Owning an Imaging Center used to be a direct path to riches. Not anymore. In the past, before the Stark Law, anyone could open an imaging center, provide an incentive to physicians in the area to refer all of their patient exams to the center, and you were assured of success. Today patients are more proactive than ever when it comes to selecting a medical provider.
Whether your imaging center is new or not, you won’t get far without patients.
Patients are at the core of any diagnostics center, new or old. Give your patients a reason to choose you over your competitors by building and maintaining trust through excellent service and great online reviews.
It’s especially important to generate positive online reviews from happy patients when you’re new to the game.
In 1988, Stark introduced an “Ethics in Patient Referrals Act” bill concerning physician self-referrals. Thus the Stark Law was enacted. It was a good law for all patients in the US. Many imaging centers have tried to outsmart the laws but it is not to be. Thus physicians have few, if any, incentives to refer to your imaging center.
However, all is not lost. Patients still have to have exams and physicians still have to refer them. The trick is to get your imaging center to be the main referral center. Some physicians will never send to you. They have allegiance to the center they are sending their patients to.
Front desk clerks do not always want to make changes. They may have been in communication with others at the center they are sending to and feel obligated to send to them. It is difficult to change habits and to get people to adapt to new ways of doing things, regardless of the benefits. How many times have you heard ”but we have always done it this way.”
Your job is to encourage them to give you a chance. Remember, they are very busy and are used to the way they have always done things. You have to give them a reason why your center is better and why they should refer to you. If the physician-employer tells their front desk to use you, they certainly will. If the patient requests your center, the physician’s office will have no choice but to oblige them. However, barring that, you will have to be very convincing if you want to open an imaging center.
Open an Imaging Center: Money, Money, Money
The reason to spend your time and finances and take a chance on an imaging center is, to be blunt, money. If you do not work hard and have faith and confidence, along with good solid numbers from extensive research, you definitely will not succeed. You might as well take a trip to Las Vegas and put all of your and your stakeholder’s money on red.
There is a much better chance with an Imaging Center if you have done your homework and have a method for success. Before even purchasing the land and building your Center, you must do some homework. There are important questions that have to be answered.
If you open an imaging center, who are the radiologists you will be using?
What will be the costs of the radiologists?
Are the radiologists considered to be good in their field by the referring offices?
Have you included the cost of maintenance contracts in your budget?
Have you taken into consideration the time your machines might be down for maintenance?
Have you researched the possible billing alternatives?
Is it cheaper for you to do the billing in your office or are you going to utilize a service?
If you are going to do the billing yourself, can you collect more or less than a service?
Do you have the physical resources to handle billing in your office?
Is your estimated budget for your center realistic?
Do you have a big enough bankroll to carry your center until it is cash flow positive?
Have you researched the reimbursement for the scans you will be providing?
Have you taken into account a decrease in the possible reimbursement?
Have you considered and pursued hospital affiliations that may increase your reimbursement?
Have you taken into account the possible overstatements by physicians offices?
Have you researched the possibility of success against other centers being utilized by physicians offices?
Have you started the paperwork to join different insurance plans?
Do you have a plan to reach the financial goals necessary for the center to be viable?
How long will it take to reach this goal?
Decisions
After researching these questions you need to be critical and decide if the answers warrant opening an imaging center. How much experience do you have, not only running a business but in the medical field in particular? There are always more problems on the horizon that you may have thought about. And it will be your job to solve them.
If you have made the jump to open a center, or perhaps you already have one, it is time to get serious about obtaining patients. You have to work on this every day. It is the backbone of your business. Anyone can open a business but not everyone has the ability to make it thrive.
If you need professional help, get it. This includes all aspects of your business. Often it is cheaper to pay for someone’s expertise than to learn it the hard way. Time is indeed money. The bills do not take a vacation because you want to. You will have to come back to reality when your employees are to be paid. They are not concerned about your cash flow, only you are.
