An Improved Avenue for Bringing in New Patients—Why Wendy Ziersch Moved 5 Clinics to HotDoc

Wendy Ziersch is the business operations manager of 7 Australian practices – 5 metro and 2 rural. As well as overseeing 7 clinics, she has led the opening of 2 of the clinics: Murray Bridge Day & Night Surgery and Greater Fleurieu Medical Centre.

Wendy shares, “The clinics vary in size. The largest has 11 doctors and the smallest has two and a half. The two rural practices are vastly different in resources, and the metro clinics are obviously more orientated toward metro people.”

Moving 5 clinics to HotDoc

Wendy explains, “Six of our practices initially used [another provider] as their online bookings, but I’ve slowly shifted them over to HotDoc… we’ve integrated HotDoc into 5 of the surgeries, and we’ve got a sixth one coming soon in Blackwood.”

Wendy says she began switching her clinics over to HotDoc after trialling the platform in one of her surgeries and noticing that it cost less and did more than their previous provider.

“It initially came down to budgetary costs,” Wendy says. “But when I moved one clinic across we saw the product did more too.”

Wendy says she eventually switched another 5 of the clinics across because of “the price, the ease of Recalls, the Online Bookings effectiveness, the Check-In station, and also the customer support.”

Pictured: Left to right: Katie Quast (Medical Receptionist), Ann Dickson-Elliott (Medical Receptionist/Nurse), Phirya Jagathesan (Medical Receptionist), Wendy Ziersch (Practice Manager)

An improved avenue for bringing in new patients

Since switching 5 clinics over to HotDoc, Wendy says that she has seen a bump in new patients. “I think HotDoc is far more effective in getting people utilising the service than [the previous provider],” she says. “The numbers for online bookings are up. I have some collated results that support that too.

“For instance, I did an audit of our bookings when we were with [the previous provider] who always claimed that they got new patients. Then I compared the results for when we started using HotDoc.”

“We are up to around 45% of our bookings coming through HotDoc… the highest we ever received with [the other provider] was 38%. It’s resulting in much more value per dollar.”

Pictured: Phirya Jagathesan Medical Receptionist using HotDoc

Positive feedback from patients, and improved support

Beyond an increase in bookings, Wendy says, “the ease of online bookings with HotDoc is also much better… and our patients enjoy the SMS confirmation of their appointments.”

“We’ve had several positive comments from patients since moving to HotDoc. And we just don’t hear the criticisms that we were getting with [the last provider].”

Wendy says the support has also improved since moving to HotDoc. “[The previous provider’s] customer support was basic to say the least. It was just problematic. We had to let them know every time there was a public holiday… and they were just constantly providing us with hiccups.”

Since switching to HotDoc, Wendy says the opposite is true. “The HotDoc support and customer service is such a great highlight. They are there whenever we need them and fix anything immediately. We shouldn’t undervalue that.”

Making the transition to HotDoc

To help her clinics’ patients’ transition from their previous provider to HotDoc, Wendy says, “We ran HotDoc and [the other provider] side by side for 3 months to allow patients the opportunity to convert over.”

“We also did a fairly consistent campaign at the front desk of each of the clinics where we were educating patients on HotDoc. We taught the staff what to do as far as how to try and convert the patients over.”

In terms of getting her team used to the software itself, Wendy says, “The integration of HotDoc into our software has been seamless, and the dashboard is just so easy to use.

“The doctors love the reliability of knowing the Recalls are going out… and we’re getting a lot less calls, which the reception team really love… I’m a big ambassador for HotDoc. I brag about you to a lot of people.”