Sometimes practices outgrow their space, expand their staff quickly, or are required to move due to landlords and building policies. However, moving can cause unexpected stress on your staff and stop growth for your practice. Not to mention, moving can confuse loyal patients or result in a loss of local customers.

Moving your practice is kind of like moving your home, but exponentially more difficult if you have servers, paper files, and other secure patient data onsite. That's why we encourage you to question whether your practice would benefit from uprooting its physical location or whether something else might satisfy your need for change. 

3 Reasons to Change Practice Locations

Without evaluating your motivations for moving first, you might not realize there could be a better solution for your practice. Make sure you're in the best place financially to take the big leap.

Need More Exam Rooms

Sometimes your need for moving is the most straightforward one: you're running out of space. Before you decide you need more space, make sure your rooms are efficiently filled with shelves of inventory, equipment, files, and other essential materials. You can make an existing storage room an extra exam room simply by reducing the amount of paper you have and going digital when it comes to patient data or billing. If you're ready to hire a new OD and there's no room that could be turned into another exam room, moving ultimately makes the most sense.

You Found the Dream Location

We all have those ideal neighborhoods in mind that we'd like to be located in some day. If there's a part of town that you know has high foot traffic, is close to residential areas or offices, and already includes a few healthcare clinics, it could be worth the leap. Consult a financial planner or business analyst to run reports on the return on investment of moving to that area to make sure your hunch is right. Then, you can even survey your existing customers in an email to see if they prefer the new location to the existing one. Make sure to gather all the feedback you can from your staff, too.

Business is Slowing or Booming

If you feel like the lack of parking or proximity to other local businesses is hurting your patient growth, maybe moving is the best solution for you. First, make sure that the scheduling software and ordering tools you use are moving patients along in your office and allowing you to accommodate every patient that comes knocking.

This advice also goes for practices that are experiencing an overwhelming amount of exam requests. If your software is filling your schedule but patients are piling up in the waiting area, train your entire staff on check-in and check-out and use modern tools for payment collections and patient education. These everyday actions shouldn't slow you down.

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