Want your physician business to go paperless?

Now and again, I encounter a tool that becomes such a valuable asset that I cannot imagine life before it! My iPod still holds the number one spot, but rapidly moving into second place is my Fujitsu Scansnap S510 Color Image Scanner.

I spotted an article on productivity (can't remember where) and, being a sucker for anything that will help tidy my desk and filing cabinets, I was intrigued by the SnapScan's sparkling review.

The reviewer promised that the scanner would rapidly scan papers, permit you to store the images, and then use the OCR (optical character recognition) function to search for the document(s) using keywords from the pages themselves.

Two day's later, thanks to my Amazon Prime membership, my new toy appeared on my doorstep. It took all of 20 minutes to install the scanner and software, and get it running, and the results astounded me. This little machine, the size of a large bread loaf, speedily ingested the sheets I fed it, scanning in color both sides simultaneously, and spitting out images on my computer ready for filing in "cabinets". Soon I had labeled folders in cabinets for my medical license paperwork, all my insurance documentation, agreements, and receipts, and I was just getting started!

What tickled me even more was remembering that there was a CardMinder function. I popped a business card into the feeder, selected CardMinder from "Programs" and pushed the scanner button. A quick throughput later, the two-sided business card image popped up on my screen with matching data fields below, populated with the company name, person's name, phone number and email address. One click on "add to Microsoft Outlook" and the contact information magically migrate to my in Contacts (there are a few prompts do deal with).

You can name and then convert your documents to PDFs, Word, PowerPoint or Excel (each document is assigned a rather obscure name consisting of numbers and dashes). The machine comes equipped with Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard, which then allows you to delete pages, rotate, and attach to email.

A demo video speaks a thousand words - check it out here if you are interested.

A few weeks later, I took a leap of faith (I do back up my computer every night onto a separate hard drive, which I highly recommend!) and put my paper shredder to work. It wasn't long before it was smoking!

Speak your way to more business as an entrepreneurial doctor

A client asked me yesterday how to polish her presentation skills as she wants to showcase a new direction she is taking her medical practice in. This got me thinking about resources, and ready to spill the beans on my blog.

Public speaking to the right audience is an excellent way to position yourself as an expert and recognized thought leader. But there is a well-circulated "statistic", which might actually be true, that the number one fear of American adults is having to make a speech in public.

Before I discovered the magic and power of the Internet, my most successful tactic for getting new business was getting myself invited to speak at various gatherings. I always came away with at least one new client.

In order to gear myself up for this new challenge early in my business (I had gotten over my fear, but not my incompetence as a speaker, in my role as a hospital CEO), I had to learn how to present effectively. So my first feedback came ever so gently from my Toastmasters' group.

I worked hard over the years, reading, practicing and studying with a couple of speaking coaches. I have reached the point of actually coaching wannabe presenters myself, and it is time to share some of the best resources I have on my office shelves:

• For the truly serious speaker who is determined to learn all the skills and a few tricks, there is the somewhat expensive and extremely comprehensive ProfessionalSpeaker System created by Tom Antion (my speaking "guru" whose content I purchased tons of) Bill Brooks and Jill Cathcart.
  This package includes Tom's somewhat less expensive "Wake 'Em Up" Speaking System ( a book plus 6 DVDs).
  (A quick addendum here -- although I spent quite a bit of money on the Wake 'Em Up System, I easily made it back in new business and speaker fees).
  
  

• Knockout Presentations by Diane DiResta

• Speak with Confidence by Dianna Booher

• The New Talk Power by Natalie H. Rogers

• Never Be Boring Again by Doug Stevenson

• Working the Room by Nick Morgan

My fond wish is that your fear of speaking in public drop to #10 on your Top Ten Fears list!

Are your services ready for the marketplace?

An article in yesterday's Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune described how a new healthcare services website, Carol.com, is potentially transforming the landscape for providers and consumers of healthcare. Carol.com is a local "marketplace" where hospitals, clinics and practices can offer service packages for fixed and transparent prices, enabling consumers to "shop around".

Think of it as a Turkish bazaar where the wares are displayed in stalls lining the alleys side by side, and where the consumer just has to wander the lanes sampling olives or fingering the fabrics and checking prices, in order to determine where and what to buy.

