Grow your independent practice in 2025: The practice growth checklist for medical providers
Use this helpful checklist to review your current growth actions and develop a comprehensive, proactive growth strategy for 2025 and beyond.
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At a Glance
- Optimize your practice website for search rankings and turn visitors into patients with clear calls-to-action to book appointments.
- Ensure your online profiles and listings accurately convey your practice’s information and brand.
- Offer online scheduling, appointment reminders, easy ways for patients to provide feedback, and options for telehealth visits.
- Set patient acquisition and retention targets and track performance metrics to refine your practice growth and success.
The patient journey often begins with an online query. While artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are growing in popularity, 56% of adults are not confident the information AI chatbots provide is accurate, according to a KFF poll. This means that search engines are still a key item on any medical practice growth checklist — along with digital marketing and access to online tools.
We’ve created the following checklist to help your practice review current strengths. Review each section to see what you’re doing right to attract new patients and deliver an experience that keeps them coming back. Any box left unchecked is an opportunity to grow your practice in 2025 and beyond.
Drive business with a modern independent practice website
Optimize your practice website for the best possible search results rankings
- Create clear, helpful titles on every webpage, along with engaging meta descriptions and URLs that address patient search queries.
- Feature rich, descriptive content about your services, dedicating a single web page to each one.
- Make sure your medical practice website is mobile responsive and can adapt to any browser size.
- Confirm that your web pages load quickly to minimize visitors abandoning your site due to slow load times.
Ensure your medical practice website conveys a professional, modern brand
- Bring your practice to life with high-quality photos that showcase your office (interior and exterior), staff, and services.
- Feature positive testimonials that demonstrate high patient satisfaction.
- Publish blog posts that establish your medical expertise — and personality — and answer patients’ most common questions related to your specialty.
Implement a website strategy to convert visitors into patients
- Include prominent calls to action (CTAs) that influence patients to book an appointment.
- Offer an online scheduling option to patients through your website, making it easy for them to schedule or request a visit.
- Ensure your phone number is featured in text, not an image, so patients can call your practice with a single click.
- Give patients the option to connect with you via text message directly from your website.
Make your website the hub of your practice operations
- Create a positive, informative experience when people arrive at your website.
- Offer patients a variety of ways to contact your practice right from your website, most notably on your site homepage.
- Implement convenient patient self-service opportunities such as online booking, digital registration, and patient payments.
Maintain a positive, influential online reputation
Take ownership of your profiles on healthcare, business, and directory websites
- Claim each professional profile on every website that lists your practice and providers.
- Ensure your contact information (name, office address, phone number, and website URL) and business hours are correct.
- Optimize each profile with detailed content about you and your practice, and high-quality photos.
Claim and audit your practice’s Google Business Profile listing
- Claim and verify your medical practice listing on Google.
- Add or confirm your office location, business hours, and specialty to ensure those details show up in filtered searches.
- Update your Google Business Profile listing with new photos, direct links to your website, and detailed content about your practice.
- Add a few questions and answers to your Google Business Profile’s Q&A section.
- Enable appointment booking through your profile listing.
- Create several great posts to share news, showcase your expertise, or drive appointments.
Proactively manage your online reputation
- Ask each patient for feedback after their visit with a simple, automated online survey.
- Monitor any online patient comments, feedback, or reviews on a daily basis.
- Reply to negative reviews swiftly and respectfully, and offer to resolve any issues directly with patients offline.
- Thank reviewers who give positive feedback and add positive patient testimonials to your practice website.
Enhance the patient experience
Offer patients online scheduling
- Give patients the opportunity to book or request an appointment via your practice website, 24/7.
- Enable online appointment requests via Google and other business listing websites that offer the functionality.
Send appointment reminders to reduce no-shows and meet patient preference
- Send automated appointment reminders via email and two-way text messaging.
- Enable patients to confirm, cancel, or reschedule their appointments digitally.
Offer patients text messaging
- Give patients a call-to-text option, so that when they call your practice, they receive a prompt to send a text message instead if they choose.
- Use a secure text messaging platform for patients to request an appointment and get questions answered.
- Send feedback surveys via text after every visit to hear from patients about their experience.
- Use text as an option to connect with your practice and help enhance the provider-patient relationship.
Provide telehealth options
- Offer patients the option to meet you virtually for certain visit types, reducing wait times and patient no-shows.
- Create a seamless telehealth experience by sending patients a unique video link that requires no software download or log in.
Accept digital patient payments
- Have the ability to create and send digital invoices via email or text message.
- Invite patients to pay their bills online, helping increase speed to payment.
Increase patient engagement with email and social media
- Set up an email newsletter and segment your audiences to send regular customized emails to your patients and stay top-of-mind in between appointments.
- Pick one social media channel to communicate on and build engagement with new and current patients (post 2x a week at least).
- Write blogs about common patient questions or concerns. Share them in emails and on social media.
Streamline your front-office work
Empower your front-office staff to save time and accomplish tasks with less work
- Send automated appointment reminders to patients, eliminating manual phone call work from your staff’s day.
