For example, an MRI machine has a large cost but also has a large return. Like all good businesses, it is important to make investments in the places that show a financial return. First, medical groups are very cost-conscious organizations about certain things.
I think that a few items are at play when we talk about doing work for free without the proper tools. The physicians who fit this profile are typically the ones who get talked into doing the on-call schedule for their partners. They are not looking to rock the boat, nor are they looking to make a big deal out of something that others find trivial. I have learned over the past 10+ years that most physicians are very mild-mannered people. Technology people are so valuable and in such demand, they will simply leave. In many industries outside of medicine, this concept would have ended 20 years ago.įor example in the technology/software industry if you don’t provide time and tools for your most valuable employees, or if you expect them to perform duties that are time-consuming, and difficult, and on top of it, have people gripe about the results, they would pack up and go somewhere else. This averages about 40 hours per year, of nights and weekends. That is so important I am going to say it again, most of the Physicians that I speak with (several hundred each year) still have to create the call and work schedule for all the partners on their own time, and without any tools. Many of the physicians who look at our TigerConnect Physician Scheduling demos and or that call into the office are still creating the work and on-call schedule for their partners on their own time, and by hand without any tools other than perhaps Excel. They thought that our set-up interface sucked and therefore moved on.Realized that they did not have all of the necessary information to set-up the system.Realized there was work involved, perhaps the volume seemed overwhelming.No money was invested (easy come easy go).Not one of the free trials turned into a sale. Out of the total group of doctors that signed-up for the service, the large majority of them never completed the set-up part where you enter the doctors’ names. We had a large number of doctors sign-up for the free trial.
In addition to our investment to automate the set-up process, we also needed to create many do-it-yourself videos so that the doctors would know how to set-up the system and be able it use it.
The free call schedule trial was for our product to help them create, maintain, and publish a call schedule for their partners. We thought it would be great to give them a self-serve method that they could do when it was convenient for them. We thought this would work because many doctors are not available to speak with our sales team during the day, they’re too busy seeing patients. In 2010, Adjuvant, the maker of Call Scheduler (now TigerConnect Physician Scheduling) spent money to customize a way for doctors to come to our website and request a free-30-day-trial of our Call Scheduler (now TigerConnect Physician Scheduling) Lite product.
This model has plagued the non-pharmaceutical medical industry for more than 40 plus years as medical offices have an expectation of being able to try something for nothing before they buy it or even consider it. If I could go back in time and be sitting in some of the early meetings at the large pharmaceutical companies when they had the brain-child idea of buying their way into the physician’s office using free drug samples, I would definitely have had something to say. Is Free Scheduling Software Too Good to be True?
Think about the building industry or mechanics. In some professions, it is acceptable to expect the resource to provide his/her own tools to be able to complete the job. Free to the physicians, not free to the medical group. Physicians should have access to free tools to use to do their job. Medical Groups should be providing valuable tools for physicians to use, for free, to create maintain, and communicate their on-call and work schedules.