Programs

The previous director is suddenly… nowhere to be found.

It requires a certain personality type – patient, reassuring, unpressuring – to engender trust and establish this sort of relationship in a business context.

A government or insurance buyer needs to make certain that a provider offers a particular service and meets particular standards of performance. They won’t necessarily require you to exceed those standards, or provide extras. They understand that we get what we pay for.

Addiction treatment is never just a business. It’s a public trust. Our goal must be to fulfill that trust by providing the very best service we can to the people who need it. That doesn’t mean we can’t do very well from a business perspective.

Even among programs with a fine clinical program, dedicated staff, good administration, some are more successful at attracting customers than others. Marketing offers a key to understanding why.

Some clients need more frequent reinforcement than others – those with poor impulse control, for instance, or who struggle with cravings, or are less motivated for other reasons.

What am I supposed to do with all this information? It doesn’t bring in more patients or help me get additional staff to treat the patients I already have.

The key question involves which part of the COD population you’re going to serve. It’s not really a homogeneous group.

In most cases, our only pre-admission contact with prospective patients and families is by telephone.

A patient said he’d visited a local family clinic three times in the past year for drinking-related problems and the physician never once mentioned that he needed treatment.