When you’re ready to expand your orthopedic business, set out on the right course by developing an effective growth plan for your surgery practice.
National health expenditure is projected to reach $6.2 trillion by 2028. The growth potential is there, but to capture a greater share of the market, you need a comprehensive growth plan.
The goals and strategies you create now can have a significant impact on your practice’s future. Get started by using the following insights to develop and implement a growth plan for your surgery practice.
Key Takeaways
- Identifying and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) is an essential first step in developing a growth plan for any surgery practice.
- Options for growth include increasing your market share, expanding your offerings, forming partnerships or mergers with other practices, and selecting a growth strategy.
- The three pillars of any growth plan are your financial, personnel, and marketing growth.
Why Create a Growth Plan for Your Surgery Practice?
Growth is an essential component of sustainability for any surgery practice, and orthopedics is no exception.
If you’re like most surgeons, the thought of setting aside several days to develop a growth plan for your surgery practice might seem like a low value task, diverting your attention from your current caseload and responsibilities.
But if you’re serious about building a practice that can last for years, you need to devote some time and attention to developing a plan for long-term growth. You’ll not only learn how to identify and expand your revenue streams, you’ll also determine the best marketing strategy to get the word out about your services and drive more patients into your doors.
How to Measure Practice Growth
The first step in creating a growth plan is to identify the key metrics you’ll use to track your progress. These metrics should help you measure your progress over time, so you can identify when something is working and when you need to adjust.
Some of the most common key performance indicators (KPIs) include:
- Total revenue
- Revenue per procedure
- Average treatment charge
- Net profit margin
- Operating cash flow
- Patient volume
- Patient retention rates
- Patient lifetime value
- Average patient wait time
- Number of procedures performed
- Medical equipment utilization
- Market share
- Claim processing time
- Claim denial rate
- Error rate
- Cancellation rate
- Readmission rate
- Overall patient satisfaction
Measuring these metrics is essential to understanding your starting point, keeping your growth plan on track, and understanding your degree of success over time.
4 Main Options for Growth
Once you’ve identified your key metrics, the next step is to determine which avenues for growth promise the best results for your practice.
1. Increasing Your Market Share
Increasing your market share involves attracting new patients or patients from your competitors using your existing services.
To increase market share, you can:
- Assess who your existing patient base is. Check whether there are particular demographics that you aren’t currently reaching.
- Analyze why patients choose your competitors over you. Use resources like patient feedback to learn what you can do to win more patients.
- Track the market share of your competitors. This will give you a good idea of where you stand in comparison to your peers. You’ll want to note which competitors are performing the best and which seem to be struggling. This will help you identify which strategies are working most effectively and adjust accordingly.
2. Expanding Your Offerings
Diversification is another lucrative area for growth. This can involve offering new, related products and services to existing patients, or expanding your current offerings into a new area of the market.
In the orthopedics specialty, this could include leveraging the related field of orthotics to serve a wider range of patients and act as an entry point for your existing services. You could also add additional services targeted at particular patient groups like athletes or the elderly.
Thorough market and patient research are essential to any diversification effort.
3. Partnering and Merging
There is also significant growth potential in partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures. These tactics involve joining forces with another existing practice that can be mutually beneficial. Merging generally makes more resources available to both sides, including sharing a bigger talent base, larger pool of patients, wider geographical area, and risk mitigation.
However, these partnerships can be complex and have the potential to generate conflict during shared decision-making and staff management.
4. Selecting a Growth Strategy
Which strategy or combination of strategies you choose will depend on the maturity of your practice, the resources you have available, the strength of your current pipeline, and your overall goals.
The Pillars of an Effective Practice Growth Plan
Any effective practice growth plan should include goals and strategies in each of the following categories:
Financial Growth
Include a financial growth plan for your surgery practice; healthy cash flow is crucial to maintain your current level of operations. A strong cash flow will allow you to invest in the tools and resources you need to grow your business.
Look for areas where the value of a treatment plan or service may have gone up, and consider adjusting charges accordingly. Forming a plan for your practice’s financial growth might include hiring a financial advisor to help you navigate the complex world of insurance planning.
Personnel Growth
Your staff are the heart of your practice and should be an important factor when putting together your growth plan.
You should assess whether your current personnel can meet the needs of a growing practice. If your practice is already operating at full capacity, you may need to hire additional clinicians before you can begin to expand.
Alternatively, you can look at ways to reduce the workload of existing staff to free up their time for more patients. Personalized care automation can take on routine administrative tasks and improve your efficiency, thus allowing you to grow your practice without needing to hire additional staff.
Marketing Growth
Now that you have a clear vision of the types of investments you want to make to grow your business, it’s important to consider the role that marketing will play in your growth plan.
With marketing, prospective patients can learn about your expanding services and help increase your top-line revenue. A healthy marketing budget contributes to the sustainability and growth of your practice and can be directed towards acquiring new patients, retaining existing patients, or reactivating past patients depending on your needs and the potential of each.
Wellbe Can Help You Grow Your Practice
Your personnel is the beating heart of your practice. An investment in their efficiency is an investment in your practice’s growth.
Wellbe’s personalized care automation solutions improve the patient experience and take daily administrative tasks off your staff’s to-do list so they can focus on delivering exceptional care to more patients and see your practice thrive.
Find out how Wellbe can help grow your surgery practice today.
The epitome of an entrepreneur, Mark has seen the peaks and valleys of starting, operating, and assuming the risks of a new venture. He’s come up against payroll, had a few bad hires, and even swept the floors early on. Collectively, Mark’s companies have done over $360 million in sales and raised more than $38 million in venture capital, and he has successfully bought and/or sold eight companies.
James believes technology, when creatively applied, can improve our life experiences. Intrigued by the amazing potential for internet and mobile technology to engage us all, James created a business model to reshape personal health management.
Mike Splinter, an electrical engineer and innovator, has played a major role in driving advances in the high tech industry, with more than four decades of executive leadership experience including 12 years with Applied Materials, Inc. where he was served as chairman and CEO, and over 20 years with Intel, where he was executive vice president of sales and marketing, and executive vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group.
Mr. Baldwin was most recently Chairman and CEO of Baxa Corporation, a leader in devices, systems, and software for the handling, packaging, and tracking of fluid medications in a critical care setting. Under his leadership from 1997 until its sale to Baxter Corporation in 2011, the company sales grew from $25 million to over $170 million. As CEO, he led the eight-member board of directors and led a minority recap resulting in Goldman Sach’s private equity group owning 27% of the company. He was also an early investor and lead director in Pharmacy OneSource, an innovative software-as-a-service business that had a successful exit in 2010.