As the founder and CEO, I want to let you know that even being four weeks into the COVID-19 situation we are still thinking of all of you every day. We’re thinking of your families, we’re thinking of your teams and we’re thinking of your practice.
Over the last four weeks, we have reached out in a variety of ways to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support you during this time. If there’s anything you need we want to hear from you and we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that we can support you. Whether that is in the ways that we’ve done historically or in new ways given the current situation that we’re in.
As of today, RSI has been remote for four weeks and here is what our teams have been working on…
The Patient Coordinators
Our patient scheduling team has been up for a month straight virtually. They continue to schedule virtual consultations and are making sure that we can help you out in any way possible with lead management or patient scheduling related phone calls. We will continue to adapt our processes to meet your needs.
Whether you are using our patient scheduling services or your staff uses the software in-house and you need help with your lead management process, please reach out to us.
We’re doing everything that we can.
The Customer Success Team
Our customer success team has been working relentlessly to help you with communication to your clients via your marketing channels about simple things regarding virtual consultations, office closures, the timing of offices reopening, etc. Whatever you need, our customer success team is here to help you.
At this point, I believe that we’ve handled most marketing issues for our clients and, over the last week and a half, the Customer Success team has started to focus on our new patient communication tools.
The patient relationship management system
Two-way texting
Different lead management enhancements
We’ve created these tools to help you adapt to the market that we’re in.
The Product Developers
Our technology team has been spending an enormous amount of time on the feature enhancements for our patient relationship management tool. As of this week, they have released an adaptation for our clients using the NexTech practice management system for fully integrated virtual consultations to be done through the NexTech system and RSI.
We will be rolling out those feature enhancements to our other practice management partners over the next week or two.
If you are a NexTech client and you have an interest in our virtual consultation process, please reach out to your customer success team member and they’ll get you scheduled with a demo.
We’re excited to bring this to you during this time. We think it’s incredibly simplistic and useful not only for today but where we’re going in the future with respect to telemedicine.
RSI’s Internal Strategies
Over the last four weeks, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to spend so much time with our clients on the phone. Ryan Lehrl and Scott Martin have really, really worked hard to make sure that we’re on the phone with you to understand the situation in your particular market. I wanted to give you all a message about the key points that we’ve learned that are helping our practices get through this.
Communication
This situation and the speed at which it has happened has forced all of us to reprioritize what most of us know to be one of the most important things in running a business and that is communication. First, we focused on communication with our family. Making sure that we’ve adapted our homes to deal with virtual schooling, working at home, etc.
Next, we focused on communication with our team so everyone at RSI understands what we’re doing in order to support you and how we are changing our products to support your practice in this new marketplace.
Weekly Check-in Schedule
My management team and I meet every day at 8 a.m. for a virtual stand-up. We go over the key things that we’re focused on in the short term, that being the next week, and the long term, being the next two weeks.
We then deploy to individual team meetings where managers disseminate that information to their teams at eight-thirty.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I meet with the company as a whole in a virtual meeting to make sure that we’re all on the same page in helping our clients with the most important situations.
Vision
Right now our vision is that we are dealing with this at an economic level for at least the next six months. We think there will be challenges in the economy and this is not going to be, as some have said, a light switch that turns back on and everything gets flowing. We perceive that we will be dealing with a challenging economy at least for the remainder of the year so that is how we are going to adapt our products and solutions to help you through that time.
In dealing with this, we’re looking at things on a three day and two-week time span for the foreseeable future. At this point in time, three days is our short term view on the changes that are happening at our doctors’ offices that they need help with and how can we support them. Two weeks is our long-term view on what we can get done that drive the biggest value in solving our clients’ problems.
So, we have a short-term view, three days, and a long-term view, two weeks, for at least the foreseeable future.
Marketing & Communication Strategies
Where we have seen a lot of opportunities in regards to marketing strategies and communication strategies for our clients is across a broad spectrum of channels. Whether you’re in a cash pay business or a third party reimbursed, some of these, I hope, will help you so that you understand what your competitors are doing, what your peers are doing, and what other verticals are doing in the medical industry.
Virtual Consultations
Obviously I think all of us at this point have been exposed to virtual consults. Virtual consults should be marketed through your website, through your social media and through your email.
On-Site Surgery Centers
Those of you that have on-site surgery centers should be adapting them to handle emergency room style work. Consumers with non-COVID-19 medical issues aren’t going into hospitals right now and are looking for outpatient care solutions. Things like lacerations or minor injuries can be taken care of by a plastic or cosmetic surgeon in an in-office surgery suite. It’s a great way to leverage that asset in your practice to adapt to the situation that we’re in.
Prioritize Larger Deposits
With virtual consults allowing practices to still book future surgeries, this is a great time to allow patients the opportunity to get a better surgery date. Prioritization of large deposits for future procedures seems to be the key factor that surgeons are using in order to get consumers interested and motivated to book. With this strategy, the larger the deposit the consumer pays upfront, the more prioritization they have on the surgery schedule when things open back up.
Leverage Add-On Services
Offer less expensive treatments as an add-on. A lot of our clients in the cash pay business, who are booking procedures out in the future, are offering add-on treatments to larger procedures. Whether you’re booking a surgery or some type of skin treatment, offer a free service as an additional value in the procedure.
Give away your time for free, in the form of an extra service, in order to create value in your delivery to a consumer today.
Surgeon fee discounts are an obvious one that can always be utilized. It’s up to the personal doctor and how they want to handle that.
Curbside Delivery
Many clients are utilizing curbside delivery of cosmetic products. They’re leveraging social media more now than ever to discuss those products and move them forward into their client base. Some clients are using eCommerce services to deliver products directly to patients homes and others are offering curbside, contact-free pick up at the office.
Social Media
When I think about social media, this is the time to own your advertising agency. You’ve heard us talk about this a lot over the last couple of years and I can’t emphasize enough now more than ever that if you’re not leveraging social media to help your practice get through communicating your vision for the practice and educating your patients, you’re missing out on an enormous opportunity.
You as the owner, you as the practice manager, you as the PA or provider of service in a practice need to take ownership of your practice’s message. The future of marketing, from our perspective, is about you as a business owner owning your brand. You the individual, as an owner, a provider, a manager, you have to have a brand that communicates through social media at an individual and personal level. Now, more than ever is a time to take advantage of that to get your business through this.
Start to think about the future and what you can do.
I hope that this helps. We are here, we’re playing offense and we want to do anything we can to support your business. We’ll continue to make rapid deployments to our technology. We will continue to communicate with you about what we can do to help your marketing.
If there’s anything that we can do, please, please, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
We wish you nothing but the best of health and productivity.
Talk to you soon,
Jason Tuschman
CEO & Founder
