Build Your Practice Successfully With The Right Technology
If you’re a health practitioner in your own practice, you know how complicated it is to get everything done.
You have a lot more to do than just treat patients. There’s marketing to bring new patients in the door — and keep patients returning. There’s administrative work of booking appointments and managing your practice. And you have to manage inventory if you dispense supplements, herbs, or other products.
Even if you have support staff, you may still be juggling several roles. But you can streamline many of the processes that go into managing your practice when you have the right kinds of technology set up and working for you.
As a Designs for Health practitioner, you already have a powerful tool at your fingertips — the Well World practitioner portal and patient engagement app.
Through Well World, you can assign nutrition plans and escript supplements to patients to support their wellness plans. You can communicate directly with patients through HIPAA-compliant text and video messaging. And you have a powerful shopping tool — patients can purchase Designs for Health supplements right through their app.
But beyond Well World, you will need a few different technology solutions to support your practice online. These are the technology solutions that we recommend to practitioners.
Promote Your Practice, Programs, and Products with Email Marketing
You can message patients securely through your Well World portal. But if you want to market your practice, you will need an email marketing software program.
Email marketing software ensures that you can send broadcast messages to your whole list and put together welcome campaigns that help educate prospective patients about your practice. It enables you to send newsletters, offer webinars, or launch new programs and products to your patients.
The most popular email marketing programs are MailChimp, Active Campaign, and Constant Contact. They are all user-friendly and have built-in templates to make your emails look professional.
Your Health Practitioner Website
Your website helps pre-sell your practice’s services. It should contain enough information for prospective patients to discover what you offer and take the next step to work with you.
You can get your website up and running with just a few clicks when you use a website builder program that has built-in templates. Wix, Squarespace, and Go Daddy are three that have a full suite of web-building tools, hosting services, and e-commerce included in their solutions.
The advantage of these web builders is that all of the technology is drag-and-drop and easily launched. You don’t have to worry about hosting or maintenance. Your website fees may range anywhere from $7 – $23 per month to start.
If you want to have more control over the design and function of your website, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms. With WordPress, you’ll need some technical knowledge to build your site. Design themes can range anywhere from $29 – $99 for a one-time license.
You’ll also need to purchase and set up separate web hosting — which can range anywhere from $7 – $15 per month.
Your Health Program Landing Page
If you want to launch a one-to-one nutrition program, group program, or detox, it will help to have a dedicated website page that can clearly communicate the features and benefits of your program to your prospective patients. This is what is commonly called a “sales landing page”.
You can use your Wix, Squarespace or WordPress site, or really any platform that enables it to build a simple sales landing page. It’s even easier to launch a sales landing page when you use a click-and-go landing page software program. Instapage, Lead Pages and Click Funnels are all proven, plug-and-play landing page software services that can have your program up and running within a day. All you need to do is add your page content and launch it.
Many of these landing page programs will easily integrate with other parts of your marketing — including your email marketing program, CRM, and e-commerce software.
All of these sales landing page solutions come with monthly fees — anywhere from $37 — $199 per month to use them. ClickFunnels and LeadPages give you a 14-day free trial before you need to sign up for a plan.
Health Practitioner Scheduling Software
How will you set up appointments with your patients and prospective patients? You can streamline the process with scheduling software.
Most scheduling software programs will allow you to set specific hours that you are available for appointments. You can then send a link to your patient for them to schedule their own appointments. Your scheduling software will sync with your calendar so that your patient’s appointments show up automatically.
Some popular scheduling software programs include Acuity Scheduling and Calendly.
We have integrated Acuity Scheduling with Well World because it has integrated payment processing, which helps you solve your payment processing as well in one solution. When you use Well World with the Acuity Scheduling integration, you can save hours of routine admin work by having patients self-schedule their appointments.
Your Health Practitioner Payment Processing
How do you currently take payments for your practice? And do you have a solution in place that allows you to process online payments?
There are many payment processing programs that are easy to set up and help you get paid.
Many of the website hosting and builder programs include payment processing/e-commerce as part of their package. So all you need to do is turn them on.
If you are creating your own website with WordPress, you will likely need to add a plugin to your site to take payments.
Some of the most popular payment processors include PayPal, Stripe, and Square. All of these payment processors have pay-as-you-go processing fees — that is, you can set up your store and “buy now” buttons for your services, and you only pay fees when patients purchase services.
Acuity Scheduling, as described above, also has its own payment processing built right in — so you can have patients pay right when they schedule their appointment.
Having an easy way to take patient payments makes it easier to collect fees when patients are ready to say “yes” to taking the next step in their health journey with you.
Your Health Practitioner Automation
Are there routine tasks in your workflow that can be automated? For example, What if you could automatically have your patient’s information added to your Well World practitioner portal instead of you manually typing in all of the data?
That’s what automation programs can do for you.
Zapier is the gold standard when it comes to automating tasks. We recommend Zapier because it is one of the most helpful tools to make your technology talk to each other.
You can easily set up a basic Zapier account for free, and it will give you 5 zaps.
Health Practitioner Design & Images
You need creative photos for your social media posts, emails, websites, and ads to give them more life and color.
Your best bet is to hire a designer, who is a specialist and can help you make everything look professional. If hiring someone is an issue, you might consider a barter arrangement where they design for you and you support their health in kind.
If you do have the bandwidth and skill to take on design yourself, you can make your own branded imagery with Canva. The design software will also allow you to create your own landing page designs. Canva has a free plan that allows you to create designs and gives you 5GB of free storage.
If you want a greater range of stock imagery, you can sign up for an account with any of the myriad stock image sites. Some of the free or low-cost ones include Stocksy, Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay.
Putting It All Together To Build Your Practice
