Fatal lessons in this pandemic for chiropractic businesses, and how to prepare for future disruptions - Chiropractic Economics (2024)

Among fatal lessons in this pandemic, patient communication was a key, and is today remains more so than ever

“Pivot” was one of the most common words used DURING the pandemic, one of the fatal lessons in this pandemic for chiropractors, and for good reason. Some of our colleagues were fortunate to be in cities and states that were allowed to be open, and others were less fortunate. But, no matter what area you were in, there were a few things you had control of during the pandemic.

Ideally, you were running a tight ship before the pandemic, but there is always time to improve your business if you weren’t. One trend I noticed with our clients around the country was that the offices with the best relationships with their patients continued to grow.

Improving your patient relationships

Patient relationships improve if you do the following:

1. Communicate with your patients when they are outside of your office
2. Be relevant to them
3. Target them
4. Data mine and know them
5. Meet them where they are at

Patient communication and remaining relevant

Maintaining a relationship with your most valuable asset, your patient list, is critical and was among fatal lessons in this pandemic for many chiropractors who did not maintain this as a high priority. Many offices need to remember to do this in good times, but it’s essential to do it all the time.

Many doctors get lost here and only reach out when they want to sell something, but more is needed to move the relationship forward. Imagine you had an acquaintance that only came to you when they needed a favor; how excited would you be to hear from them?

I hear doctors say they are chiropractors for everyone and want to care for people one month old to 100 years old. That may be true, but many of the ones I know will unknowingly cater to young families. There’s nothing wrong with that — but knowing who you are communicating with in advance makes it much more manageable when creating content.

Imagine if you had to give a speech to a room full of people with a blindfold on; what kind of speech would you give? It would be different if it were a room full of toddlers compared to young moms or seniors in a retirement home.

Your communication style and types of communication will differ depending on your audience, so it’s essential to determine who they are.

Fatal lessons in this pandemic: regularly targeting your patient personas and demographics

I always reverse-engineer everything I do. For me, it’s easier if I start with the end in mind and work backward from there.

For example, in the area where I have a practice, there are all types of people around our office, but my favorite patients were my affluent female spouses. Their husbands were retired executives or entrepreneurs and had expendable income and valued feeling and functioning better because they wanted to continue golfing, playing tennis and pickleball. They had grandkids, loved traveling, and valued being healthy over being heavily medicated.

I had some I found by chance, and once I determined this was one of my ideal patient personas, I started communicating differently in my marketing and attracting more of these patients. I was so excited that I came up with a few more patient personas, and guess what? I drew those types of patients and continue to retain them.

The example of my first patient persona is a 67-year-old affluent, Caucasian grandmother. She loves talking about her grandchildren, she’s into traveling, golf and pickleball, and she enjoys life. She’s in pretty good shape but could lose 10 pounds, but she’s comfortable with her body. She values being able to function and continues getting regular chiropractic care because she loves traveling and golf and wants to keep up with her grandkids. In addition, she loves our country and is a pleasure to be around.

Once you know who you are trying to attract, you can determine what types of communication work best for that demographic.

Mining your data and ‘psychographics’

When I created my patient personas originally, I looked at my database and figured out who I was serving the most frequently and who was paying more per visit.

Some doctors don’t like talking about money, but money follows value. If you provide high value for your patients, you will be rewarded. If stuck at a low office fee, it could be related to who you are attracting, or more often, it’s in your head about your fees. That’s another story for another day, which is the concept of price elasticity.

With EHRs it should be easy. Now our clients use our software to analyze their practice to determine their ideal patient personas. You can narrow it down to age ranges, insurance, zip codes, diagnosis and more. Data mining our patient base was essential. Coming up with five personas may be overwhelming, so you could start with two or three. Once you know the demographics of these patient personas, it’s time to get the psychographics.

Psychographics are comprised of a variety of things, such as:

• Why they come to your office
• What they fear will happen if their condition gets worse
• What they do in their free time
• Where they spend their time physically and mentally
• And possibly where they hang out virtually

Are they into sports, food, fishing, hiking, biking, etc.? Are they religious, and if so, what kind? Are they political? Personally, I’ve stayed out of politics, but I would always write to people who were more patriotic because anyone offended by that wasn’t welcome in our office anyway.

Meet them where they are at with your communications

Once you know your ideal patient personas, start communicating with them on those mediums. Think about how they found you, and one of the first places they search you out is your website, so make sure it is appealing to your ideal patient personas.

Once they are in your office, you must think about the mediums of communication, and here is a short list of them with some nuances in each. Remember, the most important content you produce is the message, so don’t get lost in the technical stuff along the way.

Email — the most important thing is who the email is from. Emails will get opened if you have a relationship with your email list and offer content, stories and reasons to open your emails. My open rate is over 50%, with 2,000 patients on that list. The list could be more extensive, but I regularly purge the list to remove people. If you’re emailing everyone who’s ever been into your office, you are hurting your open rate. Email deliverability can be highly technical, but you must understand that Google, Microsoft and other services will filter messages that look like “spam.” If you sent an email to a friend, they would open it and probably reply. If you send messages out to your patients that do not get opened and do not get replies, email services like Google will think of you as a spammer and will put you in the spam box more often.

Email is still a great medium to communicate with patients, and one of the fatal lessons in this pandemic was DCs ignoring it, but make sure the sender name is someone they know in the office and keep your subject line interesting. I prefer curiosity-based subject lines, but don’t be afraid to tell them who it’s for. Such as “Attention: women who…” If you know your ideal patients, you could put song lyrics, news headline snippets, etc. They come to your practice because of you and sharing details about your life interests them.

Text messaging — This is more timely and has an extremely high open rate. Sending them too early or late in the day can ruffle some feathers, and they shouldn’t be novels, either. It could be a check-in, a video, a gif or just a notice to check their email. Don’t abuse texts, because people get annoyed with too many.

Handwritten postcards — These are tremendous and include sympathy, get well soon, happy birthday, generic practice cards and thank-you cards. If you send out five cards daily, I guarantee your practice will grow. Send out sympathy cards when people have a death in the family, or “get well soon” if they are recovering from surgery. They include thank-you cards for a referral from a provider or a patient, and you could send out handwritten cards to patients you haven’t seen in a while.

Newsletters — These are great for everyone, and emailing them works, but if you can mail them, it’s even better. Our practice gets 10+ patients monthly from a mailed newsletter, and it’s one of the best retention tools. If you know your target audience, it’s easy to put together.

Social media — Anything that grabs their attention and engages patients to leave comments always helps. If you’re a funny person, consider using comedy. If you’re not, you could always joke about not being funny. Once you get your audience engaged with your content, you can ask them what type of videos they want to see. Follow famous people on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and other places to seek inspiration.

Phone calls — Believe it or not, people still pick up the phone. Calling patients to check in on them does help. Especially a phone call after their first treatment. If you’re too busy for that, you could consider sending them a text or shooting a video and texting or emailing it to them.

Use these ideas to stay engaged with your patients and increase communication, while also increasing your retention.

NAOTA HASHIMOTO, DC, is the co-founder of TrackStat (trackstat.org), patient-tracking software that makes it easy for admin. people to attract and convert new patients while ensuring your existing patients stay in your practice. It offers new ways to retain patients and also ways for staff to communicate and schedule patients while providing you all the metrics of success.