Revenue challenges in healthcare have been well-documented, and unfortunately many practices struggle to stay afloat. With economic uncertainty on the horizon, you may be wondering how you can weather any potential storms, and one strong solution is to diversify revenue. Let’s jump in.
What is revenue diversification and why is it important?
Revenue diversification is the practice of creating multiple streams of revenue for your organization so that you’re never too dependent on any one source. Typically, this involves trying other strategies and services to increase revenue and reduce risk.
For those in the rapidly changing healthcare industry, this is particularly important. Trying too hard to cling to traditional models and maintain the status quo can prove damaging to a practice. By focusing on new areas that naturally coincide with their core business, practices can achieve strong profit growth and withstand economic downturns. Revenue diversification is all about being proactive rather than reactive.
5 Ways to Diversify Revenue
Diversifying revenue doesn’t have to be intimidating as long as you know the best places to start. Here are five ideas you can consider for your practice:
- Expand your practice hours to provide urgent care services. This option helps your practice in a couple of ways. First, new patients will come in for urgent care, resulting in additional revenue. Secondly, you won’t be losing opportunities to provide care to your regular patients as they can choose your practice over the local urgent care clinic.
- Add ancillary services related to your specialty. Odds are there are services that you suggest to your patients that they typically have to go elsewhere for that you could bring in-house in order to increase patient satisfaction as well as revenue. Consider lab or imaging services, rehabilitative therapy, or even med spa services for dermatologists. Many practices have already taken this step and seen great success from it.
- Rent out unused space to another service. If you feel like taking on the management of another service yourself feels too intimidating, consider renting out some extra space in your practice to another service. This typically works out best if the service you’re renting to is at least somewhat related to your specialty. Just be sure to thoroughly vet the business you’re renting to and enjoy the extra income.
- Monetize de-identified data. Healthcare today involves a lot of data, and while protecting your patients’ information should always be a top priority, there are ways to use de-identified data to increase revenue while also making a contribution to the industry as a whole. This can be as simple as analyzing your data in-house in order to obtain insights that allow you to streamline your workflow and save money, or you can sell de-identified data to a third party that can then use that data to improve population care on a greater scale.
- Bring pharmacy services onsite. Many treatment plans involve medication, yet few providers offer pharmacy services within their practice. This option for revenue diversification is great because not only does it increase revenue, but it also provides convenience for your patients and is likely to improve medication adherence.
While revenue diversification can feel like a daunting task to take on, it doesn’t have to be if you simply consider new ways to serve your patients and move forward from there. As with most things in the healthcare industry, technology can make this task a lot easier. That’s why we at SolutionsHub work tirelessly to find the best partners for your practice as you step into the future of healthcare. To learn more about how SolutionsHub can help with your revenue diversification plans, reach out to an expert today.