To open an imaging center, you must be innovative in finding ways to obtain more patients. Figure out what patients are looking for in an imaging center. It often relates to costs. In today’s market with deductibles so high, many patients of the past are going without the necessary tests.
Many businesses are attempting to cut costs and may be self-insured. Many victims of accidents want auto insurance to pay their bills but do not know how to make it happen. What can you do to help with their problem and solve yours at the same time?
The answers are out there. You only need to find them.
Gaining knowledge of your local market is the first step in creating an effective diagnostic marketing plan.
Owning an Imaging Center used to be a direct path to riches. Not anymore. In the past, before the Stark Law, anyone could open an imaging center, provide an incentive to physicians in the area to refer all of their patient exams to the center, and you were assured of success. Today patients are more proactive than ever when it comes to selecting a medical provider.
Whether your imaging center is new or not, you won’t get far without patients.
Patients are at the core of any diagnostics center, new or old. Give your patients a reason to choose you over your competitors by building and maintaining trust through excellent service and great online reviews.
It’s especially important to generate positive online reviews from happy patients when you’re new to the game.
In 1988, Stark introduced an “Ethics in Patient Referrals Act” bill concerning physician self-referrals. Thus the Stark Law was enacted. It was a good law for all patients in the US. Many imaging centers have tried to outsmart the laws but it is not to be. Thus physicians have few, if any, incentives to refer to your imaging center.
However, all is not lost. Patients still have to have exams and physicians still have to refer them. The trick is to get your imaging center to be the main referral center. Some physicians will never send to you. They have allegiance to the center they are sending their patients to.
Front desk clerks do not always want to make changes. They may have been in communication with others at the center they are sending to and feel obligated to send to them. It is difficult to change habits and to get people to adapt to new ways of doing things, regardless of the benefits. How many times have you heard ”but we have always done it this way.”
Your job is to encourage them to give you a chance. Remember, they are very busy and are used to the way they have always done things. You have to give them a reason why your center is better and why they should refer to you. If the physician-employer tells their front desk to use you, they certainly will. If the patient requests your center, the physician’s office will have no choice but to oblige them. However, barring that, you will have to be very convincing if you want to open an imaging center.
Open an Imaging Center: Money, Money, Money
The reason to spend your time and finances and take a chance on an imaging center is, to be blunt, money. If you do not work hard and have faith and confidence, along with good solid numbers from extensive research, you definitely will not succeed. You might as well take a trip to Las Vegas and put all of your and your stakeholder’s money on red.
There is a much better chance with an Imaging Center if you have done your homework and have a method for success. Before even purchasing the land and building your Center, you must do some homework. There are important questions that have to be answered.
If you open an imaging center, who are the radiologists you will be using?
What will be the costs of the radiologists?
Are the radiologists considered to be good in their field by the referring offices?
Have you included the cost of maintenance contracts in your budget?
Have you taken into consideration the time your machines might be down for maintenance?
Have you researched the possible billing alternatives?
Is it cheaper for you to do the billing in your office or are you going to utilize a service?
If you are going to do the billing yourself, can you collect more or less than a service?
Do you have the physical resources to handle billing in your office?
Is your estimated budget for your center realistic?
Do you have a big enough bankroll to carry your center until it is cash flow positive?
Have you researched the reimbursement for the scans you will be providing?
Have you taken into account a decrease in the possible reimbursement?
Have you considered and pursued hospital affiliations that may increase your reimbursement?
Have you taken into account the possible overstatements by physicians offices?
Have you researched the possibility of success against other centers being utilized by physicians offices?
Have you started the paperwork to join different insurance plans?
Do you have a plan to reach the financial goals necessary for the center to be viable?
How long will it take to reach this goal?
Decisions
After researching these questions you need to be critical and decide if the answers warrant opening an imaging center. How much experience do you have, not only running a business but in the medical field in particular? There are always more problems on the horizon that you may have thought about. And it will be your job to solve them.
