Units of Measure for Drug Addiction Treatment Centers
How Do Drug Rehabs Measure Their Space For Admissions?
How Do Drug Rehabs Measure Their Space For Admissions?There are two very visible units of measure in the drug rehab space and they are:
1) Treatment Center Census
Increase your drug addiction treatment center census.
2) Treatment Center Number of Beds
Once a drug treatment center achieves a full census it might be time to expand.
As far as business health is concerned if the treatment center is at 100% census this means that all of their beds are filled every month. If the center is having problems with their census and is at 50% of capacity let’s say something should probably be done in order to improve the census to a higher number. If the treatment center has a strong referral and/or lead generation program working then chances are filling more beds and keeping the census at a healthy number is an easy problem to fix. If these referral and lead generation systems are not in place then it can be very painful to fill the center when the revenues are down.
Should Drug Rehabs Do Marketing When Their Facilities Are Full?
I speak to all kinds of treatment centers every day and the ones that are doing well tell me that they don’t need to do any marketing because they are always full. I tell them that this is a risky strategy because if their current admissions sources dry up what will they fall back on? It just makes sense to have the foundation laid for both referrals and marketing leads. If the foundation is laid properly and the inquiries are coming in you have choices of what to do with them. At the same time if your center is always full try on boosting your prices and see if you can find the ceiling because maybe you aren’t charging enough.
Having A Long Term Marketing Plan
Adding beds to a treatment center can significantly boost profits. Adding another 1 or 2 people to a group in therapy is not a big deal. Assuming the capital costs are covered and you have the space to add another 5 or 10 beds technically speaking you only have electric, laundry, food, and drug testing and a few other nominal costs. This being so and you are charging a full rate it basically becomes nothing but pure profit for the treatment center. Adding another 20+ beds starts to get into building a much different business because many other considerations need to be analyzed. At the same time the larger you grow the business the headaches can become bigger as well managing employees, marketing, facilities and all of the other government requirements in order to stay compliant.