Here is how some of the functions of the website are described in the article:

"Ankle pain? Click on the matching body part and two options pop up. For $199, doctors at Sports and Orthopaedic Specialists will check out your ankle, review your medical history and recommend treatment. TRIA Orthopaedic Center lists a similar package for $213 -- and a reminder that they are the team doctors for the Vikings and Timberwolves.
What did patients think? Read user reviews.
Will your health plan pay? Tap in your details and find out."

I encourage you to read the full article, even though you might have to sign up as a subscriber, for free. There is lots of food for thought! And a whole new trend to prepare yourself for.

This new web-based business will likely do two things for a physician practice or a hospital:

1. Force practices and hospitals to analyze their costs of providing various services, to price them competitively and profitably.

2. Require that, in order to compete effectively, each practice or hospital may have to reinvent how it does business. As in the example from the article:
"Alarmed at how its price for treating a sinus infection ($231) stacks up next to MinuteClinic's ($49), Park Nicollet is trying to figure out how to bring that down, perhaps using nurses instead of doctors to treat simple ailments."

To attract new patients to your practice, if you want to take advantage of a similar marketing and selling opportunity  that is bound to be coming your way, what must you know about your practice in order to appropriately price and deliver your bundled services?

Leverage your medical expertise to build a booming sideline business

I am a big proponent of finding a well-defined niche to build your business around. Rosalie Hamilton of Expert Communications has been shrewd enough to accomplish that in spades, by providing business development education and coaching to physicians (that is a niche in and of itself) on the topic of how to succeed in a medical expert witness business. A niche within a niche!

I interviewed Rosalie today to learn more about the business of becoming an expert witness and how to generate a steady flow of clients requiring your services -- clients such as attorneys and insurance companies. This conversation is not about doctors being asked to review the odd case for an attorney -- we all know someone who has done that. Instead it focuses on physicians whose intent it is to build a business as a medical expert witness.

By the way, take note of how Rosalie exemplifies good marketing -- she has a niche and a distinct target market, and she promotes her services by writing articles for publications, making public presentations, and writing a book that positions her as the expert in her field, The Expert Witness Marketing Book: How to Promote Your Forensic Practice in a Professional and Cost-Effective Manner.

Get insights from this consummate professional consultant and author guest by listening to this week's Entrepreneurial MD Podcast.

Have you set aside time to work on your entrepreneurial physician business?

Michael Gerber, in the E-Myth Revisited, first educated me about working on my business not in it. Until then, I figured I was creating a coaching practice, much like a medical practice, and that a successful month meant I'd worked with a certain number of clients (the medical practice equivalent is obviously patients).

The realization that hit home hardest from reading his book was that, by myopically focusing on just providing coaching services to each client and the attendant administrative services, I was denying myself the pleasure of crafting and shaping my own larger creation - my business!

I was acting like a freelancer seeking work project by project and acting delighted if just one new client signed up, instead of behaving like a business owner.

Business owners, I discovered, build businesses on the foundations of documented processes, infrastructure, automation, delegation and leverage. They rejoice when their systems consistently funnel in and maintain business, not just when one person becomes a client.

I immediately instituted a "business development day" on Friday each week. It is a full day each week in which I refrain from acting as a Technician -- I don't coach or hold teleclasses. Instead, the day is dedicated to being an Entrepreneur -- the visionary, dreamer, the builder of my business's future (per Gerber's descriptions).

I confess to awakening very excited every Friday, brimming with enthusiasm for my latest project, or for the phone calls I want to make to explore opportunities to collaborate. And sometimes even just to read one of my many business books, or listen to some of the hours of teleclasses I have on my iPod.

I learn. I play "what if". I ponder on how to advance my business model, how to leverage my time (The 4-Hour Workweek is an over-the-top inspiration), how to offer more value to my clients and prospects so that they will want what I have to offer, and which tasks to delegate.

This is the day that I allow my imagination and creativity to flourish, and that keeps me deeply engaged in what I am doing professionally.

Where are you carving out your own business development time? And how are you protecting and cherishing it?