If you have made the jump to open a center, or perhaps you already have one, it is time to get serious about obtaining patients. You have to work on this every day. It is the backbone of your business. Anyone can open a business but not everyone has the ability to make it thrive.
If you need professional help, get it. This includes all aspects of your business. Often it is cheaper to pay for someone’s expertise than to learn it the hard way. Time is indeed money. The bills do not take a vacation because you want to. You will have to come back to reality when your employees are to be paid. They are not concerned about your cash flow, only you are.
To open an imaging center, you must be innovative in finding ways to obtain more patients. Figure out what patients are looking for in an imaging center. It often relates to costs. In today’s market with deductibles so high, many patients of the past are going without the necessary tests.
Many businesses are attempting to cut costs and may be self-insured. Many victims of accidents want auto insurance to pay their bills but do not know how to make it happen. What can you do to help with their problem and solve yours at the same time?
The answers are out there. You only need to find them.
Gaining knowledge of your local market is the first step in creating an effective diagnostic marketing plan.
Marketing to physicians should be a cornerstone of any imaging center’s overall strategy.
Effectively marketing to physicians comes down to professional relationships. Building and maintaining relationships with both current and prospective referring physicians is the name of the game. Email is an effective and surprisingly personal method for doing just that.
But what should your radiology email marketing convey? When should you send them? And how do you determine what’s working and what’s not?
Needless to say, setting up automated email funnels for various groups can be tricky. Today we are here to help you build your roadmap to email success.
But before we dive in, remember, your marketing is only as good as your reputation.
If your reviews are less than stellar, not only will patients look elsewhere for care, physicians will look elsewhere when sending referrals.
Writing physician emails to increase patient referrals
First and foremost, your focus should be on your physician emails. Since doctors are the ones referring patients to your facility for diagnostic tests, they need to be your focus. As a diagnostic center, one of your most valuable relationships is with referring physicians.
There are three groups of physicians to consider here.
Potential relationships: Doctors who have not referred anyone to you, but that you would like to build a relationship with. (Cold leads)
Previous relationships:Doctors who have referred patients in the past, but not within the last few months. (Warm leads)
Current relationships:Doctors that have recently referred patients. (Hot leads)
Each of these groups needs to have their own automation funnel which we will go over next.
New Physicians: Using a radiology newsletter to build relationships
Gaining traction with a provider that has never referred to your center is the most difficult group to engage so it’s very important that you are selective with the content you include in your radiology newsletters to these offices.
For radiology email marketing, the most important question you can ask yourself here is:
How can I best provide value to the person I am reaching out to?
Here are some proven tactics to use:
Personalize each email by medical specialization. By targeting the physician’s specialty you can provide information that is specific and therefore most useful to that office.
Let them know you researched them. If you’re sending cold emails you don’t want people to think you’re emailing every doctor this side of the Mississippi, but that you chose to reach out to them for a reason (which should be the truth anyway). Tell the referring provider exactly why you chose to reach out to them. These reasons could be:
You have a relationship with one of their partners
Introduce your facility. Let them know who you are and why they may be interested in building a relationship with your radiology center. This is your chance to focus on your strengths.
Ask them a question. Give them an opportunity to tell you what they are looking for or what they are having trouble with. You can send out a survey asking things like:
What difficulties do you face when referring patients to a diagnostic facility?
What are the biggest factors you consider when choosing a facility to refer patients to?
Important note: Always be respectful and courteous of their time. When marketing to physicians that you have not worked with previously, make it very clear that they can choose to stop receiving your radiology emails marketing at any time and make it easy for them to do so.
Winning back physicians who have referred patients to you previously
There could be a number of reasons that a physician who has previously referred patients to your imaging center is no longer doing so. Marketing to doctors in this category means striving to understand what caused them to stop referring and what you can do to make them interested in sending patients once more.
