5 simple tips for getting referrals from patients
Getting referrals from your patients is vital for increasing the profitability of your chiropractic clinic. Granted, your competence as chiropractor certainly plays a big part in how many of your patients will tell their friends about you. But you can boost your chances with the following five tips: Offer monthly specials: Your patients will love saving a few dollars on their next visit and they will be sure to tell their friends about it. You can generate an even greater word-of-mouth buzz if you promote your special offers via social media like Facebook and Twitter. Just make sure there won’t be any billing errors because nothing will kill your patients’ excitement about your services faster than a messed up bill. Hint: Use an insurance claim and patient invoice tracking system! Position yourself as valuable expert: Provide value with immaculate documentation and impress you patients and any referring doctors with timely and complete Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Your notes must reflect your unique expertise and justify the fees you charge for your service. When your patients trust your expertise they won’t hesitate to recommend you to their friends and family. Put patient education first: Help your patients understand their conditions and treatment plans with an animated system that provides clear visuals. Patient education is critical for patient compliance, which is the necessary condition for better outcomes and ultimately, also for referrals since people only recommend what has successfully worked for them. Improve scheduling: Patients have busy lives and appreciate any help that allows them to manage their time more effectively. As such your front office staff should make it easy for them to keep and reschedule appointments by using an interactive system that provides system alerts. Ideally, your staff should use the opportunity to schedule appointments before the patient leaves your practice. In addition, patients should be contacted via phone to follow up on no-shows and no-future appointments, and to remind them about upcoming appointments. Your patients will appreciate the excellent customer service and their friends might notice it, too. Make patients feel important: Patients want to feel important while they are at your practice, rather than getting treated like an inconvenience. When your entire practice staff works as a team with a centralized task assignment and tracking system each person can solve any arising problems swiftly. As you can see it’s all about the little things. Keep in mind that all these tips will also help you run your practice more effectively without the need to micromanage your staff or spend valuable resources on expensive marketing campaigns. Ultimately, the right chiropractic software can make all the difference.
Is your chiropractic website about you or the patient? | Understanding patient personas
“Does your organization (chiropractic clinic) offer great services? Well get over it! Marketing is not only about you. The most important thing to remember as you develop a marketing and PR plan is to put your services aside for a little while and focus your complete attention on the buyers of your services (your patients).” – David Meerman Scott. Devoting all of your attention to your prospective patients and away from the services you offer is difficult for many chiropractors, but it always pays off in the form of bringing you closer to achieving your new patient goals. When it comes to your website, what is the first thing a prospective patient see? Is it a complicated mix of fancy chiropractic terminology? Is your home page or most of your site’s content filled with “BS” words like “subluxation”, “Q-lasers”, “Dorsal/Thoracic” and “Sacrum” or is it focused on patient conditions such as headaches, lower back pain, poor sleep quality, dependency on pain medication or poor mobility? If you are guilty of using this outdated “it’s all about me” approach you are not alone. As a matter of fact, you would have do heavy searching and investigation to find a member of the chiropractic community whose site didn’t fall victim to this self-centered marketing approach. For those of you reading this, thinking to yourselves, “I don’t fall into this category,” because you have some small portion of text on your site that says “It’s all about the patient”, think again! The only one buying that line is you. We, as a society, have learned, “If you have to say it, then it probably isn’t . . .” A patient persona would basically be a characteristic or condition you use to organize the different types of patients your clinic focuses on treating. When patients search for solutions or information regarding a condition they aren’t typically looking for specific techniques and often times are not looking for chiropractic services at all. To build a website that is a functional part of your marketing strategy you must first focus on the prospective patient experience. You may have multiple techniques for helping a patient eliminate chronic headaches but is your websites content geared toward attracting this type of patient? Creating an online experience that is focused on the patient’s condition and the problems this condition creates makes it easier for your target patient personas to find you. A truly patient-centered site should speak to the patient in a special way; a way that makes him feel that you truly understand his condition and the impact it has on his life. By doing this you are creating a feeling of trust and authority and only after that will your attempts to educate the prospective patient on the techniques you use and the technology you possess be well received. Creating a site that is centered around the patients condition lets potential patients know right away that they are at the right place when they do find your site. Once your prospective patients have found your site by searching for solutions to a specific condition you can further enhance their website experience by showing that you understand the problems their condition may cause in their lives, offer persona specific testimonials and last but not least talk about you and how you have the experience, technique, tools, staff or facility needed to give them back the life they used to have.