From: Dr. Margolies.. 6-1-23

www.familychirocenter.net

Please forward this to your chiropractic colleagues

  E-mail Message This Week .. Salvage Job

We all have patients who gave us the green light to proceed with care only to stop for no apparent reason. During your staff meetings you collectively shake heads trying to find a lapse in service or patient management and when he or she slid through. Was it money, time waiting prior to their adjustments, a poor outcome between visits or some type of misunderstanding? Besides the loss of income, potential referrals and community networking this is a lost opportunity to help yet another soul. This is compounded if repeated many times per month. 

Too often doctors are in denial or are poor administrators. Their heads are deep in the sand and they only look up when a crisis brews. Dropped and missed appointments demand immediate action and shoving accusations between staff members is as irresponsible as shoving dust beneath the rug. The buck stops with you and you best get your act together to salvage your practice or complacency eventually will rule the roost. 

If missed appointments are the rule rather than the exception, you are missing a fundamental component of patient management .. Education. If patients drop out of their scheduled care without a call or returning your calls and it seems to be the rule rather than the exception, you are missing a fundamental component of patient management ..  Education. If patients are not attending your new patient spinal care classes or referring others to your office for outstanding care and this seems to be the norm rather than the exception, you are missing a fundamental component of patient management .. Education.

It all boils down to knee to knee or collective lectures on Chiropractic 101 and why they need to follow your lead, not lose momentum and keep up with their specific schedule of care. They need to see and feel your knowledge of the spine, spinal decay, physical wear and tear and realize that it is never too late to tell others to avoid what they have gone through providing you with unlimited new patients. They need to understand that their daily habits, social activities and years of micro traumas have set their physical timetable on an accelerated course but your conservative and unique chiropractic care will keep it at bay and attempt to reverse the downward spiral, heal, regain and maintain a better life without chronic pain or poor personal performance. Who would not take advantage of that? But, they also need to know and they need to tell others and for sure they need to keep up with their appointments and feel the urge to tell the chiropractic story over and over again. How and when they need to be salvaged is dependent on your office statistics.

Review the past 20 new patients and determine their status and when they either dropped out or why they are still with you. If your ledger shows most are on schedule, pay on time, have attended educational programs and try to share with others their good fortune of meeting you, then continue on course and further anticipate and meet their chiropractic, ergonomic and nutritional needs. But, if patients have been lost here and there, you better determine on which visits there seems to be a pattern and decide which steps you need to apply before the quicksand of practice demise sets more and more traps for patients to slip through.

Patient education providing a clear value of your service sets a better tone and captures patients prior to their slipping through the cracks. Ask a colleague for help if you find trapped yourself or if your staff lacks the proper verbiage or scripts to get the job done. 

Salvage what you have before it is

delegated to the heap of chiropractic history