Here are some strategies to use when reaching out to this group:
Update them on what’s new with your facility. If they haven’t talked to you in a while, they likely aren’t up to speed on any new equipment, software, and referring guidelines you may have. Letting them know what they missed could mean you’ve already resolved the thing that made them leave in the first place.
Remind them of your referral process. Sometimes reminding people of how easy it is to work with you makes a big difference.
Let them get to know your staff better. Did you hire a new office manager? Let people know who to contact to get in touch with you. Giving everyone the chance to learn who’s who on your team will help strengthen relationships with physicians. Putting faces to names also helps make your business memorable.
Maintaining relationships with physicians who are currently referring patients
Making sure you’re fostering strong relationships with currently referring physicians is vital. The content you send to this group is highly dependent on the nature of your current relationship. So, always be sure you’re only sending emails to these doctors if and when they are wanting to receive them. If you have determined that these providers are interested in getting emails from your imaging center, here are some tips:
Tell them something they don’t know. Do some research so they don’t have to. Maybe there is a new imaging technology that is being developed for their specialty or maybe there are some new findings in how to interpret the results of a scan. Find the information that is most valuable to show them you care about their interests.
Make every email personalized. Maybe you have a doctor that is interested in hearing about new medical technology, and another doctor that is interested in hearing about upcoming community events. Ask people not only if they are interested in getting your emails, but also, what they are interested hearing about.
Learn how you can help them. It may be that there are ways you could help your referring providers out that you don’t know they need. So why not ask them? Finding out how you can best help people means you will understand what you can do to provide value to them.
Effective email marketing to referring physicians takes time
Maintaining mutually beneficial relationships doesn’t have to be hard, but it does take work. With these tactics, you can write effective radiology email marketing to your referring physicians that provide value to your referring partners. Every physician’s office is unique and research is an ongoing process. Measure your progress often to find what emails are best for your diagnostic imaging center.
In need of effective and professional email marketing centered on increasing provider referrals?
Marketing to physicians should be a cornerstone of any imaging center’s overall strategy.
Effectively marketing to physicians comes down to professional relationships. Building and maintaining relationships with both current and prospective referring physicians is the name of the game. Email is an effective and surprisingly personal method for doing just that.
But what should your radiology email marketing convey? When should you send them? And how do you determine what’s working and what’s not?
Needless to say, setting up automated email funnels for various groups can be tricky. Today we are here to help you build your roadmap to email success.
But before we dive in, remember, your marketing is only as good as your reputation.
If your reviews are less than stellar, not only will patients look elsewhere for care, physicians will look elsewhere when sending referrals.
Writing physician emails to increase patient referrals
First and foremost, your focus should be on your physician emails. Since doctors are the ones referring patients to your facility for diagnostic tests, they need to be your focus. As a diagnostic center, one of your most valuable relationships is with referring physicians.
There are three groups of physicians to consider here.
Potential relationships: Doctors who have not referred anyone to you, but that you would like to build a relationship with. (Cold leads)
Previous relationships:Doctors who have referred patients in the past, but not within the last few months. (Warm leads)
Current relationships:Doctors that have recently referred patients. (Hot leads)
Each of these groups needs to have their own automation funnel which we will go over next.
New Physicians: Using a radiology newsletter to build relationships
Gaining traction with a provider that has never referred to your center is the most difficult group to engage so it’s very important that you are selective with the content you include in your radiology newsletters to these offices.
For radiology email marketing, the most important question you can ask yourself here is:
How can I best provide value to the person I am reaching out to?
Here are some proven tactics to use:
Personalize each email by medical specialization. By targeting the physician’s specialty you can provide information that is specific and therefore most useful to that office.
Let them know you researched them. If you’re sending cold emails you don’t want people to think you’re emailing every doctor this side of the Mississippi, but that you chose to reach out to them for a reason (which should be the truth anyway). Tell the referring provider exactly why you chose to reach out to them. These reasons could be:
You have a relationship with one of their partners
Introduce your facility. Let them know who you are and why they may be interested in building a relationship with your radiology center. This is your chance to focus on your strengths.
