071 - 3 Things Every Specialist Should Know About Getting Referrals from Primary Care Physicians to Generate Wealth In Their Practice

Welcome to another episode of The Independent Physician’s Blueprint Podcast, where we empower physicians to transition from corporate to independent practices, reducing stress and increasing income, even without prior business experience. Today’s episode is tailored for younger physicians and medical graduates seeking to enhance their practice efficiency and grow their patient base.

Are you a new physician out of medical residency, a junior doctor, or a specialist like a surgeon, urologist, or consultant struggling to get referrals? Are you looking for ways to decrease stress, improve patient satisfaction, and achieve financial freedom? You’re in the right place.

In this episode, we’ll uncover effective strategies to communicate with primary care physicians, optimize your schedule for same-day appointments, and use text messaging for complex patient cases. We’ll also share a bonus tip on how to validate and secure more referrals from primary care doctors.

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover practical steps to grow your medical specialty practice without spending any extra money. Stay tuned to learn how to decrease stress, increase practice enjoyment, and pave the way towards early retirement and financial freedom.

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.046)
By the end of this episode, you'll discover the easiest things that you can do to grow your medical specialty practice without spending any money. Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience.

In this episode, you'll discover why it's important to communicate with your primary care physician, how leaving space on your schedule can help you be open to same day appointments or referrals. And you'll also find out how text messages can really help in treating complicated patients.

Welcome to another episode. And if you've ever wondered why you're not getting referrals as a specialist, or how you can grow your business as a new physician coming out of residency, I'm going to give you these three steps, three things that I think you can do as a specialist to increase your referrals, increase your income, and obviously decrease your stress with all that. So the first one is, as a new doctor, I think you need to speak to the primary care doctors in the community.

And one of things I see happening in my community is where we have new physicians who come in, are just starting off in their practice, or maybe in practice for while, they'll come and meet the doctors and they'll meet me and they'll meet the primary care doctors in the community. And I think that is a really important way to help primary doctors in the community know that you exist, know that you're there.

Whether you're a specialist, urologist, neurosurgeon, orthopedic surgeon, speak to your colleagues. It's important to have open dialogue about cases. And one thing that I actually have seen

Coach JPMD (01:43.756)
that has been really helpful in my practice is that I can call my specialists and call my cardiologists and call my orthopedic doctors in the community and they'll answer their calls. That's important. I've had that have been pretty complicated that I wanted to have a specialist see. And I'd call their office and speak to their office staff and the doctors are in the room or the doctors will get back to me.

or the specialists will say, hey, tell them I call them back. And they never call back. So it's hard for me to refer patients to doctors who don't call me back because then I can't discuss these urgent cases. And I know that there are doctors in my community and I'll name them. So Dr. Raxwall, we Dr. Nimer, we have Dr. Zeidan, some of our doctors in the community, they know who they are. And...

You know, they answer my call. Dr. Kumar is another one who answers my calls and they get a majority of my referrals. So that's number one. Answer your call. Speak to your primary doctors because I think that you'll get more referrals when you do that. Number two.

Leave space in your schedule for same day appointments. I don't know if this is possible. I do it in my office where we keep a couple of spots open for walk -ins. I do have nurse practitioners and extenders that actually see my walk -in patients. And it gives the patients the opportunity to see the doctor, their doctor, their primary doctor.

in a timely fashion and it decreases the emergency room visits, which if you're in managed care, that also helps increase your revenue. So you learn about that in my course on Medicare Advantage, learn about Medicare Advantage, where if we decrease ER visits, then that actually increases income to the primary care doctor. So in the specialist world, I'm not sure how that works, I'm not a specialist, but I would say, hey, leave a couple of spots open for walk -ins, maybe even analyze

Coach JPMD (03:51.056)
schedule to see how many urgent visits you get in a given week or a given month, and then divide that by 20 or 22 days. And that gives you the average number of patients you see as an urgent visit. And that allows the the primary doctor to be able to send patients to you same day. And that availability will help decompress

your schedule. Because if you're not having to scram patients in, because your schedule is already full, then that of course will help you decrease that the stress of having to see those urgent visits on the same day. The next thing I think specialists should do is text PCPs with complicated cases.

I got a text recently on a patient that was really complicated, had some complicated back issues, chronic back pain, was going for, I believe, hip surgery. And the specialist really didn't think that the back surgery that the patient wanted was going to actually help her chronic pain. And he texted me. And he texted me and the orthopedic surgeon that was going to be doing the hip surgery, I believe, as well.

And it was a great summary of what's going on with the patient. I was able to understand where his mindset was and why he didn't want to do the surgery. I was also able to understand how the patient felt. The surgery was going to help her, but in actuality, probably wouldn't. But having that communication and it was a quick text from the specialist who was able to tell me, hey, Jude, don't think this is right.

shouldn't do it. And I don't believe it took that much time for the specialists to do that.

Coach JPMD (05:44.822)
So when I saw the when I'm going to see that that patient, I'm to be able to have that communication that it's probably going to be in his his office note. But as you and I know, office notes don't always get to the specialists or the primary care doctors in a timely fashion for whatever reason. But text messages is quick. You can quickly read the text message, put the document that document that in the patient's note so that when they come to see you the next time, they'll be able to you'll be able to understand what

going on with the patient. And one last thing, I said three things, but I'm going to I'm going to add a bonus. And that bonus is refer patients back to the primary care doctor. It's really nice to see the specialists appreciate the care of the primary care doctor, some specialists tend to get in their silos and don't refer back. But I definitely know that it is validation.

that the specialists trust the opinions of the primary doctors in the community and trust their care. And that is a sure way to get more referrals back to you as a specialist. Refer patients, I it'd be, I know you can't do it exclusively because you want to increase your pool of referrals, but definitely look to refer patients back to the specialist, back to the PCP, because that I think is going to help increase your referral. So those are the

Those are four things. So as a new doc, as a specialist in the community, speak to your colleagues. Number one. Number two, least base in your schedule for the same day appointments. Not sure how that works for you, but it's something to consider. Text the PCP with complicated patients. And as a bonus, I think you should refer back to the PCP as a validation that you trust

their opinions and their care, but also that helps secure referrals back to you. So there you have it. Four things that you can do to help grow your panel as a specialist and increase your revenue. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe, follow, your favorite podcast app so you'll never miss an episode.