Are physician-to-physician meetings effective in driving referrals? We hear from many physicians that they have personally met with their referral sources in an effort to improve communication, build relationships, and drive referrals. When we ask them, “how many times have you met with them?” They usually reply: “once or twice.” We then ask: “How many times have you told your wife that you love her?”  They reply: “not enough” or “all the time.”

Just as you have a relationship with your wife or loved ones — a relationship that needs to be continually reinforced and nurtured with continual communication — your referral relationships also need continual reinforcement and communication or they will tend to whither over time. These relationships are key to the success of your practice, as such they deserve and require continual reinforcement!

The other challenge inherent to physician-to-physician networking is that your peers will seldom be objective with you. As a peer, they will often tell you what you want to hear for fear of offending you in some way. They may not tell you that they feel you/your staff is too slow to report back to the PCP, that patients complain about not being able to get an appointment soon enough after the referral, etc. A third party, on the other hand, is often able to get objective feedback from a referral colleague about your practice and staff. This feedback, which can be obtained through a practice rep, for example, can be invaluable to the true health of your practice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 8:37 am and is filed under All Posts, Referral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.