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7 Steps to Take to Prepare Your Practice for COVID-19

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, medical practices and businesses everywhere are having to figure out what to do. Do you close your doors temporarily? Minimize your appointments for emergency cases only? Go virtual?

At Fast Track Marketing, we have been working tirelessly over the last 3 weeks to help our clients through this dynamic situation and we would like to lend some guidance to other practices facing this uncertainty. Communication will be vital to let your patients know how you are responding to the latest information. You may need to communicate things like your office is open/closed, you’re offering virtual phone consultations or you’re getting telemedicine put into place.

Here are 7 steps that you should take to navigate through this ordeal:

1. Create a pop-up or banner on your website to show your current status and what you are doing for COVID-19. If you haven’t already started this, you can get a jump on it here.   

2. Send out periodic communications to your patients to keep your practice connected. Consider starting an e-newsletter if you don’t already have one. These will be valuable for both Patients and Referring Doctors.

3. Keep your social postings active. Social media is one of the best ways to stay front and center with your audience. 

4. Make sure your website has next steps (known as Calls to Action or CTAs) for people to take when they are investigating your services. Your website may already have some of these. At minimum you should have a Contact Us form, phone number and a Request an Appointment form.

If you offer elective procedures, it’s always important to have multiple ways for those prospects to engage with you. If you don’t already have these on your website, now is the time to add them because people may be stuck at home and ready to research elective procedure options:

  • Self-evaluations
  • Phone Consultations
  • Sign up for Webinars or Newsletters

During COVID-19, we highly recommending Phone Consultations and webinars for those elective procedures. You would then schedule candidacy exams once you are open for business.

5. Make sure you have a great follow-up protocol in place for elective procedures. We know people are researching. Capture those leads with your CTAs and then nurture them with an automated drip email system and, of course, follow-up calls! We have developed a drip marketing program that is already helping dozens of practices stay front-and-center with prospects. It can be custom-built to meet the needs of your practice. For example, we can build the program to help with follow-up for any type of inquiry that comes in or you can choose just from one of our Procedure-specific Tracks. Phone calls will be crucial as well to keep those connections.

6. Consider setting up your practice for Telemedicine. There are several HIPAA secure options available – a few that our practices are using include:

Doxy.me

EyecareLive

Zoom

7. Continue giving great customer service! It’s important to understand that EVERYONE is dealing with this pandemic. People are stressed. Make sure your staff is keeping a level head and helping your patients through this time as best they can.

It looks like this is the “New Normal” for the foreseeable future. Let’s come together as a community and help each other. Let us be a resource for helping your practice through this time.

Contact Brandi Musgrave to talk through your struggles and let’s brainstorm on how we can help.   

Call or text:  303-731-2634

Email:  brandi@fast-trackmarketing.com