Chiropractic Coaching: Lifetime Personalized Functional Chiropractic Care, Part Two

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This edition is part two of Lifetime Personalized Functional Chiropractic Care. Let’s continue our discussion of the Lifetime Patient Formula, which tells us that when you combine the optimal program of chiropractic care with optimal lifestyle habits and optimal health and wellness modalities and technology, it leads patients toward making a lifetime commitment to ongoing wellness care.

These three components are essential for the patient to receive the greatest benefit from your services. So then the purpose of this Thrive in Five is to outline the structure of lifetime personalized functional chiropractic care so you can shape your office procedures to build more lifetime patient relationships in your practice.

Having set and polished procedures and protocols will refine your patient management and improve your patient compliance, your clinical results, and your profitability. So, let’s examine the four skills you’ll need in order to accomplish these outcomes in your practice. They say well begun is half won, and nowhere is this more true than making the best possible first impression on your new patient.

The time tested way to handle this is with a well thought out, well orchestrated entry procedure with a concise and effective consultation, a thorough history, and a complete and relevant exam, followed by a powerful persuasive report of findings that reveals the truth of the patient’s situation in simple, clear language the patient can understand.

Remember how easy it is to trip over the curse of knowledge when we talk just slightly over the patient’s head, missing a great opportunity to connect. We must trade at shoulder level, adjusting our communication so it’s as close to ideal as possible for that particular patient. This is one of the greatest challenges for the chiropractic entrepreneur, to learn to deliver our message in a way that works for the end user.

Your consultation must walk a fine line between laser focus on the patient’s presenting complaint and your desire to enroll this person in a lifetime wellness track. Do ask enough questions about the condition, but pre frame the encounter by alluding to the grander scheme. For example, avoid the trap of asking pain questions first, and rather, ask if they know what’s causing the problem, or if they know why their body hasn’t healed this problem yet.

It will lead to a discussion of natural healing and innate response, rather than a same old same old conversation about their symptoms, which damages the relationship beyond repair and misleads the patient into thinking you’re like every other doctor they’ve ever seen. How could you reasonably expect a new patient to commit to a program of care with a new doctor they don’t know while they’re dealing with the nasty symptoms that brought them in if you don’t make a strong effort to explain what they need to know to make such a life altering decision?

Shape this new relationship by asking good questions in the consultation and history and by using the exam to learn what you need to know to help the patient make good choices. Then, engaging them with your report of findings will seal the deal, so you can move forward together. A well designed report of findings has three parts.

The four questions, the program of care, and the commitment. The four questions are, can you help me? What’s wrong with me? How long is this going to take? And how much will this cost? Answer those four questions effectively, and you are that much closer to a committed lifetime patient. Consider this language to open.

Mr. Patient, I believe I have some good news for you. I believe I found the cause of your problem. And if you do what I ask you to do, and avoid doing what I ask you not to do, I see no reason why you shouldn’t respond beautifully to chiropractic care. Next, you must explain your program of care in simple terms, so they know what you’re going to do and why.

Mrs. Patient, in our practice, your program of care will have three phases. The first, to get you out of trouble as soon as possible. The second, to correct the underlying cause of the problem. And finally, to follow through so you can enjoy the miraculous healing and wellness benefits that chiropractic is famous for.

Finally, you must ask for a commitment, and I can make the argument that if you do the four questions in the program of care badly, but ask for the commitment properly, you’ll get a better result than if you do the four questions in the program of care properly without a commitment. The second skill you’ll need to develop and apply is your patient education, best provided in small tidbits each visit, rather than a huge data dump up front, and then not much more along the way.

Write 10, 20, 40, or more SNPs of patient education and arrange them into a sequence that works from visit to visit. For example, your first visit is your consultation history exam, your second visit is your report of findings and first adjustment, your 12th visit is your first re exam, your 24th visit is your second re exam, and so on.

But what should you say on visits 3 to 11 and visits 13 to 23? Well, it’s up to you, but I wouldn’t waste the time on small talk. You have so much meaningful information you could share with the patient, it’s worth the effort to design a patient education routine that you can use on every new patient to create compliance and satisfaction.

The third skill is your re exam system, where you re examine each patient every 12 visits or every 90 days, whichever comes first. The purpose of your re exam is to make a progress report and re commit the patient to their program of care. If you sense that your patient is disengaging, bump up the re exam to a sooner date and step in to re commit the patient then, if necessary.

And, use colorful visual technology to illustrate your message, like HRV scans, the health and wellness line, the functional health management score, and so on. This is a critical key to consistently making the invisible visible. Finally, the fourth skill is your recall system. Both daily recall and long term recall for those patients who discontinue care who you would like to invite back to your office.

For daily recall, any patient who misses a visit is to be contacted within 15 minutes of no showing to see if they can be rescheduled for later the same day. If not, they go on to a list of recalls to be contacted and rescheduled so no one slips through the cracks. For patients who have left, faded, or quit, choose those who you believe would re engage and send each a recall text, email, note, or card to invite them back in for a re exam.

Eighty percent of these contacts should be done by the CA. A more formal communication like, it’s been three months since your last re examination, the doctor asked me to contact you to schedule a convenient appointment for your re exam. Please click here to schedule your next re-examination. Or, if you’re not yet automated in this way, say, please call at your first opportunity to schedule your re exam.

For the 20 percent or so of patients that the doctor had a close relationship with, an informal handwritten note works best. Dear Joe, you haven’t come in for an adjustment recently, you’re overdue, please give me a shout ASAP. Yours, Dr. Dennis, or whatever. All recalls should have at least two parts, a note followed by a phone call.

The call should repeat the note. The formal ones by the CA and the informal ones by the doctor. It just takes a few minutes once a week and it pays major dividends. People are impressed when their doctor calls them for any reason. And this only takes a minute or two to potentially attract back a good patient after life got in the way.

These four skills, the Entry Procedure and Report of Findings, the Patient Education System, the Re Exam System, and the Recall System have been developed and refined over four decades to produce the most compliant, least stressful practices, and they will help you build a practice that offers lifetime, personalized, functional chiropractic care.

If you want to know more about this cutting edge material, go to the 6 Essentials landing page by scanning the QR code you see on the screen. Or, if you like, you can leave your questions below and I’ll respond. Thanks for watching. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman for The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching.

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