Ask them a question. Give them an opportunity to tell you what they are looking for or what they are having trouble with. You can send out a survey asking things like:
What difficulties do you face when referring patients to a diagnostic facility?
What are the biggest factors you consider when choosing a facility to refer patients to?
Important note: Always be respectful and courteous of their time. When marketing to physicians that you have not worked with previously, make it very clear that they can choose to stop receiving your radiology emails marketing at any time and make it easy for them to do so.
Winning back physicians who have referred patients to you previously
There could be a number of reasons that a physician who has previously referred patients to your imaging center is no longer doing so. Marketing to doctors in this category means striving to understand what caused them to stop referring and what you can do to make them interested in sending patients once more.
Here are some strategies to use when reaching out to this group:
Update them on what’s new with your facility. If they haven’t talked to you in a while, they likely aren’t up to speed on any new equipment, software, and referring guidelines you may have. Letting them know what they missed could mean you’ve already resolved the thing that made them leave in the first place.
Remind them of your referral process. Sometimes reminding people of how easy it is to work with you makes a big difference.
Let them get to know your staff better. Did you hire a new office manager? Let people know who to contact to get in touch with you. Giving everyone the chance to learn who’s who on your team will help strengthen relationships with physicians. Putting faces to names also helps make your business memorable.
Maintaining relationships with physicians who are currently referring patients
Making sure you’re fostering strong relationships with currently referring physicians is vital. The content you send to this group is highly dependent on the nature of your current relationship. So, always be sure you’re only sending emails to these doctors if and when they are wanting to receive them. If you have determined that these providers are interested in getting emails from your imaging center, here are some tips:
Tell them something they don’t know. Do some research so they don’t have to. Maybe there is a new imaging technology that is being developed for their specialty or maybe there are some new findings in how to interpret the results of a scan. Find the information that is most valuable to show them you care about their interests.
Make every email personalized. Maybe you have a doctor that is interested in hearing about new medical technology, and another doctor that is interested in hearing about upcoming community events. Ask people not only if they are interested in getting your emails, but also, what they are interested hearing about.
Learn how you can help them. It may be that there are ways you could help your referring providers out that you don’t know they need. So why not ask them? Finding out how you can best help people means you will understand what you can do to provide value to them.
Effective email marketing to referring physicians takes time
Maintaining mutually beneficial relationships doesn’t have to be hard, but it does take work. With these tactics, you can write effective radiology email marketing to your referring physicians that provide value to your referring partners. Every physician’s office is unique and research is an ongoing process. Measure your progress often to find what emails are best for your diagnostic imaging center.
In need of effective and professional email marketing centered on increasing provider referrals?
However, all is not lost. Patients still have to have exams and physicians still have to refer them. The trick is to get your imaging center to be the main referral center. Some physicians will never send to you. They have allegiance to the center they are sending their patients to.
Your job is to encourage them to give you a chance. Remember, they are very busy and are used to the way they have always done things. You have to give them a reason why your center is better and why they should refer to you. If the physician-employer tells their front desk to use you, they certainly will. If the patient requests your center, the physician’s office will have no choice but to oblige them. However, barring that, you will have to be very convincing if you want to open an imaging center.
To open an imaging center, you must be innovative in finding ways to obtain more patients. Figure out what patients are looking for in an imaging center. It often relates to costs. In today’s market with deductibles so high, many patients of the past are going without the necessary tests. 
First and foremost, your focus should be on your physician emails. Since doctors are the ones referring patients to your facility for diagnostic tests, they need to be your focus. As a diagnostic center, one of your most valuable relationships is with referring physicians. 
Important note:
Making sure you’re fostering strong relationships with currently referring physicians is vital. The content you send to this group is highly dependent on the nature of your current relationship. So, always be sure you’re only sending emails to these doctors if and when they are wanting to receive them. If you have determined that these providers are interested in getting emails from your imaging center, here are some tips: