You invest time and effort in helping your patients recover from injury and illness and live healthier, pain-free lives. However, once patients complete their active care plan, they often stop coming in for routine adjustments or preventive care. Some DCs scoff at the notion of self-pay preventive care, but your patients typically perform daily habits that counteract the gains you make with treatment. They sit too much, eat inflammatory food and when they are out of pain, many quit doing the daily exercises that help them. Dentists recommend routine check-ups if you want to maintain a healthy smile, mechanics do maintenance on your car and even though every mechanical object requires maintenance, some DCs are against it? For those of you who want to offer your patients more, a wellness program will benefit them and your bottom line.
Continuous value
Recurring revenue isn’t a new concept. If you look at your monthly credit card statement, you will see a wide assortment of subscription services. If you ever plan on selling your practice, recurring revenue will be valued more than non-recurring revenue.
Patients will love the convenience, potentially discounted fee and maintaining their quality of life. These patients are easier to please because they are familiar with your treatments, they know what to ask for and you typically need to put forth less effort to make them happy.
Imagine if half your patients came in once a month when they finished their active treatment plan. If you were seeing 20 new patients a month, that would be 120 extra visits a month after a year. Imagine if you had an extra 300 to 500 visits a month from wellness patients? What would that do to your bottom line?
Why recurring revenue matters
Recurring revenue has become the backbone of many successful businesses. Subscription models offer companies financial stability, customer retention and long-term relationships, making them a powerful tool in today’s business landscape. Netflix and Spotify, for example, have shown how recurring revenue can lead to massive growth by offering a service users pay for consistently—month after month.
For DCs, this same model offers unique opportunities. The idea of having a steady stream of patients signed up for ongoing wellness care provides income predictability and also the chance to build long-term relationships with patients who might otherwise drop off the radar after their pain subsides.
When I first started in practice, I implemented a monthly wellness program early on, calling it our VIP Wellness Club for those completing active treatment. The difference it made to my practice was astounding. Ensuring patients were on board with preventive/wellness visits, I could guarantee my overhead was covered by the first of the month. This peace of mind freed me from the constant stress of relying on new patient flow to meet financial obligations and gave me the freedom to focus on improving patient outcomes and growing my business. That positive cash flow also allowed me to pay off two chiropractic school loans in three years.
How to introduce a wellness program to your patients
To introduce a wellness program successfully, it’s important to start planting the seed from the very beginning of the patient’s care plan.The following are strategies for introducing the wellness program to your patients:
- Educate patients throughout active care. Early in a patient’s treatment, emphasize chiropractic care’s long-range benefits. Use each visit as an opportunity to reinforce how continued care can help maintain spinal health, prevent future pain and enhance overall wellness. As patients progress through their treatment and begin to feel better, regularly remind them that chiropractic care isn’t just about treating pain, but also about maintenance and prevention.
- Celebrate milestones. When a patient completes their active care plan and achieves significant milestones, acknowledge their progress. This is a great time to discuss how maintenance care through a wellness program can preserve their health improvements.
- Offer incentives for early enrollment. To get more patients on board, consider offering a legally discounted fee for those who enroll in the wellness program during their active care or as soon as they finish. Patients are more likely to commit to wellness care if they feel it’s affordable. Wellness patients are easier to treat and already understand how things work in your office. All of those advantages added up should be more than worth a discount.
- Make it simple. Keep the program easy to understand with clear benefits. For example, offer a certain number of adjustments per month at this discounted fee, priority scheduling and preferred pricing on products and additional services. Simplicity encourages enrollment.
- Track your patients. Your goal should be for patients to use your services and receive the benefits of care. At first we used a manual process to check in with membership patients who didn’t have a future visit scheduled, but eventually we started using software that helped manage this automatically.