- Send digital registration and intake forms before appointments, optimizing convenience for staff and patients.
- Manage your patient payment process digitally. Create and send digital invoices to reduce paper workload, and expedite the time to send a bill and receive payment it.
Track your business performance metrics
Set goals and track metrics to help refine your practice success strategy
- Establish medical practice key performance indicators — such as appointment volume, new patient visits, and patient review sentiment — to help gauge your practice success.
- Set reasonable growth targets by month, quarter, or season.
- Monitor performance data and refine strategy on an ongoing basis.
Printable practice growth checklist
Use the following checklist to review which tactics you’ve already completed, as well as those you’ll need to tackle in 2025 to attract new patients and keep them coming back. Consider each item an opportunity to grow your practice this year and beyond.
1. Optimized healthcare practice website
Your website is a great place to make a positive first impression with patients. But that experience is not only about your site’s look and feel.
In addition to looking clean and readable, and providing all the key information about your practice, every healthcare practice website needs more. Your site must be written, designed, and built in a way that tells search engines to find it. This is search engine optimization (SEO), a key element of an effective patient acquisition strategy.
Fully optimizing your website — for patients and search engines — requires a keen understanding of how search engines work. It also demands exceptional, informative copy and imagery, and a clear and concise CTA. That invitation for website visitors to take action is usually to book an appointment or find out more information, both of which should be supported on your website and via phone.
List of necessary website elements
This full optimization of your website will help prospective patients find you, learn about your services and, ultimately, schedule an appointment. Here is the list of critical elements needed to ensure your site is ready to support your 2025 growth strategy.
I've optimized my practice website for the best possible rankings in search results.
- All web pages have a helpful title, well-written meta description, and URLs that answer search queries
- Features rich content about my practice and services, with a single web page dedicated to each service
- Has a responsive design — it adapts to any browser size to look and work great on any device
My website conveys a professional, modern brand.
- Includes high-quality photos that showcase my office (interior and exterior), staff, and services
- Prominently features testimonials that demonstrate high patient satisfaction
- Has blog posts and site content that establish my medical expertise and answer patients’ most common questions
My practice website is optimized to convert visitors into patients.
- Includes prominent CTAs that drive appointment bookings
- Offers one-click calling to my practice office
- Has easy online booking for patients that syncs with my office calendar
2. Positive, influential online reputation
I have claimed my profiles on healthcare, business, and directory websites.
- I have claimed my professional profile on each website where my practice and provider listing appears
- Includes correct contact information (name, office address, phone number, and URL) and business hours on each profile
- Each profile has rich, detailed content and high-quality photos
I have claimed and audited my practice’s Google My Business listing.
- I have claimed our listing
- Our listing includes office location, business hours, and specialty
- I regularly update our Google My Business listing with new photos and rich content
- I have added a few questions and answers to our Google listing’s “Questions & Answers” section
- Patients can book an appointment through our Google Business Profile
- I use Google Posts to share news and special offers
My practice has a business page on Facebook.
- Our Facebook page includes contact information and recent photos of our practice and providers
- I regularly post useful news and other information to my Facebook followers
- I have enabled reviews on my Facebook business page
I proactively manage our online reputation.
- We monitor online patient comments, feedback, or reviews on a daily basis
- I reply to negative reviews swiftly and respectfully, and work to resolve any issues directly with patients offline
- I thank reviewers who give positive feedback and add patient testimonials to my practice website
3. Modern patient experience
In a world of increasing competition, patient retention is critical for continued growth. As part of their overall experience, patients put a premium on convenience, and they want to feel valued. Here are tried-and-true tactics designed to help modernize and enhance the patient experience.
My practice offers online scheduling.
- Patients can book appointments directly via our practice website, 24/7
- Patients can book or request appointments via Google, and across a variety of third-party websites
We send appointment reminders to reduce no-shows and improve each patient’s experience.
- My practice sends multiple automated appointment reminders via email and two-way SMS
- My patients are able to confirm, cancel, or reschedule their appointments digitally
Our patients can easily share post-appointment feedback.
- Patients have the opportunity to provide feedback through multiple channels, including email and SMS
- Patients can easily share their experiences on review websites including Google
4. Streamlined front office
Eliminating time-consuming, manual tasks is a strong strategy that creates efficiencies, and can improve patient and staff satisfaction — while also supporting your practice’s cost-containment efforts.
Ditching old-school paperwork and archaic phone call reminders by employing a virtual practice model can help support your practice growth in ways your staff will appreciate. Automate tedious front-office tasks using the following list as a guide.
My front office staff have the technology to accomplish tasks with less work, in less time.
- My practice sends automated appointment reminders, so staff does not have to manually contact patients
- Online appointment bookings automatically sync with our appointment calendar
- Patients can fill out registration and intake forms online before appointments, saving time
- My practice uses email marketing campaigns to share medical and practice information with patients, and to drive patient recall and retention
- My practice tracks business performance metrics, including patient acquisition and retention goals
Editor's note: This article was updated in November 2024 to reflect the most recent data.
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