beyond what your competitors are doing, you can easily increase your patient numbers and boost your bottom line in 2022 and beyond, so what are you waiting for?