digital health Archives

4 Tips to Keep Your Practice Busy this Summer

June 9, 2022/in Articles, Blog /by Sarah Kirby

4 Tips for Keeping Your Cosmetic Practice Busy During the Summer Months

Nearly every plastic surgery practice and medspa experiences downtime in the summer. As travel restrictions from Covid-19 continue to lift, people are getting back to making summer travel plans and spending more time outdoors with friends and family. Cosmetic practices are sure to notice changes to their appointment books and possibly a much lighter schedule from June to mid-August. While that can be an unsettling thought for small businesses, we encourage you to make a detailed evaluation of the steps you may or may not be taking to keep your appointment books full and implement these 5 tips to keep your business busy during the summer months.

Start A Patient Loyalty Program

You’ve probably heard the 80/20 rule: 80% of your business will come from 20% of your existing patients. Are you incentivizing your patients to continue to be loyal to you?
What’s keeping your current customers from trying another practice or medspa down the street that’s offering a slightly better Botox deal on Instagram?
Here’s the good news: We are living in the age of digital. Before HIPPA-compliant digital charting software and encrypted text messaging, starting a patient loyalty program meant excel spreadsheets or buy 5, get 1 free card (you remember these from Subway and Blockbuster?) Technology now exists that enables you to incentivize your patients to keep coming back to you.
Studies on customer satisfaction report that 54% of consumers say that they would consider doing more business with a company for loyalty rewards.

Your electronic medical records and point of sale system keep records of patient treatments and transactions and provide the foundations for what can become a robust patient rewards program. Symplast EMR software includes a Point-of-Sale system to eliminate the headache and integration issues for a seamless experience for plastic surgery and medspa businesses.

Follow Up with Those One-Time Treatment Patients

Do you have a lengthy list of patients who visited your business one time, only never to return? What is your practice strategy for follow-ups on initial appointments and cosmetic procedures?
Consider 1-to-1 text and video messaging follow-ups as a standard protocol for new and existing patients. Ask them meaningful questions that show that you’re invested in giving them the best results and experience:

courtesy check and follow up on specific concerns with pics and video
digital copies of post-care and recovery tips
product recommendations with links to online POS
gentle appointment and cancellation policy reminders

Utilize your EHR to create custom reports for your one-time patients and their treatment history and prepare a customized offer to woo them back into your cosmetic practice for additional therapies.
Symplast technology helps you build a relationship with your patients over a secure digital platform. We do this by providing your team with a HIPAA-compliant video and text messaging capability so that your team can craft unique messaging for individual patients.

Launch A Patient Referral Program

Bringing in new customers can cost up to 16 times as much as retaining existing customers, but if your existing patients are happy, why not ask for referrals? Word-of-mouth referrals are the strongest type of marketing that an organization can have.
Give your happy patients a reason to tell others just how wonderful you are and give them an effortless way to do it.

Educate Your Patients

Providing value for your patients is a win-win. It gives your new and existing customers much-needed education to feel empowered about the products and services you offer while credentialing you as a helpful expert. Drive education about the therapy, address cosmetic trends and debunk myths about plastic surgery procedures.

Use email marketing to create educational content. Symplast to pull a report on your services with low revenue generation and procedure inquiries might indicate that your audience needs more information.
Evaluate your low-cost services and offer a compelling monthly special for single and multi-service treatments directly to your patients through Symplast’s Patient App.

Getting started with these tips will help you and your team think outside of the box on how to use your practice data and technology to attract, interest, convert and delight new and existing patients.

4 Tips for Preventing Burnout in Your Practice

May 17, 2022/in Articles, Blog /by Sarah Kirby

4 Tips for Preventing Workplace Burnout

Burnout is a condition that occurs when you feel emotionally exhausted and disconnected from your job. You’re unable to perform your job well, and finding the energy to complete even your most daily, repetitive tasks can drain what little energy reserves remain. But what are the causes and signs you can look for to stop workplace burnout before it starts? We’re reviewing the signs of workplace burnout and sharing 4 tips for preventing burnout in your practice.

