Is it true? Can you double your practice without adding ANY extra new patients?
Of course the answer is YES! All you have to do is double your retention.
Truth is, I am sick and tired of all of the management companies talking about new patients, new patients, new patients! How about keeping the ones that we have?
What IS retention, exactly?
Retention can mean different things, but we don’t have time to look at all of them. For this conversation, we’re going to define “retention” with a formula so we can track it. Retention is a number found by taking the last 90 days of patient visits and dividing it by the number of new patients from that same period. You can also call this your PVA.
Before we go further, let’s make sure you have some tools in your toolbox to go through an exercise with me.
Click here to download our excel spreadsheet stat sheets (instant download).
The first one monitors all the classics that most people monitor.
But we’re also monitoring how many new patients came back to visit 2.
Then, we take those and track how many signed up for care.
Then, we categorize by the type of plan (large, small, or pay-per-visit).
We track how many stopped care before their first re-evaluation.
We look at how many made it to the re-evaluation, then the re-report. Then, we look at how many stopped care after their first evaluation.
It also figures tons of metrics i.e. PVA for you!
The second stat sheet is a Dropped Patient Stat sheet. When did patients drop out of care i.e. visit 2, 5, 55, 155? And WHY did they stop? And it graphs it. This is extremely valuable information that most people do not take the time to monitor.
The average PVA worldwide is about 20.
Now remember we can think in terms of golf score or basketball score.
In golf, I want the lowest score; the lowest number. If I am practicing in a pain based model, my goal is to get them feeling better and out of my office as soon as possible.
But if I want to help people get healthy and stay healthy for a lifetime by correcting their subluxations and showing them ways not to recreate them in the future, then I would want more of a basketball score where the highest number wins.
From our perspective, the lowest number we consider as a True Optimal Health and Wellness practice is 60. We have doctors who have over 200 PVA.
So, if you double your PVA without adding any extra new patients, you double your practice.
How do you double your PVA?
The answer is simple. Get your patients to GET IT!
If your patients truly GET what you do, the odds are they will want what you offer.
In our model we find out what they want in RELATIONSHIP to what you can actually do for them. Then simply show them how to have it.
Let’s take a look at that. There is a huge gap between what they think they want when they come to see you and what they truly want in relationship to what you can truly do for them. It is our job to help close that gap and in visit 1 help them experience what we can actually do for them.
What is that? We can help them get healthy, stay healthy and have a better life.
How do we do that? By correcting subluxations and showing them ways not to recreate those subluxations. What might that entail? Help them eat better, exercise in a healthy way and deal with stress and of course once we get as much correction as possible of their nervous system we need regular checkups to keep it functioning at its optimum
Again I am sick of all the crap I hear out there. “Just get them out of pain, then they will come in when they are in pain. Just do what their insurance will cover… blah, blah, blah”
MALARKEY! Help them realize the tremendous value of a healthy functioning nervous system and reasonable lifestyle. Help them realize that they live their lives through their nervous system and how much better their present and future life will be under your care and they will happily stay, pay and refer for a lifetime!
You will be amazed at what happens when you do this. People will happily pay money right out of their pocket for this care. And more then you ever imagined!
But you must learn how to help people GET what you do and want what you offer and here is a clue. It is NOT what you TELL them. Instead it is what you ASK them.
We hear it all the time, “Tell the story, tell the story, tell the story”. Not true! We need to ASK the story. We need to ask a series of very specific questions to help them realize that they do in fact want what we offer assuming they do.
In our Communications Mastery Program, we give you EVERYTHING you would ever need to help your patients fully understand what you do, how you can help them and how they can have it. These include:
- Patient Education Presentations
- Visit 1
- Visit 2
- Daily interactions, how to deal with difficult patients, posters etc.
- …and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the STRATEGY to make these tools work