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.
