Follow these ‘rules’ to keep patients coming back

Follow these ‘rules’ to keep patients coming back
By Jeff Smith

The three true “rules” to patient education may be very different from the ones you have heard. But if you follow them, you will be rewarded with excellent patient retention and patient referrals.

The three rules are:

1) Lead by example. If you become your own best practice member and start attracting others like you, you will eliminate almost all of the patient education you now feel compelled to do.

Why? Ideal practice members take responsibility for their own health. They do not rely on the doctor to educate them, but rather are active in seeking out information and answers on their own, looking to you to guide them to the right sources, but not relying on you to constantly spoon feed them answers.

Bottom line: ideal practice members “get it” and don’t require you to spend extra time educating them.

2) Don’t talk like a doctor. If patients can’t understand it, they won’t value it.

Yes, you are quite well educated and know everything about chiropractic. But that is far less important to your patients than the condition of their own health. They rely on you to give them the facts in plain language.

Einstein said the true test of genius is being able to transform the complex into the simple. So if you’re a genius of chiropractic, make it simple for your patients.

3) Remember: More is not necessarily better. The key to education is progress, not knowledge. Many doctors believe that giving their patients more education is better. It isn’t.

What keeps patients coming back is the feeling that they are making progress, not the feeling that their head is filled with new ideas that they don’t fully understand anyway. Your job as a doctor is to make your patients feel like they are making progress. Scaring them with the 50 billion things that are wrong with them often makes them feel like they are going backwards, not forward.

Be honest with your patients when you find things that need correcting. But find a way to communicate that to them so that they can have a goal to pursue and can see the progress they are making toward that goal.

Work with them as a team to continue to improve their health every day for the rest of their life. Being able to see that their health is improving is the motivator that keeps them following your care plans and coming back in, without you ever having to ask.

Make a commitment to analyze your own method of providing patient education and see which of the three keys you might be missing. Your patients will thank you for it – and your practice will grow because of it.