We talk a lot about putting yourself into the shoes of your patients when it comes to making the best effort at growing your practice and holding on to new patients. Assuming that your patient understands how “things work” when it comes to Chiropractic and not taking their prior experience in the medical field into account is the single biggest reason that practices lose out on patients, and so guess what we are talking about today? That’s right – how not putting yourself into your patients shoes can cause patients to give up on you and go to your competitor instead. 

How many times have you seen a patient for an exam, scheduled their Report of Findings, and then never seen them again? Too many to count? Have you ever looked into what these patients might all have in common, besides you (do you see where we are going with this yet?)? If you looked into it, I would wager that a good majority of those patients were scheduled for their Report of Findings several days after their initial exam. 

Looking at this from a patient standpoint, this is what happened: the patient has been in pain for some time, they may have tried over the counter medicines, they may have been to their family doctor, and then a friend mentioned Chiropractic and they decided to make an appointment to see if this Chiropractic thing could help. They called your office and made an appointment. They go through all of the paperwork and the thorough exam. You tell them that you will need to study the exam results to come up with a treatment plan that is going to heal their pain and that your front desk will schedule a time for them to come back to go over the results. Then the patient is told that they should come back next week.

…next week?

But they are in pain RIGHT NOW. If it were you, would you wait another week in pain, or would you go somewhere where they will at least get her Exam and Report of Findings done in a few days? We have been setting appointments for practices all over the country for many years now – and it doesn’t matter if it is Personal Injury, Wellness, Weight Loss, or Reactivation – if the follow up to your exam is as far away as a week or more, statistically that patient is not likely to return. That doesn’t mean it never happens, but what it does mean is that the more patients you do this to, the fewer will come back. If you want to hold on to the patients that you are spending all of this time on exams with, it’s time to take charge of your schedule and make sure that those patients are getting their Report of Findings and starting their treatment as soon as possible after their exam.