Causes & Signs of Burnout

We live in a society where the lines have blurred between the work day and personal time, and keeping dedicated time to unplug from work is becoming more of a challenge with each passing year. In fact, the most common causes of workplace burnout are work overload, pressure, lack of feedback and support from management, and more. Burnout can lead to emotional and physical withdrawl from work and may manifest in some of the following ways:

• having a negative and critical attitude at work
• dreading going into work, and wanting to leave once you’re there
• trouble sleeping
• being absent from work
• feelings of mental exhaustion and depression & anxiety
• signs physical exhaustion and frequent illness
• losing your cool with your boss, coworkers, and patients

Prevent Workplace Burnout Before It Starts

When symptoms of job burnout start to occur, most people bandaid their problems rather than creating strategies to prevent and alleviate the symptoms associated with burnout. We want you to move beyond surviving work to thriving at work. These 4 tips will help you reduce your risk of emotional exhaustion and burnout

Review Your Job Role and Responsibilities

Work overload day in and day out can feel as though you’re climbing uphill with no end in sight. Performing a job analysis will help you clarify your role and job responsibilities, so that you can identify tasks and projects that need to be removed from your to-do list and delegated to others.
Schedule a meeting with your boss or team to review your workload. Bring solutions for shifting certain tasks to other employees, and simplifying practice processes by creating workflows. Together, you can troubleshoot ways to prevent burnout. It might be that you need to hire more help in the office to handle day-to-day tasks.

Create An Organized Work Culture

Creating an organized work culture is probably the most important step that will enable you to leave work at work at the end of the day. Whether at home or in the office, create a familiar and inviting workspace where you can focus on work without any interruptions. Keeping a calendar and other online productivity tools can help you allocate time to focus on deadlines so you don’t get overwhelmed and can pick up where you left off next business day.

Leverage Technology To Do The Work For You

In some cases, having the right technology in place can help your team work and communicate more efficiently, and prevent you from having to hire more hands, especially when money and resources are tight. Intuitive technology can eliminate the frustration that comes with missing patient charts, prescriptions, and endless “tag, you’re it” communication with patients. Don’t be afraid to ask questions like, “could a patient app eliminate patient miscommunication, treatment errors, and streamline scheduling so that I can focus on other projects?” Rather than running revenue pivot tables in Excel for your boss, consider creating dashboards that show high-level data on Revenue, Profit, and ROI.

Make Time To Have A Fulfilling Personal Life

With all that you’re responsible for it can be hard to do, but holding yourself accountable for implementing work life balance is essential to avoiding burnout. We recommend you pick a consistent end time to your business day so that you avoid working nights or weekends. Silence your email and text notifications from work, and limit your daily intake of news and social media altogether. When getting started, have a loved one help you keep you unplugged from work and focused on resting and living life by your own design.

Bring Balance Back to Your Work and Personal Life

Practices with engaged employees are 78% more profitable and 40% more productive. With support from management and collaboration with your tram, your practice can resolve stressors leading to burnout.

Let Us Help You Beat Burnout

Tune in as Christy Perry, our Senior Customer Success Liaison with over 30 years in medical aesthetics, reviews her strategies for beating burnout and how Symplast EHR technology helped Dr. Jennifer Walden optimize her practice needs.

Avoiding Burnout

2 Videos

Symplast Customer Support: Avoiding Burnout with Dr. Jennifer Walden and Christy Perry

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Avoiding Burnout ABAM Presentation

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5 Simple Tips for Running a Smooth Workplace

May 15, 2022/in Articles, Blog /by Sarah Kirby

Productivity and Efficiency: 5 Simple Tips for Running a Smooth Workplace

It is a top question we get from our plastic surgery practices and med spas alike: “What tips do you have for helping my team work smarter, not harder?” And we get it. Every day we listen as our customers share the struggles that a small business must manage, all while trying to keep their employees, make happy patients, and stay profitable. Your business is a small operation, and each team member wears multiple hats. Your boundary lines for work-life balance are completely blurred. And you are tired of plugging holes with no end in sight.

