How to Start a Business

I just read Erik’s post about able to change the music for each patient during doctor visits.  This would be really cool.  I have had 5 cat scans in the last 6 months, and the good scan centers now allow you to choose your own radio station for the precedure.  Cat scans can last awhile, so it is nice to be able to get good radio.

Howver, I predict very few doctors and dentists will adapt the patient specific music.  The doctors and dentists are not smart enough!!  My dad is a doctor, and is one of the incredibly rare doctors that have any business sense.  He got his MBA in his sixties, aftyer a long career or running successful medical businesses.  But, he is the huge exception!

I have seven doctors that I see with any regularity.  Only one of them sent me a Christmas card.  He is also the only doctor that calls me to schedule appointments.  If I don’t go see him every six months or every month, his office calls to set up an appointment.  I have another doctor that, at my lsat visit, told me to come back in a month.  I have went back.  He never called to set up the appointment.  I do not plan on going back.  Doctors need to sell their services too.  He should call and GET my business.  After all, with 5 cat scans and 7 doctors, I am a good “customer!”  To be clear, I am not referring to a call to confirm an appointment, but a proactive call to set an appointment, to drive business.

I have been going to the same dentist for 35 years.  Excpet, I haven’t been in 2 years or so.  I quit going to see him because his receptionist has grown old, cranky, difficult, and bitchy.  Its not wroth seeing him to have to put up with the receptionist.  I see the dentist frequently, as he lives about 100 yards from me and we eat in many of the same restaurants.  I saw his wife walking their dog yesterday.  When he sees me though, he never asks when I am coming in to give him money!

Doctors, you are salespeople too and must drive your businesses.  You must promote yourself and bring in new customers and must treat the old customers like you appreciate their business.

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5 Comments

1.   justin   |  Friday, 08 January 2010 at 11:01 am

   There are good reasons doctors make for bad business people (and entrepreneurs). The healthcare system is set up where the customer is an insurance company (1) and (2) practicing medicine has turned into a matter of treating symptoms rather than proactive care. In other words, the doctors expect *you* to call them when you have a problem because on the front-end (the preventative end) they largely have nothing to offer.

   Case in point: medical students only take maybe a semester’s worth of nutrition. Insane when you consider that diet (and lifestyle) choices are certainly the most likely causes of people’s health maladies — so really, when it comes to having the proper tools to help patients avoid getting ill in the first place, doctor’s aren’t equipped. They proactively/preventatively neutered.

   I won’t get into the insurance company angle, but that has an impact, too. The customer has been utterly divorced from the healthcare system when you’ve got so many layers between you and your care:

   you -> employer’s HR department -> [the insurance company bureaucracy] -> [hospital bureaucracy that negotiates reimbursement amounts] -> doctors who code procedures and provide you care

   Simply cutting out the employer side would immediately get the consumer more plugged in as you’d have 10s of thousands of more individuals interested in getting better rates/plans from insurers than the lackadaisical corporate HR departments. I digress.

   And there’s a (3) here, too. That’s the doctor’s go to school for longer than any other profession, which makes them prone to dogmatism/procedure instead of being creative or driven to trial/error and problem-solving.

   All things considered, it’s a disaster of a system. It’s no surprise it’s only getting worse. The only surprise (to me) is that so few people are talking about these core, simple problems that are making for such a disastrous healthcare system.

   
2.   Jacob Dearolph   |  Friday, 08 January 2010 at 12:13 pm

   Great points Justin. I’ve had a terrible time with companies’ HR departments and the bureaucracy of insurance. My stint with Home Depot was completely without their health insurance due to mistakes made by their HR department. It was very frustrating. I was able to secure similar health insurance with less cost to me on my own. I never used it though.

   Your points brought to mind a real estate development project I was working where we we positioning a piece of property to be a surgical center that allowed doctors the ability to own their own space for far less than what is currently available. During the due-diligence I ran numbers that demonstrated the doctor’s ability to buy these medical offices. The wild thing to me was realizing that despite the rumors and stereotypes of financially well-off doctors the average over-achieving doctor has a very difficult up hill to climb to open his/her own practice. This is keeping many would be “business owners” and problem solvers out of the market.

   
3.   lalit   |  Tuesday, 27 April 2010 at 9:23 am

   i do agree partly with the idea that doctors are terrible entropenuers,time is changing ,as more and more doctors are opening their own practice so their problem solving skills [non medical ]are developing;i am a pediatrician and having a successful practice,i adapt regularly to my patient needs,people also do not expect business promotion calls from doctors-as anyone reaches a doctors office only in illhealth otherwise he will reach a hotel,why a doctors office,think about it.

   
4.   Jimmie Sances   |  Tuesday, 01 June 2010 at 7:59 am

   Amazing Dude, this is very helpful information, thanks.

   
5.   John Pinion   |  Sunday, 29 August 2010 at 8:33 am

   I’m not a doctor, but I did go to some medical school, and I do help people very frequently. (I enjoy it, but in fact, sometimes I feel like it’s all I do!) So (just for some perspective) is it any wonder that I (or doctors in general, for that matter) don’t run up and down the street with a placard screaming “Come to me, I will help you!”?

   I have more “business” than I can handle as it is, and I take it if I do in fact help people, word gets around and plenty of people find me (which they do)…

   I would be suspicious of any doctor that ‘drums up business’ any other way. (Or maybe I’m way behind the times.)