- Use testimonials. If you have existing patients in your wellness program, ask them to share their experiences. Positive testimonials about how continued chiropractic care has kept them pain-free or helped them maintain an active lifestyle can be powerful in encouraging others to join. You can take those testimonials and create a video for patients to watch before their final re-exam, to prep them for this membership program. Throughout your office, I would place photos with written testimonials about different conditions and how your membership program can help. *Always remember to get signed HIPAA authorization to use their information for marketing purposes.
Benefits for your practice
Implementing a wellness program can bring tremendous benefits to your chiropractic practice. Here are a few:
- Steady, predictable income. One of the biggest advantages of a monthly wellness program is the financial predictability it offers. No longer do you need to rely solely on new patient appointments or unpredictable flows of traffic. When patients commit to a monthly program, their recurring payments can cover your practice’s fixed expenses, allowing you to better plan and grow your business.
- Improved patient retention. Many patients stop coming in once they feel better, only returning when pain flares up again. With a wellness program, you encourage patients to stay engaged in their health journey, reminding them of the importance of regular care. This prevents gaps in care and keeps them coming back. And when a new condition or exacerbation occurs, they simply step back into active treatment, pausing their wellness program, and then return when they are once again discharged from active treatment.
- Higher patient satisfaction. Patients who commit to wellness care often report feeling healthier, more energized and less prone to injury. By offering a wellness program, you give your patients the tools they need to maintain their progress and keep improving, which naturally leads to greater satisfaction and loyalty.
- Better marketing opportunities. The recurring revenue from a wellness program can free up time and resources for marketing efforts. For example, launching my VIP Wellness Club gave me financial stability to focus on marketing without the pressure of needing immediate results. I could experiment with new marketing strategies, knowing my overhead was already covered.
- Lower cancellation rates. Patients enrolled in a wellness program tend to cancel less frequently because they’ve already committed to their care. When patients know they’ve paid for the month, they’re more likely to show up for their scheduled appointments, which also leads to better outcomes for them. *Be sure to check with your state laws about accepting prepayment from patients. And ensure that unused, prepaid visits remain on the patient’s ledger as a credit.
Manage your wellness program efficiently
Tracking patients in a wellness program requires structure and organization, but you can make it simple with the right tools. In my practice, we used a patient management tool that allowed us to easily see patient progress, credits, upcoming payments and future appointments. By keeping tabs on these metrics no patient fell through the cracks. By proactively reaching out to those who didn’t have their next visit scheduled, we kept patients on track with their membership.
Structure your wellness program
Creating a monthly wellness program is about finding the right balance of services and pricing that works for both you and your patients. Here’s a basic framework to help you get started:
- Adjustments. Offer one or two chiropractic adjustments per month as part of the core package. You can also include additional services, such as nutritional consultations or massage therapy sessions, as optional add-ons.
- Fees. Set a fee that makes sense for your patient base. You want it to be affordable enough that patients feel they’re getting a good deal, but also high enough to cover your costs and generate profit. If you choose to offer a legally discounted fee for this Wellness Club, be sure to seek guidance from a professional to ensure the discount is permissible.
- Discounts for additional services. Encourage patients to use other services by offering discounts on additional appointments, products or therapies not included in the monthly plan. Using a discount medical plan network for these discounted fees provides an extra layer of risk protection.
- Family plans. Consider offering a family wellness plan that covers multiple members of the same household. This increases value for families, while ensuring more consistent visits to your practice.
Final thoughts
Incorporating a monthly wellness program into your practice can help stabilize your income, increase patient retention and provide you the financial independenc to focus on growing your practice. With recurring revenue and loyal wellness patients, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your practice can thrive, even in slow seasons.
Start planting the seeds for your wellness program early, communicate its benefits clearly and watch as your practice shifts from a fluctuating, unpredictable model to one with consistent growth and revenue.
Naota Hashimoto, DC, is the cofounder of TrackStat, patient tracking software that makes it easy for you and your staff to attract and convert new patients, while ensuring your existing patients stay in your practice. It offers new ways to retain patients as well as ways for staff to communicate and schedule patients while providing you all the metrics of success. For more information, visit trackstat.org.
