Making your doctor-patient relationships ‘sticky’
By Tom Deters, DC

In the late 1990s as a board member for an Internet company, I had numerous discussions in board meetings about how to get Internet users to not only come to our site, but also to keep coming back.

The techno-gurus called it making the site “sticky.” We know that chiropractic itself is sticky because it works, but is your practice sticky?

You’ve probably heard it before — if not, it merits repeating: One of the most valuable assets you have in your practice is the doctor-patient relationship you develop. In chiropractic, you care for people in a way that gives you an unparalleled opportunity to both develop and mine such relationships.

Unfortunately, just helping someone get well doesn’t guarantee that we have done all we can toward maximizing our doctor-patient relationships. This is especially true in the case of the managed-care patient.

Can these patients be converted to cash patients? Yes! Many books have been written on building customer relationships. (By the way, do you see patients or customers — or both?) Improving your business in this area should absolutely be detailed in your strategic plan in order to grow revenue.

Good customer service boils down to five key elements that seem deceptively simple. But the reality is that getting your mind around each of these components is a lot more complicated and has much more profound effects, than you might at first imagine.

1. Communicate. Most interpersonal commun-ication is nonverbal. Your style of communication — your affect, your tone, your words, a relaxed body language and talking slowly — is much more important than the content of what you are conveying.

Talk with patients, not at them. Put yourself in their shoes. They may be in pain, intimidated, unsure about their condition or anxious. Don’t issue orders, discuss services or attempt to manage their expectations.

Listen to them. The best sales people learn to read their customers. You are a sales person! Too often we are so result- and goal-directed that we neglect the human component — and that’s one of our major competitive and market advantages over other healthcare professionals!

Too busy to take a few minutes and listen? Just hang on — you’ll have lots of time on your hands if patients only show up once or twice and never come back. Communication — starting with a warm greeting, calling to confirm appointments and asking how the kids are doing — has to be a priority for all staff members.

2. Educate. Patients come to you because they have a problem. The more you can educate them and help them understand exactly what is going on and why, the better their buy-in, compliance and commitment to care.

Establish a formal as well as an informal patient-education program. Offer copies of articles for them to take home and share with spouses or friends.

When you have explained and shown them their problem (a picture or a model is worth a thousand words), then explain to them the benefits of your care.

Getting your customers to understand what you tell them means you have to know them and what’s important to them. What’s their lifestyle? What are their hobbies? Then you can direct your presentation of benefits accordingly.

3. Serve your patients. In a nutshell, service is the name of the game. Be happy to serve. Be happy to accom-modate. Your practice is there to serve your customers, not the other way around.

Listen to your front-desk staff when they answer the phone and schedule appointments. Do their conversations with patients sound like a chore? They shouldn’t. Train your staff to develop the heart and attitude of a servant.

Do your patients feel valued and important? Remember the last time you were at a really top-notch hotel? The staff was “just itching” to give you personalized service and help with anything you wanted.

For example: I was at a fine hotel recently and asked where the fitness center was. The manager came out from behind the desk and walked me all the way there — down two floors and along a long hallway. What service!

Everything in your office should revolve around the patient’s experience — from providing office hours that can accommodate the largest number of patients to having coffee or herbal teas available in the waiting room, along with a television, newspapers or possibly even a computer terminal.

4. Get results. While the specifics of diagnostic and treatment modalities are beyond this article’s scope, it bears repeating that the most important result of the doctor-patient interaction is for the patient to get well and feel better.

Do what you have to, within your scope of practice, in order to accomplish that. Sounds like common sense, right?

Then why do so many doctors subscribe to the dogma of a narrow treatment regimen, limiting themselves to a particular technique style or instrument?

Fit the treatment to the patient’s needs, not vice versa. Use your vast expanse of clinical knowledge and experience. Hunger to learn more, to improve your skills and to make a difference.

5. Follow up. Caring for and serving people are not “fire and forget” propositions. Out of sight is out of mind. One of the primary objectives in marketing is to create an emotional identity between you and your customers.

Call your patients — not just when they are in the acute stage, but a few months later, just to check in with them. How many doctors do that? You can set aside time to make these calls every day to refresh your relationships which can lead to more referrals.

You’re too busy? Let’s think about that. According to Chiropractic Economics 7th Annual Salary and Expense Survey (Vol. 50, No. 6), the average practice sees about 150 patients a week. But only about 30 percent or so are different bodies.

So, let’s say you see 30 different people a week. Divide that by five working days — that would be six follow-up calls to make per day. At two minutes a call, you would invest 12 minutes each day for a potentially big payoff.

You don’t have 12 minutes? Okay, call only half of your unique patients. That’s still an awesome personalized follow-up program.

Deepening and strengthening relationships with your patients tends to make your revenue more efficient (it’s cheaper to keep and develop a patient than it is to acquire a new one), increases your referral base and makes your practice so much more rewarding and satisfying.

For further information on seminars, workshops and consulting on strategic practice development by Dr. Deters, go to his Web site, www.tomdeters.com or e-mail him at info@tomdeters.com.