A clinic is only as good as the quality of care it provides.
Consistently high quality can build trust and relationships with customers that last a lifetime. But it only takes one bad experience to sour that same trust.
This is why it’s so important to deliver high quality of care every single time.
But this isn’t always an easy task. Especially when you hire more staff and open more clinics. You have more people, more locations, and most importantly, more clients to keep happy.
This creates a lot of challenges if you want every customer to be happy with the care they receive, no matter which of your clinics they visit.
To hopefully make this challenge a little easier, this article will break down five strategies for delivering consistent quality of care across multiple clinics.
(And if you stay to the end, there’s a cheeky bonus strategy, just for you)
Let’s get cracking!
Looking to maintain consistent quality of care across multiple clinics? Schedule a free demo to explore how our platform can assist you in implementing these 5 strategies
Strategy 1 — Go paperless, or go home
There’s something comforting about paper. You can pick it up, write on it, and when paired with a glass it’s great for evicting spiders. It’s old reliable! This is why traditionally a lot of clinic documentation was carried out on paper. From questionnaires to medical notes to aftercare instructions. But paper has one fundamental flaw—it can’t be in two places at once. This is a huge problem when you’re working across multiple locations, like Dr Ahmed El Houssieny “Some of my patients moved about. So they saw me one day at clinic A, and another at clinic B” This meant he had to make sure his paper records were available at the right clinic for the right appointments. Which is a HUGE additional strain on an already large workload. This is why a paperless system is a must when you’re working across multiple clinics. Implementing a paperless strategy across your clinics means everything is digital, and everything is accessible. You don’t need to worry about ensuring the right paperwork is in the right place before appointments. Everything is accessible, whenever your team needs it. This makes it so much easier to provide a consistently high quality of care.Strategy 2 — One app to rule them all
Running multiple clinics isn’t the same as running multiple separate businesses, but it can certainly feel like it! This is the case if you try to use separate clinic management apps/accounts at the different clinics. You’ve got to start from scratch every time you open a new clinic. Setting everything up, importing data, and hoping you didn’t miss anything. And even when you’ve done that, the data becomes out of date and out of sync as soon as you change a record or book an appointment. Unfortunately, not every software makes it easy to run all your clinics from one app, but when you find one that does, you’ll never look back. When everyone in all locations, uses the same system, they can access everything they need. It doesn’t matter where their previous appointments were, you can still access patient records, notes, customer comms, etc. This means that a customer can walk in, and ask for the “same as last time”, you know exactly what they want. Regardless of which clinic they went to last. This doesn’t just improve the quality of care you can give your customers, it also makes it so much easier for your team to carry out their work.Strategy 3 — Standardized processes
Despite what marketing teams want you to believe (ahem), you can’t solve all your problems by simply buying a new app. The processes and systems you adopt while using that app are just as important. But if one person does x, and another person does y, you’re not going to have a good time. For example, if one clinic formats notes one way, and another clinic does it another way, it’ll be much harder to share and collaborate on the records. By implementing consistent processes across your clinics, you’ll save time and money, and deliver the best quality of care you can. This includes things like:- Booking & Scheduling
- Patient records
- POS
- Forms
- Pre-care and aftercare
Strategy 4 — Speak the same language
Just like consistency is important across your processes, you also need to be consistent in how you communicate with your customers. At the most basic level, this means things like how your staff talk to patients during appointments, on the phone, etc. But your communication goes much further than that. You need to be sending the same appointment confirmation messages, and appointment reminders. You need to be consistent with pre-care and aftercare instructions when you send them out. And your marketing emails and survey/review requests need to be the same across all your clinics, too. This is because all of these things contribute to your customer’s experience and the quality of care they receive. Consistency isn’t just about the content, either. You need to include the same information, send messages at the same time, use the same communication methods, etc. For example, if a client gets an SMS appointment confirmation from one of your clinics, they shouldn’t get an email confirmation from another clinic. It should feel seamless for your customers, from the small talk, to the promotions you send them. Note: This will be much easier to implement if you’ve already done strategy 2 & 3Strategy 5 — How to train your clinician
Let’s be honest here, none of these strategies can work without your talented team. But just because they’re talented, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be constantly training and developing them. In order to provide a consistently high quality of care, your staff need to be performing at a consistent standard. Consistent with themselves, and everyone else. You need to be able to set KPIs, and track and compare each employee’s progress. You also need to hold regular performance reviews, to both reward high performance, and give people the chance to improve. For your sales team, you can also use commission and sales targets to incentivise better performance. The key is to stay proactive, and set clear expectations for your staff, across all of your clinics. This will result in a happier workforce, and ultimately a better quality of care.Bonus strategy — Do them all at once
I’m going to let you in on a secret. There’s an easy way to implement ALL FIVE of the strategies we’ve outlined in this article… Use Pabau! We’ve specially built Pabau to make it as easy as possible to provide the best quality of care possible. And we’ve done this by giving you the tools to do all of these strategies at once.- It helps you to reduce costs, increase efficiency and help the environment by moving to an entirely paperless system.
- It includes everything you need to run your clinics from a single app. This includes key features like accepting bookings across multiple locations.
- You can set up your processes to be the same everywhere, so your clinics all run the same way, every time.
- Templates and automation make it really simple to communicate consistently with your customers
- Advanced people management tools give you everything you need to manage your staff and keep them performing to a high standard
