"Great Sales Funnel Course!" and HIPAA Protected Communications

Direct Primary Care Sales Funnel Course Receives Praise

One of Startup DPC docs recently completed the Sales Funnel Course and had this to say about the experience:

Hi Paul, great sales funnel course! I will start implementing what I learned immediately.  When you set up MailChimp for newsletters, how do you share your subscriber’s data and be HIPAA compliant with your patients? MailChimp doesn’t have a BAA for PHI. Any other recommendations?

Thanks for your insight.

First of all, I’m glad people are enjoying and getting a ton of value out of the Sales Funnel Course. I’ve had several docs talk about how helpful it has been in helping them attract new patients for their direct primary care practices.

Using Email Marketing Platforms to Grow Your Direct Primary Care Practice

Second, I don't put my patients info into MailChimp unless they enroll themselves. If someone goes to my site, they can sign up for my email blasts by putting in their email address online, via a form submission on our website. I’ve synced my MailChimp account with my Plum Health SquareSpace account. Therefore, if anyone submits their email address on my website, they automatically are asked if they’d like to join the email list. If they agree to MailChimp’s terms and conditions, they are then made a part of my email list.

If set up correctly, this is more or less an automated process. I then send out monthly email blasts to those folks. Here’s the form as it appears on our Plum Health DPC website.

This is the site on my Plum Health DPC website where folks can submit their contact information. If they complete this form and agree to MailChimp’s terms of service, we can send them emails whenever we like. We usually send monthly updates.

For my patients, I send them notes via my EMR. There's a function in ATLAS that allows me to send a group email to all of my patients. 

As a side note, I have all of my patients waive my obligation to their HIPAA rights in the contract, which is roughly 7 pages long. That way, I have some protection for any emails, phone calls, or text messages. 

- Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC

How to Get More Patients for your Direct Primary Care Practice

The biggest question doctors have is how to get more patients for their Direct Primary Care practice. How do you attract patients to your Direct Primary Care practice when your name is not on the back of their insurance card? How do you get people to pay over and above their insurance for your Direct Primary Care service?

I’ve come up with a short list on how to get more patients for your Direct Primary Care practice, and it starts with building trust with your community.

Build Trust with your Community

When a patient selects you as their physician, they are entrusting you with their most important asset - their health. The doctor-patient relationship is solemn and sacred, so how do you build trust with people in your community? To build trust you should be consistent, authentic, genuine, and caring. We often form deeper relationships with people who demonstrate these qualities, they are typically our best friends. Bonus points if they’re fun to be around!

Simple actions like speaking at a local school - and documenting the process - can help you build trust with local stakeholders.

Now, it’s one thing to have and possess these qualities, and it’s another thing to communicate these qualities with a broader audience. Many Direct Primary Care doctors have these qualities - people who choose a DPC practice are often phenomenal people with big hearts who want to do the right thing for their patients, their community, and themselves. I’ve been to several meetings of Direct Primary Care doctors and I’m always blown away by their compassion and caring, their willingness to do the right thing no matter the cost.

However, their weakness - the weakness of the DPC doctor - is their ability to communicate with their broader audience. They have a hard time telling folks about their character. Maybe it’s because we’re doctors, and we feel like once we hang a shingle, our neighbors should flock to us for their care. But this simply isn’t the case.

The market is fiercely competitive and you have to communicate your value to the people in your community and you have to do this on a consistent basis. So how do you communicate your value?

How do DPC Doctors Communicate Their Value to the Community?

Direct Primary Care doctors use tools to communicate their value to their broader community. The best known tools are the social media channels that we and our prospective patients use on a daily basis. That’s right - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc… are the mediums by which we communicate to our patients. If you’re able to build a strong personal and professional brand on these channels, you can build a robust DPC practice.

Additionally, DPC doctors leverage other tools like email lists and press releases to reach more patients in the broader community. These can extend your reach beyond the algorithms of Social Media channels.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive on these subjects, check out our courses page.

Thanks for reading and have a great day,

Dr. Paul Thomas, founder of StartupDPC