Caution. Attracting patients from another market will do one or all of three things.
1). Slowly and sustainably grow your REI practice
2). Hedge your patient flow in a recession
3). Offer you data to decide if maybe even one day it would make sense to open a clinic in that area (if you´re so ambitious)
I shot this video post back in June after the 2015 Midwest Reproductive Symposium. The way infertility patients use online reviews for their Reproductive Endocrinologists and their practices is vastly different from most other categories. Facebook is by far the most positive review source for fertility centers. Yelp is certainly the most negative. Other sites, such as RateMDs, ZocDoc, HealthGrades, and Fertility Authority tend to fall in between the two ends.
How do you grow your infertility clinic's practice if you´re from a small market? What if you´re the only fertility center that provides IVF in your area?
I have an assignment for you. First, you certainly have an anecdotal idea of how many people come to your practice from out of town, that´s a start. But there´s also a way to tell if people are considering you, researching your practice online from other cities.
If you're not familiar with one of my favorite authors, you may want to check out Seth Godin.
Godin says “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”
Most healthcare categories do not have tribes. Dermatology patients are not connected by an idea. They have no shared interest and thus no leader or way to communicate. Couples and individuals struggling with infertility are connected by an idea however. They are connected by the feeling of loneliness and exclusion. They are connected by the feeling that they want to know their problems are human.