Small Tweaks, Big Returns: 5 Revenue Turnaround Moves from PE Physician Practice Leaders

Are you a private equity professional hunting for more revenue for the physician practices you manage? We asked successful physician practice leaders how they harnessed patient reactivation to put their practices on the road to more revenue. Here are their insights.

Think your practices are already deploying patient reactivation to its highest potential? They aren’t.

PE professionals like you routinely deal with physician practice portfolios that contain a mishmash of practice management and marketing automation systems. “Our PM software already handles patient reactivation,” office staff reassure them.

But most PM software doesn’t do patient reactivation well and diverse platforms don’t communicate well with one another.

Chief Operations Officer Grizelda Altamirano faced this challenge at Platinum Dermatology Partners, which contained 19 brands and 154 providers. Altamirano understood that even a one percent conversion rate uptick would translate to a substantial revenue boost. She tapped Brevium to deliver advanced reporting with updated conversion rates and financial results.

Within just six months, Altamirano and her team reactivated 21,605 patients and generated more than $3 million additional revenue. They achieved an astonishing 24.4x return on investment.

Even simple, inexpensive text messages have the power to reactivate patients.

Chief Marketing & Growth Officer Laura Fink knew she needed to deploy multiple outreach tactics to re-engage patients for Schweiger Dermatology Group (SDG), a practice with 110 locations and 400 providers. With such a large pool of potential patient reactivations to work with, Laura wanted insight into which outreach methods work best.

Brevium has given Laura the insight and results she was looking for. Over 18 months, SDG contacted more than half a million patients and achieved a 17% patient reactivation rate. Text/SMS messaging accounted for almost 48% of scheduled appointments.

Brevium provides the insight you need to understand when less expensive contact methods such as text, automated call, or email can do the patient reactivation job and when you should test more expensive options such as traditional phone calls that require staff time or direct mail.

Automated patient reactivation makes every dollar you spend on staffing count.

If you feel like rising expenses are eating away at the revenue gains you manage to make, you’re not alone: 92% of medical groups report higher operating expenses in 2024 compared to 2023. Rising salaries and wages are the main source of rising expenses, according to a recent MGMA poll.

Karen Medina, Chief Operating Officer at Eye Physicians, knew that manual patient reactivation was costing her practice precious staff time, data errors, and lost patients and revenue, so she tried Brevium for the 12-specialist practice treating across five locations in and around New York City.

Over seven months, Eye Physicians collected more than $1 million in patient reactivation revenue — 30.1x ROI. Freed from tedious manual patient reactivation tasks, Medina’s office staff could invest more of their time in patient-facing interactions that only humans can do.

Software targets patient reactivation outreach to times when patients are most responsive to it.

If your office staff are doing manual patient reactivation, you are limiting your efforts to times when many patients aren’t receptive to your messaging.

Manual reactivation happens only during business hours, and “no one answers because they are at work,” observes Rosa Tang, MD, MPH, MBA of Bellaire Eye Care Center in Houston. Before Brevium, “I had to get somebody to work in the evenings to call people because that’s when patients were able to answer their phones,” Dr. Tang adds.

Autocalls and texts allow for flexibility — not only for when your practice sends the message but also when the patients are able to answer or respond. Moving away from manual messaging has yielded 54.4x ROI for Dr. Tang’s practice.

Patient reactivation can help you ramp up additional revenue streams.

It’s no easy lift to launch a new ambulatory surgery center or practice location. Patient reactivation ensures that your investment pays off more quickly than it would otherwise.

A re-engagement journey that begins with office visits sometimes progresses to ASC care. Over just one year, patient reactivation yielded more than $968,000 for Covenant Physician Partners and Texas Eye Care Network (TECN), as well as an additional $490,000 for its ASC.

Brevium boosted quality of care and patient experience by routing patients to providers most equipped to treat their conditions. “For example, cornea patients were directed to the corneal specialist. Potential surgery patients were directed to surgeons, and glaucoma patients were directed to the medical ophthalmologist,” explains Covenant Regional Vice President, Connie St Clair.

Providers improve lives and save lives. So can you.

If you work on the business side of healthcare, your role in a patient’s health may feel inconsequential. But you have more impact than you think.

If you implement a patient reactivation strategy that helps to preserve or restore a patient’s sight, for example, you help them lead a safer, more fulfilling life.

You may even help save a few lives.

Trent Renta, practice administrator at Olansky Dermatology & Aesthetics, implemented Brevium to reactivate 2,454 patients over 10 months. Of those patients, 97 needed Mohs surgery, a procedure that treats basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). These skin cancers are not life-threatening in their early stages but left untreated, they can progress to more advanced and potentially fatal stages.

Because patient reactivation clears away obstacles to necessary health care, it’s more than just a revenue strategy. It can be a life saver.

Click here to see for yourself what patient reactivation can do for your practice or practice portfolio.