Depending on your specialty, there are times during the year when you’ll inevitably experience a decrease in business. It’s normal to experience the annual ebb and flow of patients but you may be experiencing slower times than usual given the economy.

You can certainly augment your marketing efforts through emails or newsletters and you can send out reminder postcards to be sure that you’re capturing annual visits. These can both be effective for increasing your daily patient count but let’s talk about a way to be more proactive without investing any money and that’s through maximizing your current patients.

Last time, I covered including complementary care providers into your clinic. These providers included: physical therapists, massage therapists, and other providers within the medical community, who can offer additional services to your patients. This week, I will cover incorporating alternative care providers into your clinic, which may be more of a challenge.

With all the changes coming down the pike with the healthcare reform bill, you should be strategizing on how to accommodate these changes into your practice, while still maximizing patient care and profitability for your practice. While this seems like a tall order, (only because it is) you do have time until the majority of mandated changes take place in the healthcare insurance industry. Most of the effects of the healthcare reform don’t take place until 2014, with only a few beginning in 2012.