One of the greatest thing about Naturopathic Medicine and being a Naturopathic Doctor or Physician is the myriad of health problems you can help your patients with.
As an ND you have the ability to help your patients with everything from the common cold to energy loss, weight concerns, hormone imbalance, menopause, skin issues, digestive problems, diabetes, cancer care, blood pressure and hundreds of other health issues.
While that is great from a general practice / primary care viewpoint, you don’t need me to tell you that it makes your job as a Doctor much more difficult. You have to keep up with current research in all the areas of medicine, which that alone is an impossible task. You have to spend hours doing developing personalized care plans, re-inventing the wheel and spending hours on charting for every patient and worst of all it’s really difficult to do effective marketing.
That is the exact reason why so many Naturopathic Doctors become overwhelm and unfortunately burn out. Just last week I spoke to an ND in Northern California who shared with me that after 8 years in practice she is completely burnt out, financially stressed and has decided to quit & go get a JOB (As a life long entrepreneur JOB is a four letter word to me!)
What’s that old saying; You can please some of the people all of the time, or you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time! It’s the same in your practice, you can’t effectively provide great service to everyone in every area of health for too long before something breaks … usually it’s you, the Doctor that breaks first.
Also trying to market all those solution for all those problems to all those people is next to, if not completely impossible.
The solution … develop Your Signature System.
It’s not as complicated as many people make it out to be. In fact you are already doing all the steps, you just haven’t turned them into Your Signature System & it is really simple to do so.
One Naturopathic Doctor here in California turned her struggling practice into a $700,000 a year practice in just 18 months by focusing all of her services on providing her signature system on Lyme Disease. She has now written four books on the subject, sees most patients in groups and online only. For those patients she does see one on one she charges a premium rate and her charting is a breeze as it is almost the same for each patient, with just a few exceptions. She has become known as one of the words premier experts on the subject working 4 days while speaking at various conferences around the world. Just a few years ago she was a general practitioner struggling to make it all work!
Here’s the general how to develop your signature system:
- Pick an area of health that you love to help patients with, an area/illness that you are very confident in the results you can achieve for those patients.
- Identify and list out the typical steps you take to treat that issue with your patients now. So for a very simplified example most NDs follow a similar process when treating patients:
- Initial Health Assessment/ Consultation to discuss health history, symptoms, possible causes, initial solutions etc.
- Lab work / blood tests etc to identify cause
- Results of findings
- Care Plan & Supplements
- Follow up
- Next you “name” those steps to be more specific to what it is you are treating. For example, if Headaches is the problem you solve, you specialize in, instead of it being an “Initial Intake Appointment” or an initial health assessment … call it a “Headache Analysis Meeting”.
- Do the same for each step in the process & develop benefit rich descriptions of each step.
- Brand the steps you developed as your system: ” Dr. Kelly’s Headache Elimination & Prevention Program”
If that sounds too simple, it’s because it is simple! Don’t overthink it.
Create it, market it and before long you will start to be recognized as an expert in that area of health. You can develop your website to focus on it, blogs, webinars, books and more.
You will have more impact, more income and enjoy more free time by focusing in on Your Signature System!
____________________________________________________________________________
Want to learn more great strategies to grow your practice the smart way?
Click here to Check out our next 2 day ND Marketing Intensive Online