Best Practices: Schweiger Dermatology
Founder Eric Schweiger on brand building, technology, and patient experience
With its airy reception area furnished with wide banquette couches, Schweiger Dermatology’s pristine Long Island City headquarters feels like a clean, bright retreat from the grit of surrounding Queens Plaza. Now that the practice is a little over seven years old, occupies 30 offices in the greater Manhattan area, and has worked hard to establish a media-savvy, yet patient-focused operation, there are a lot of glowing reviews that mention the speed of getting an appointment as well as the general professionalism. The practice’s savvy adoption of up-to-the-minute tech like text-messaging appointment software has also kept pace with the client communication preferences of today’s healthcare landscape.
We talked to principal and founder Eric Schweiger about how he’s been able to see most changes in the profession coming down the pike and what it’s like to build a great medical brand ahead of the curve.
Tell us a little about the role the internet has played in shaping your practice.
After practicing for a couple of years, I hung my own shingle in November of 2010. That was the time patients were just starting to look for doctors online, and I think most physicians didn’t yet know how to market to clients.
“It made sense to build a business based on the patient experience I’d personally want to have: basic sense things that maybe weren’t historically basic sense in the medicine of the past.”
I saw patients were coming in from our website. We weren’t focusing on our site per se or worrying about optimizing it, but I could see that healthcare was going to be more consumer-driven so I read SEO for Dummies cover-to-cover. We wrote all the web pages by hand to ensure optimization, then we topped number one on Google for every keyword on dermatology.
Lots and lots of patients came in the door after that. ZocDoc came along and we were among the first ten dermatologists on it. Then, I became the very first dermatologist on Living Social. We got 550 patients in one day from a single offering.
How do you ensure consistency across your offices?
On the provider side, when we’re hiring or acquiring new practices, we look for people who satisfy the qualities you’d of course require: good references, good schools, the same philosophy of patient-centric care. Standardizing care isn’t applicable necessarily to this field, because not everyone has to be performing the same protocols to get a good result. In other words, there’s more than one way to treat acne.
With that in mind, we wanted to standardize the patient experience from check-in to check-out. Our mission is the ultimate patient experience. That means short wait times, fast response times when they call, and getting their prescription when they want it. We spend five to ten days in orientation and training the staff to focus on patients.
You have a great brand. How’d you build that from the bottom up?
When I began, the wave of consumer-driven healthcare was starting in fields that people could more easily comprehend, or in which they have a more identifiable hand in the outcome, like dermatology or dentistry. In 2013, when we were organically up to six offices and I was a single practicing doctor, I didn’t have some big strategy of a brand that we wanted to develop. I did, however, think a lot about the fact that consumers were choosing where they were going, and that clientele wasn’t simply getting funneled through doctor referrals.
It made sense to build a business based on the patient experience I’d personally want to have: a nice, modern, clean office. Friendly staff. Availability on the weekends and evenings. A return call or text when you contact the office. Basic sense things that maybe weren’t historically basic sense in the medicine of the past.
What do you think may change the way patients get treated in the near future?
Telemedicine has been around for a long time. All things held constant, people still like to go to the doctor and actually see somebody. I don’t see that changing in the short term.
In healthcare on a broader scale, it’s likely that artificial intelligence will play a role. Pathology or radiology are likely candidates for the sort of technology that involves a computer suggesting diagnoses and a physician being able to submit photos to refine or alter those diagnoses. I don’t know if it’s ten years away, or five years away, in terms of dermatology, but down the road, that’ll be part of the practice of medicine.
Is there a recent development you’re excited about?
Our new Bronx clinic allows us to serve the community and make healthcare more accessible to those without insurance or means to dermatologic care.
Vital Signs:
Preferred workday playlist: Parra for Cuva.
Top procedure: I think Botox is still going to be the answer. It’s really timeless and we’re seeing a lot of preventative use in patients starting in their late 20s, early 30s. It’s a broad procedure with high patient satisfaction and some benefits to doing it early.
Favorite patient amenity: Free WiFi.
Best-selling skincare product: Sente Dermal Repair Cream.
Go-to piece of tech: Hand-writing capability on the iPad. I used it in front of my staff once, and by next meeting we had everyone scribbling on their screens.
Learn more about Schweiger Dermatology here!
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