Note: Kevin Doherty is one of the first people I stumbled across a few years back when we started this blog. He built a successful acupuncture practice, then went on to become an author and business coach.
He’s a smart guy, which I like, but he’s also walked the talk, building a six-figure income while maintaining a life.
Here are our favorite acupuncture-specific online resources for practice growth and management, in no particular order. Have we missed any? Let us know in the comments.
ChineseMedicineTools.com offers a broad spectrum of TCM practitioner resources – you’ll find everything from forums, podcasts and a wiki to product suppliers and research. You can even get your own hosted blog. The site has over 400 registered users, so the forums have a reasonable level of activity. Registered users can submit their own sites/blogs to the site’s listings. Check it out here: ChineseMedicineTools.com
The folks at Acutoronto have taken some of their homespun promotional print materials and made them available for sale on their site. I haven’t seen them up close to check the quality, but they may be worth a look.
Here’s a quick shout out to a few acupuncture blogs with a marketing/practice growth slant that you might enjoy. Drop by if you’ve got a minute.
Insights for Acupuncturists has a solid list of practice-building links, a few of which I hadn’t seen. Worth a look, and as with most of these resources, they apply to just about any CAM practice, too.
I just finished Lisa Rohleder’s book, The Remedy: Integrating Acupuncture into American Health Care. I’d discovered her book and Working Class Acupuncture, via the Integrator Blog a while back, and she was kind enough to shoot me a copy of the book to review.
If you’re NOT an acupuncturist, let me grab you before you go: this book is a good read for anyone in the CAM profession. If you’ve wondered from a business perspective about the viability of chasing solely mid-to-upper class dollars, or about how to transition to a volume practice, this book is a must read. If you’ve ever felt the ethical twinges of focusing all your efforts on the small demographic segment that can afford your services, Lisa makes a rational, sensible case for more broadly affordable health care.
The Integrator Blog has an update on the Working Class Acupuncture story, including several interviews and comments. Worth a look – there’s a larger picture here that goes beyond acupuncture.
John Weeks’ The Integrator Blog featured an interesting article on Working Class Acupuncture, a Portland, Oregon clinic built on the concept of making acupuncture more affordable.
As Lisa Rohleder, LAc, began trying to make sense of the business of professional acupuncture, she witnessed two distinct phenomena. First, she observed that a huge percentage of the working poor and even the middle class of people in the United States cannot afford to pay for acupuncture treatment when individual appointments cost $65-$200. Second, Rohleder observed that over 50% of graduates of acupuncture schools abandon practice without ever figuring out how to make a living at it.
There is a natural progression to starting an alternative health practice. After opening your doors, the first order of business is, of course, to get as many new patients as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a natural second step in this process is to forget all about these patients once they leave the office. The file goes safely in the cabinet, and the next time it comes out is when the patient takes the initiative to call for an appointment.
Getting your holistic patients to return with regular frequency iswhere you start to reap the rewards of the hard work and expense of attracting new patients to your practice in the first place. It’s where you begin to turn your focus from the external world of prospective patients, to the internal world of the existing patients in your practice.
