Dear Doctor:
Most savvy chiropractors realize that building a great practice requires establishing a sense of priority in their patients. The missing link in most offices is a clear way to convey the chiropractic message in language that compels the person to value chiropractic care appropriately. Here’s a method of delivering such a message, custom-tailored to your style of practice and guaranteed to enhance your patient’s experience, a technique known as the Chiropractic Patient Curriculum, or CPC.
Take a sheet of paper and brainstorm out all the ideas you would like a well-informed chiropractic patient to know and understand. Basic anatomy, explaining pain, promoting wellness, inviting family referrals, teaching about subluxation and innate intelligence, specialties like nutrition or exercise, miracle cases – there are dozens of topics that may apply, depending on your particular practice model. Write down as many tidbits of information as you need to express your story effectively.
Take another sheet of paper, and organize these ideas into a series of statements or short paragraphs, in a logical sequence, so when you’ve rewritten your brainstorming page, you have the pertinent information chunked and orchestrated into a smooth flow.
Now take a third sheet of paper, and write numbers down the left hand side, then flip over the page and keep numbering until you hit the bottom. These numbers represent the number of each office visit – you’re designing a CPC, a visit-by-visit patient education routine that you will apply to each new patient. Fill in the slots with the visits you already know – for example, the first visit is consultation-history-exam, the second visit is report of findings and first adjustment, the twelfth visit is the first re-exam, the twenty-fourth visit is the second re-exam, etc. Now, begin to layer your patient education material into the open slots on the sheet, until you use all the tidbits.
Once this visit-by-visit routine is defined, take key words from each small script and write them on an index card with the numbers, and use the card to help you remember until you fully own the process. Just look at the travel card to see what number visit the patient is on, and use that patient education tidbit to guide the patient toward your ideal.
Taking the responsibility to properly train your patients is well worth the effort. Help your patients at a deeper level by offering them more than just relief – use a Chiropractic Patient Curriculum to improve your communication and build your practice.
Dennis Perman DC, for The Masters Circle
PS Last chance to register for “Success Systems That Never Fail,” in Chicago, July 16-17 -- please visit themasterscircle.com, or just call 800-451-4514. See you there!
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