Every practice has its own style, own culture and own atmosphere. Some practices go for upbeat, bright and active. Others prefer laid back and relaxed. When you do a new patient consultation, you certainly want to convey all of that to the new patient. As such, there is obviously no one way to conduct a new patient consultation. You and your staff have to feel comfortable in order to make potential new patients feel comfortable.
Given this, there are some overriding principles and techniques that have proven successful over the years that contribute to a better patient experience and improved batting averages. Some of these may be obvious, but over time, they’ve been shown to work.
Yes, all patient days are important for successful treatment, but some are more important than others. You cannot treat a patient unless he or she signs up with you and gets started. And as we know, new patients are the lifeblood of any practice. Success here means success in a lot of areas.
Schedule days solely for new patients. If possible, only new patients should be on the schedule for these days – with some potential time left available for emergency patients. As discussed earlier, those new patient days should be on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday (and possibly Saturday morning) to maximize the chance that a patient will show up. If you’ve been wanting to experiment with hours other than 9-5, this is the time. Hours of 10 am – 8 pm would allow you to capture those on their lunch break, the after-school crowd and the after-work people. Maximum convenience maximizes the opportunity for people to show up.
Enough space should be left in the schedule to enable you to immediately greet a patient and get him or her started on the consultation process.
Staff that day with your marketing A-team
Some people are more outgoing and more at-ease in social situations than others. That’s not a knock against those who do not have those traits, but a large part of the consultation experience is to make patients feel both relaxed and excited to be a part of your practice. Regardless of experience, those who can bring that personal, friendly touch are the ones who should be there on a new patient day to convey whatever atmosphere you desire.
Have that staff be as friendly, helpful and upbeat as possible. Simply handing a patient a stack of intake documents to fill out is a much less satisfying experience than greeting them pleasantly, asking them how their day is going and letting them know that they are in for an outstanding experience in your office.
Dress up the office
Any office should be spotless, but if there are extra touches you like to put on for that extra-special finish, now is the time to do them. If you are going to serve coffee and snacks (there will be coffee and snacks, right?), put out the kind you would serve to the best guests in your own home. Open up whatever doors and shades you can to remain OSHA compliant while making the office as open and inviting as possible. If you have a TV running, make sure you show something popular like a fun movie or an uplifting channel (uplifting generally does not include a CNN discussion of the latest wrangling in Congress). New flowers? Computer screens set to a positive, happy scene for the screen saver? Prominent display of your referral promotions and social media information? Check, check and check.
Keep the consultation short and active
Obviously, no one likes to sit in a doctor’s office waiting. Nor, do they want to be dragged through a 2 ½ hour snoozefest complete with in depth discussion of various types of malocclusions. Patients want to be seen promptly and be given attention throughout the process. Then, all of a sudden the appointment is done and the patient feels like he or she barely spent any time in the office. If you or a staff person sees a patient sitting around bored, engage that patient in some type of conversation and work to ensure that the process moves forward for them.
Everyone has their own style, but a somewhat amalgamated analysis of consultations puts the time from patient entry to patient exit at about 45 minutes. Those minutes generally break down as follows:
5 minutes for greeting and documents
5 minute office tour
15-20 minutes for technical things including a discussion of office policy, patient compliance
5-10 minutes of time with the doctor
10 minutes of financial arrangement discussion and exit
A couple of things to note about the last two items.
Avoid the technical talk
Every doctor has gone to school for a long term to learn a lot about tooth and jaw movement. Those skills and talents are obviously hugely valuable. And, also as obviously, patients don’t want to hear about it. One client of ours used to spend 90 minutes going through a very technical analysis of his diagnosis, projections for movement over the course of treatment and the expected outcome. Despite the brilliance of the analysis, patients were desperate to get out of there and equally as desperate not to come back again.
They want to know when they have to be there for appointments, what they need to do to make sure things go well for them, how things will come out and most prominently, when do you expect that they will get their braces off? The last item is clearly something you want to spend your limited minutes discussing.
In most cases, experienced doctors typically need just a little while to look at x-rays, determine the best course of treatment and then translate that into plain language for the patient. This usually comes with time so expect constant improvement.
Save any financial discussion until the end of the consultation
When you go to a fine restaurant, you want to enjoy the entire experience and then deal with the money part later. Same principle here. You want patients to be so happy with the consultation experience that their mindset leans toward not allowing cost to be a significant barrier to starting treatment.
We laid out a number of our thoughts on the financial side of a consultation in our last post. In the end, you want the patients to know that you really, really want them to start in your practice and that you are willing to work with them to make that happen.
There are hundreds of different ways to handle the financial side. How you deal with them is dependent on your attitude and your practice. We’ve certainly provided you our opinion with regard to monthly payments and fees. But regardless of the individual situation, one thing will generally be true: you will find objections on the financial side. Listen to them, understand exactly what they mean (“I need to call my spouse” sometimes doesn’t mean that) and either provide a solution that will overcome the objection or walk away.
And, we will walk away from this discussion now. But if you want to talk about it further or have any other questions as it relates to your practice, please let us know by clicking here and sending an e-mail.
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