Blog Growing Your Clinic from One to Many? Start and Manage Scaling with Plato.

Have you already started your practice and are now thinking of expanding? Or perhaps you manage a group practice that has scaled to multiple clinics? Regardless whether you run one clinic or fifty, Plato has what you need to support your scaling ambitions. Learn how to start and manage the scaling process with Plato, so your clinic sustains its trajectory for exponential growth.

Why Scale Your Practice?

Figure 1. Excerpt from Plato’s “Scale Your Practice” whitepaper: Images adapted from Is there a difference between growing and scaling an agency business? (Beyond Noise, 2019)

In traditional growth, a business will increase its revenue at the same rate it incurs costs (Figure 1). The business will spend more on resources to generate a higher output, but rising expenses eventually restricts and decelerates its growth. 

Scaling, on the other hand, involves rapid growth comprising high revenue and low incremental costs (Figure 1). Companies that scale (aka scale-ups) also have a competitive edge that differentiates them from rivals. Scale-ups don’t just survive and grow, they possess a competitive advantage that helps them stay ahead of rivals in the long term. Successful scalers are the opposite of labour-intensive businesses; scale-ups operate efficiently by embracing automation as key to their operations, so standard processes run independent of any individual. 

While all this sounds great, scaling is complex and not everyone’s cup of tea. Plato’s “Scale Your Practice” whitepaper guides you through the intricacies of starting and managing scaling—from helping you decide if scaling is your cup of tea to scaling operations throughout your patient journey.

Why is Scaling Challenging to Start and Manage?

For any startup to scale into a successful business and for any scale-up to sustain its growth, the company must achieve Product-Market Fit (PMF). While there’s no official definition of PMF, author of The Lean Startup Eric Reis describes it as “the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its product.” (Head, 2018) 

Figure 2. Excerpt from Plato’s “Scale Your Practice” whitepaper. Image adapted from A Playbook for Achieving Product-Market Fit (Lean Startup Co. Education Program, 2020).  

One common myth about PMF is that once you achieve it, you can’t lose it. On the contrary, achieving PMF is a continuous work-in-progress. Since environments, markets and competitors are always changing, companies must continuously work to attain PMF. In Plato’s “Scale Your Practice” whitepaper, you’ll learn how to set the foundation to scale, such as identifying your market, how to determine when you’ve attained PMF and why it’s vital for businesses to find different ways to scale. Once your foundations are in place, it’s time to scale your clinic operations.

Scale Operations: Why Scale-Ups Prioritise Automation

Scale-ups automate as much work as possible, so their people can focus on complex tasks that can’t be done by technology. If a software efficiently handles monotonous tasks, staff can focus their energy on activities that add value directly to the business. For example, software can’t care for a patient, but it can fill forms and receive data. A tech-supported clinic staff can thus focus their attention on patients to not only improve the patient experience, but also increase employee job satisfaction.

Scale Your Clinic Operations with Plato

Clinics that use Plato can automate work across the patient journey. By thinking of your clinic’s operations in terms of the “patient journey”, you can focus your operations on what’s most important—patients. Each day, clinics process patients in a standardised way. They define and run routine tasks before, after, and during the patient visit. Repeat processes present opportunities for automation. A clinic that automates as much work as possible is where patients take priority, because staff are freed from admin tasks.

At each stage of your clinic’s growth, Plato automates work not just for doctors, but also their clinic teams and even HQ. Plato is more than just a clinic software, it’s your Clinic’s Operating System—the central platform around which your clinic’s operations revolve. When your clinic chain first starts, setting the right workflows is critical. Plato automates work for your front desk staff and doctors to ensure that each clinic operates efficiently. As your clinic grows, automations at HQ become critical. Plato makes it easy for your HQ team to analyse your clinic chain and drive improvements. For example, Plato’s “Intelligence” automatically generates reports for your clinic’s accounting, finance, inventory, and patient management by pulling data from across your clinics. If you need custom insights to power growth, you can integrate your Plato with Business Intelligence tools such as PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik or Mode. 

Plato’s “Scale Your Practice” whitepaper helps you discover exactly what automations can be applied across your patient journey and their benefits. But that’s not all. You’ll learn how custom analytics can power your clinic’s growth, how to scale HR, and how to stay compliant while scaling. Start and manage your scaling journey with Plato today.