Healthspan Blog

Diet2Live is a great new forum intended for the discussion of all things health related. On the forum you’ll find categories where you can chat about different types of exercise, exchange tips on healthy recipes, and discuss all sorts of popular diets (such as South Beach and the Atkins diet).

As well as exercise tips, diet discussions and recipes, Diet2Live offers a section where you can keep readers up to date on your progress. If you want, you can post pictures of yourself periodically to give yourself that vital confidence boost as you see your shape improving. All in all, Diet2Live should be an essential bookmark for anyone trying to get into shape.

If you’re looking for ways to drop a few pounds, build stamina or just improve your general health, Diet2Live is a great place to start. Best of all, you can treat the site as a support group to lean on when you’re having trouble maintaining your diet or exercise regime. All in all, a very handy site. I suggest you take a look.  Check it out

The new yellow pages came out in our area last week, so as usual, I took a spin through to check out the competition. To my surprise, some of the newer practitioners in the area had chosen not to advertise. Our area is pretty thick with chiropractors, and the number of naturopaths and TCM practitioners is on the rise, too, so I was curious why a new practice would overlook this choice. A yellow page ad is relatively inexpensive here.

I've always been a fan of the yellow pages. You can find a list of good reasons here, as well as a list of negative aspects here.

My favorite reason has always been that the yellow pages are how *I* find things. Even for a company I regularly patronize, I don't tend to use the white pages. And if you happen to be a holistic practitioner with a hard-to-spell name, the yellow pages are critical - it may be the only way your patients can find you.

What can be challenging, once you've decided to use the yellow pages, is how much to spend. The most useful piece of information for helping you with this choice (or any advertising choice) is your average annual revenue per patient. To find this, take your total revenue for a year, and divide it by the number of active patients in that same time period. I find this is a handy number to have in mind for many expenses. It seems so much easier to make decisions when you can say, for example, "Okay, all I need to do is get two new TCM patients this year from the yellow pages, and the ad is paid for." It puts things in concrete terms.

If you track your referral sources, you'll also be able to tell how many new patients came through the door in a given year as a result of your yellow pages listing. Using your revenue per patient number, you can then easily tell if your ad was worthwhile, and whether to go bigger or smaller the following year.

SoundPractice.Net's latest podcast is on the importance of creating and using systems to manage return visits, and ensuring that test reports, etc. are properly followed up on.

SoundPractice.Net - Podcasts for Medical Practice Management and Health Care Administration