We have put together workplace productivity tips to help you get back behind the driver’s seat for your business day, so you can focus on building your team and improving your practice!

1. Make Time on Your Schedule

Some research suggests that only around 17% of people can accurately estimate the passage of time. How many times have you walked into your office, settled into your workspace to check emails, only to receive an unexpected patient complaint, or receive a text from a staff member with a family emergency? Unexpected events can quickly take your daily plan from good intentions into full on crisis management mode. Before you know it, the day is over and everything you meant to do is now waiting for you (again) at the start of tomorrow.

Michael Hyatt said, “What gets scheduled gets done.” Scheduling your daily tasks including team meetings, marketing, budgeting, patient follow ups not only helps you measure and manage your time, but it helps give you peace of mind knowing that you’ve scheduled time for a task in the future. Just remember, once you’ve made a schedule, STICK TO IT!

We also recommend implementing the 2-minute rule which states: “If a task or action can be done in two minutes or less, do it right away. It actually takes less time than having to go back to the task later.”

Symplast’s scheduling tool is not only easy to use, it keeps you and you team on task with links to your patient notes, billing, and more. It also allows you to approve appointment requests right in the calendar!

2. Brainstorming Sessions with Your Team

Depending on the size of your team and practice, consider scheduling team huddles to devote a dedicated block of time especially for exchanging ideas on topics like product and service bundling, improving the patient experience, and perfecting practice flow. Look for areas that overlap and simplify redundant tasks and paperwork.

Remove your thought filters as a group and talk through your teams’ ideas. Brainstorming sessions provide many benefits for both you and your team:

• It supplies a dedicated time and space where your team can be heard.

• It gives your team a platform to share their viewpoints in a productive, solutions-oriented way.

• Enhances team productivity

• It inspires your team to search for ways to make the business better.

• It allows you the opportunity to think outside of the “manager’s box” with insight from different perspectives of your team.

Interested in more ways to stay in touch with your team? Symplast provides easy, communication tools for your team and your patients.

3. Leverage Technology

Conserving costs is a big concern when you are running a practice, and no one wants to spend money if they do not have to. But remember: In business, what matters isn’t what you spend now, but how much money you make later. It is worth taking an honest look at technology built to keep your team lean and mean. Oftentimes, creating a system for repetitive tasks (called a workflow) can help your team combine duties and accomplish more without hiring more hands to do it. Another way to leverage technology is to templatize your frequent tasks and notes, and to keep those templates handy so you can use them again and again.

4. Take Meaningful Measurements

Practice data is all around you, and it is easy to get overwhelmed by managing spreadsheets and calculating ROI statistics. But is the information you are collecting really helping to drive revenue for your practice? Schedule some time to reflect on your business objectives and goal setting for growth. After you have decided on your goals, create custom reports to help you evaluate how well your practice is performing.

Symplast’s Reporting extends beyond the basics and lets you take a deeper look at your practice to get a true understanding of your retail, overall business, and even patient demographics.

5. Look At Ways to Become More Mobile

Technology that provides instant “anywhere” access to your practice information positions your team for easy pivots when the office manager’s child is ill, or your patient care coordinator’s car breaks down. Beyond that, adopting mobile technology will free you from your workspace, meaning you can leave early to avoid the traffic, do your pre-appointment review anywhere, and lets you stay in-tune and in-touch with all aspects of your practice no matter where you are. Creating a better work/life balance and giving you peace of mind.

Symplast prides itself on being a true-cloud mobile software, for a deep look on how mobility helped one doctor excel at his practice and his hobbies take a look at THIS Case Study.

Create A More Productive Practice Today

Tim Ferriss said it best, “Focus on being productive instead of busy.” Creating a more productive and efficient workplace is possible with the right strategy and tools. We also love this quote that says, “If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan, but never the goal.” Every practice is different. We hope these workplace productivity tips for aesthetic businesses will inspire you to think of creative ways to build an effective workplace and encourage healthy team productivity.

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