Drive Your Radiology Practice Growth Through Improved Physician Engagement

As a radiology practice or diagnostic imaging center, your physician referral volume directly correlates to your practice’s overall success. The more you actively and effectively engage with referring physicians, the more referrals you will receive. In turn, these strong relationships and accelerated rate of referrals will grow your appointment volume and bottom line.

This may sound simple in theory. However, in actuality, it can be very difficult, especially when your diagnostic imaging center is located in a saturated market. So, how do you go about improving referring physician relationships and referral appointment volume?

Building a marketing strategy tailored to an audience of local referring physicians is imperative to growing your radiology practice. While there may be many approaches, the best way to develop and manage your strategy is through a robust customer relationship management tool (CRM) that tracks your historical and current referral data. Unlike other CRM’s, AbbaDox CRM provides your practice manager and marketers with a flexible, radiology-centric solution designed from its inception to help radiology practices streamline the referral marketing process. This tool integrates directly with your RIS to monitor and categorize analytics in real-time. With a comprehensive and highly specialized CRM, you can easily uncover trends across your referring physicians by modality, service type, location, and more. By diving into your practice’s data through intuitive reports, you can compare your referral marketing efforts with actual physician output to determine ROI. Ultimately, you’ll be able to quickly discover what’s working, what’s lacking, and which areas/physicians need more attention, so you can continuously enhance and adjust your referral marketing campaigns.

Once you have engaged in a strategic outreach process and built those initial connections, the work is far from over. Establishing those initial relationships is not enough. A successful referring physician strategy should also focus on maintaining them. The best way to do this is by optimizing and streamlining your referring physician workflows. To become their radiology practice of choice, you must make it simple and convenient for them to refer patients to you. With a comprehensive referring physician portal and image/results sharing solution from AbbaDox, you can ensure your referring physician will always be able to register a patient, order an exam, check appointment statuses, review follow-up requirements, and assess final results in an efficient, timely manner. All images and results will be delivered immediately and automatically to the referring’s desktop where they can be reviewed in a Universal Image Viewer without ever having to log in to another platform. Referring physicians will greatly appreciate the convenient and seamless experience you provide them. You can even set up handy delivery notifications by text or email based on your referring physicians’ preferences. You’ll also benefit from the marketing value of AbbaDox’s customizable features that allow your unique branding and logo to shine on high-quality PDF reports.

By engaging frequently with your referring physicians, you can build a solid, continuous network. While your CRM is a vital starting point, developing strong relationships goes beyond the walls of your imaging center. Create a plan for networking with new physicians and staying top of mind for existing ones. Consider activating an email marketing strategy, sending personalized referring physician thank you letters, engaging in personal conversations, and even providing lunch-and-learns or coffee chats to share more about your office over a small meal. The goal is simple. Whenever your target physicians see a patient that requires a referral to a diagnostic imaging center, you want to be their first thought due to your expertise and genuine care for their patients.

Practices that have been successful in building effective referring physician strategies have one thing in common – they focus on creating a symbiotic, mutually beneficial partnership. When you show a potential referring physician how well you take care of them and their patients, you build a strong relationship with endless growth potential. Securing a continuous patient flow is the primary goal. The more you increase physician referrals to your practice, the more likely you are to grow your appointment volume and ultimately, your bottom line.

Are you eager to improve your referring physician strategy? Let’s get started.