Five ways to get more TMS patients – without spending a lot of money
If you offer TMS in your mental health practice and your TMS machine is not at least 90 percent utilized, this article is for you.
Wait . . . 90 percent utilized? Am I crazy?
If you’ve tried over and over to get more TMS patients without success, you probably do think I’m crazy. But read on and judge for yourself. We have worked directly with practices who are seeing 12, 15, and even 20 patients per TMS chair per day. In other words, their TMS utilization is consistently in the 80 to 90 percent range.
So how do they do it?
It’s not by accident. It’s the result of a deliberate effort that attracts patients to the practice who are already primed to accept treatment, aligns all activity within the practice toward the goal of helping patients start TMS treatment, and then creates a positive feedback loop as patients who have a successful TMS outcome share their story and refer friends, family and coworkers to receive treatment.
And the best part? It doesn’t take a lot of money to create. It just takes time and a consistent effort to produce these results.
So how can you build this same TMS-centric culture in your practice and keep your TMS chairs full? Here are five ways you can get more patients starting TMS – all without spending a lot of money.
Five Ways to Get More TMS Patients For Your Practice (Without Spending A Lot of Money)
1. Network With Referring Providers
One of the best ways to find more patients for your mental health practice is to network with referring providers in your community. Primary care providers such as general practitioners, family care, internal medicine, integrative medicine, and even primary care providers in nontraditional settings such as urgent care clinics or retail-based clinics can all be good sources of patient referrals.
When networking with potential referring practices, it is important to keep the following three guidelines in mind:
- Providers refer out because their patient has a need that they cannot solve themselves
- Providers refer out to other providers whom they trust
- Providers refer to practices who are easy to refer to
The first step to building strong referral relationships involves helping potential referring practices to understand what services you can offer their patients that they themselves cannot provide. Educating referring providers on TMS gives them a reason to refer to your practice, because they can readily understand the unique service you provide for their patients that they themselves cannot offer.
Building trust with referring providers is crucial. Primary care providers refer to specialty providers who they trust. They place their own relationship with their patient at risk every time they refer out to another provider. If the referral is successful, the referring provider has increased patient trust. But if the patient has a negative experience with the referred provider, that negative interaction can damage the relationship between the referring provider and their own patient.
Keeping open lines of communication with providers who refer to your practice is essential to building trust. Simply providing progress notes on referred patients back to the referring provider goes a long way to building that trusted relationship. Even better – keeping the referring provider informed as part of the care circle will set your practice apart from the rest, as few mental health practices bother to do this.
Finally, primary care practices refer to mental health practices who make it easy to refer to. Make sure your referring providers have multiple ways to send you a referral – fax, phone, or email being the three most preferred. Additionally, ensuring there is a close match between the insurances you accept and those accepted at the referring practice helps make patient referrals smoother for your referring providers. Remember: the easier you make it for them to refer to you, the more likely they are to choose you for their referral partner.
2. Get Patients Excited About TMS Before They Ever Step Foot In Your Door
Patients seek out mental health services because they have a need. They are dealing with life-impacting issues stemming from depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, bipolar, suicidal ideation or other disorders. Because therapy and medication are so prevalent in our culture, patients may assume those are the only options. It is your job as a mental health provider to help them discover the potential of TMS.
Prior to ever stepping foot in your practice, every patient should have a minimum of three touchpoints with your practice where they have an opportunity to learn about TMS: your practice website, the intake phone call, and the appointment confirmation email.
Practice website
One of the reasons we at Mindhealth Media are so passionate about content marketing is because it delivers a rare “triple benefit”: it provides useful information for site visitors (encouraging them to choose your practice), it provides Google with a steady stream of content used to rank your site, and it gives you content that can easily be repurposed for other channels. It’s the first reason that matters here: when prospective patients come to your website, they should clearly understand you offer TMS, why you offer it, and what hope it offers them for recovery. This is the essence of content marketing: telling your story to your intended audience. Make sure your website tells that story.
Intake phone call
An often-overlooked way to educate patients about TMS is the patient intake call. When a new patient calls your practice to schedule an appointment, you can be sure of one thing: they are calling because their existing treatment program is not working. That’s why they’re looking to make a change. What better time to educate them on TMS and how it can help?
No, you don’t want your intake team acting like phone salespeople. No one wants that. But as part of an introductory phone call about the practice, it is entirely appropriate to bring up TMS, mention why it’s part of your service offerings, and ask the patient if they are familiar with TMS. Intake personnel should be trained to deliver an effective message about TMS that helps patients in their care journey without coming across as pushy. You offer TMS because it works; it would actually be a disservice not to bring it up to a prospective patient.
Appointment confirmation email
The appointment confirmation email is another frequently missed opportunity to bring up TMS before a patient ever steps foot in your practice. Yes, you still need to include the important information about the appointment: date, time, address, and provider. But don’t limit yourself to just the boring basics!
The appointment confirmation email is an ideal time to once again inform patients of TMS in a non-threatening, non-salesy way. And since appointment confirmation emails have a much higher than average open rate, it’s as close as you can get to making sure a patient sees your message. So take advantage of the opportunity to again explain your practice services, highlighting the incredible promise of TMS and why your practice offers it to patients.
Enacting the three simple steps above will ensure patients are exposed to TMS a minimum of three times before they ever step foot in your practice. According to the old maxim, the Marketing Rule of 7, a prospective customer must be exposed to your product or service seven times before they are comfortable making a purchase decision. By engaging with patients three times before they ever step foot in your practice, you are already well on the way to giving patients enough exposure to TMS that they feel comfortable enough to choose TMS as a treatment option.
Wondering where the next four exposures to TMS come from to help patients get to that magic number of 7? We cover that and more in Part 2 of this article.