Pages written for referring physicians, not patients
A small audience of people who each refer repeatedly, and almost no practice writes for them.
6 min read
A primary care physician who trusts one audiology practice refers to it for years. That is the highest-value relationship available to a hearing practice, and the ratio of effort to return on a page written for them is better than anything patient-facing.
It is a different page in almost every respect, and putting the two audiences on one page serves neither.
- 01
Write to a clinician, in clinical language
This is the one context where the clinical vocabulary belongs unexplained. A referring physician is not helped by an explanation of what an audiogram is and is mildly insulted by it.
State the test battery, the equipment, the scope of practice, and the qualifications of the audiologists by name.
- 02
Answer the three referral questions
How quickly can you see my patient. What will I get back, and when. What will you do if you find something outside your scope.
Turnaround on the report is the one that decides it. A physician who waits three weeks for a report stops referring, and a specific commitment on this page is unusual enough to be persuasive.
- 03
Make referring frictionless
A downloadable referral form, a direct phone line that does not go through the patient queue, a named contact, and a fax number, because a meaningful share of practices still use one.
Every extra step here costs referrals in a way that is invisible because nobody tells you they stopped.
- 04
Build one page per referring specialty
A paediatrician needs different reassurance from an ENT, who needs different reassurance from a GP or a neurologist sending vestibular cases.
Three focused pages beat one general one, and there are usually only three or four specialties worth writing for.
- 05
Accept that this page will have almost no traffic
It will be one of the lowest-traffic pages on the site and possibly the highest-value. Judge it on referral volume from named practices, not on sessions.
It also does work you cannot see: physicians look you up before they say your name out loud, and increasingly they ask an assistant instead of a colleague.
Where this goes wrong
- Explaining basic audiology to a physician
- Mixing patient and physician audiences on one page
- No commitment on report turnaround, which is the deciding factor
- A referral route that goes through the patient phone queue
- Judging the page on traffic