Why You Should Have A Google For Business for your Direct Primary Care Practice

If you own and operate your Direct Primary Care practice, you should have a Google for Business Page. This allows you to keep tabs on some key metrics about your practice. Each month, I get an email about my practice’s performance from Google For Business. Here’s what it looks like:

Direct Primary Care Google For Business report that is sent monthly from Google.

Wow! 4,973 people found me in the month of June 2019 because of Google. That has a lot to do with our Search Engine Optimization and how we’re able to dominate certain key words and search terms, and therefore drive more search traffic to our website.

Note the top search queries of “dpc,” “plum health,” and “primary care doctor near me.” It’s awesome to see that people are using Google to find directions, visit our website, and call our office. Of those 30 people who called our office, we converted at least 10 of those into members of our practice.

Additionally, the monthly email from Google includes an update on your Star Rating. This is crucial.

So, if you don’t have a Google for Business account for your Direct Primary Care practice, you need to drop what you’re doing and register for one right now.

In the meantime, our first course on Direct Primary Care and growing your DPC Practice is now live, so head over to our courses or just go directly to the course and dive in - it’s designed to accelerate your growth and help you build a sustainable practice.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day,

-Dr. Paul Thomas with StartUpDPC

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

Why StartupDPC?

StartupDPC exists because we believe in the Direct Primary Care movement and we want to help doctors start and grow their DPC practices.

My name is Dr. Paul Thomas and I’ve been planning, building, and growing my Direct Primary Care practice over the last 3 years and I want to share everything that I’ve learned during that time with you. I went from 0 patients in November 2016 to over 500 patients today and I recently hired a second physician to help me manage the demand.

In addition, I’ve become a thought leader in the Direct Primary Care field, as I have advocated for the advancement of DPC in Washington and I’ve spoken at the national Direct Primary Care conferences on a range of topics.

I want to accelerate your growth, decrease the number of mistakes that you make, and help you achieve a fulfilling practice in Direct Primary Care. I want to do this because I believe in Family Medicine and Family Physicians, and their ability to deliver excellent primary care services to their patients and to their communities.

I’ve consulted with several Direct Primary Care doctors who have gone on to create successful, thriving Direct Primary Care practices. I want to share the knowledge that I’ve gained and share the essence of these consulting sessions with you so that you can grow your practice more quickly.

More to the point, there isn’t a great coaching resource in the marketplace right now, and we want to provide an excellent service to accelerate the growth of the DPC movement.

We aim to answer the most commonly asked questions in the Startup Phase and then we have additional resources for you to use during the growth phase. We will also add modules as needed, specifically around hiring another physician and similar topics.

To get started, head over to our courses page.

Thanks for reading and good luck with starting your DPC practice - let me know if I can be helpful along the way!

-Paul Thomas, MD

Dr. Paul Thomas speaking to an audience of over 300 at the AAFP Direct Primary Care Summit aka DPC Summit in Chicago in June 2019