USING HEALTH INFORMATION FOR OPTIMAL REFERRALS. In ancient pagan cultures, it was common to arrive at the villages place of worship and see thousands of carved idols. Each year new idols were created and added as the perceived needs of the people changed. Surprisingly, older idols were never discarded; they continued to be part of the worship culture. Theres a parallel between this and the challenge of educating your patients about the principles of chiropractic. You cant just add new information on top of what theyve already been taught about their health. Patient education should really be called patient re- education. You have to tear down virtually everything they believe about health and once thats accomplished, then you can begin rebuilding with the chiropractic story. It is not good idea to compare chiropractic to medicine or adjustments versus pills. When you make these comparisons, you automatically place chiropractic in the allopathic model and your patients will never see chiropractic as anything more than a natural way of obtaining symptom relief. The dialogue should be about function vs. feeling. Once a patient understands the fundamental principles of health and healing and the necessary role of symptoms, then and only then can you introduce subluxations and chiropractic. Chiropractic adjustments restore proper function, they restore whats normal. For a patient to understand the devastating effects of subluxations and fully appreciate the adjustment, they have to value whats being restored. I had a friend who bought a classic car with the intention of restoring it as a hobby project. After years of tinkering with it, he finally took it to one of the best auto body shops in the state for an estimate. He had purchased the car for $3,000 and was willing to spend another $5,000 if necessary to get it restored. Imagine his surprise when the man quoted him a total restoration fee of $42,000! The shock of hearing the quote upset my friend, but after the owner of the shop explained that the car was a very rare classic that, once restored, would be worth well over $140,000, he couldnt write him a check fast enough. The owner could have talked until he was blue in face about the cars condition, the restoration process, his qualifications, etc. but none of that would have made a difference. All he needed to do was describe the value of the car in its restored condition. What happened in the case of my friends classic car illustrates the thought process that should be used in effective patient education. Help your patients to understand the value of their restored condition and of the importance of using a function-based health care model. All of this requires a major change in their paradigm. When changing a paradigm, its easy to slip into a confrontational situation - nobody likes to be told theyre wrong and essentially this is what youre doing. Even a friendly conversation can still have confrontational undertones, which can inhibit the learning process. This is easy to overcome in a couple of different ways. First of all, rather than give people pieces of information simply ask a leading question and allow them to respond with the correct information. For example, rather than saying The central nervous system controls and coordinates every function in the body, ask them What system controls all of the functions in the body? When they respond correctly, acknowledge and reinforce their answer and then continue to ask probing questions. When patients supply the right answer, its far more credible coming from them than having you feed it to them. This is also true in group settings and lectures. Your job as the doctor/teacher is to link all of those answers into the chiropractic story. Do this and watch their mindset change! When engaging in daily patient education in your office, the leading question method is an effective way to tell the story. Yet, people dont like to be put on the spot by being asked something they cant answer. The way to overcome this is by pre-framing the purpose of your question. An example of this might be, Mrs. Smith, were very committed to health education in our office, because we know that those who are best informed about their health get the best results - does that sound reasonable to you? They will always say yes. To which you may respond, Great, Mrs. Smith, I want to ask you a couple of questions and I want to test whether I and my staff are doing our job in educating you. So if you dont know the answer, its not your fault, its our responsibility - fair enough? Youve just taken this patient completely off the hook, youve reaffirmed your role in the community as an educator, and you can now have an in-depth conversation about health and Chiropractic with her, because shes totally at ease with the dialogue. Never forget that when educating patients, youre not just doing it for their benefit, but youre actually teaching them an easy-to-duplicate method of sharing the same story with others. The value of the Digital Poster collection is that is starts the “conversation and communication process between the Doctor and the patient, the staff and the patients and in many cases, between individual patients. Set up a monitor in an area of your office that has the highest traffic area and simply play the powerpoint slideshow presentation or the DVD in a place where the greatest number of people can watch it at the same time. The settings on the slideshow can be changed—ie, the length of time between frames. You just need to go to SLIDESHOW-SETTINGS-and then change the length of time between frames. This will spark an incredible amount of conversation in the office and that will lead to greater patient compliance and even more importantly—referrals. We have found that the key to referrals is to share information with people (such as the case with these slides) in short, “easy to absorb” pieces and you will find that people are amazed and then your next dialogue is ‘Mr/Mrs. Patient, I bet you know a lot of people who would really appreciate or benefit from this information—don’t you” and they will agree and they it simply becomes a matter of putting the information in their hands that they can easily pass on to others. I cover this in detail on Turning Satisfied Patients into Referring Patients video. We have also found that when doing community events, such as health screenings or business expos, that taking a computer with a monitor and running a loop of the slideshow presentation is a very EFFECTIVE way of getting people to stop and talk with you ( which is often 75% of the battle) You can also move the slides around if you are focusing on a particular target audience ( children’s health for example) and run a shorter presentation of say 15-20 of those targeted slides. Each individual poster can be extracted and used in things like lectures, newsletter, facebook fan pages, social media sites. You can even print a single page and display it in high traffic area again to spark conversation. If you have a website, then any of this content can be used on your various pages. Many offices, will put up an image on the main page and then change it every couple of days as they find that visitors to the site will continue to visit the site to see the next poster. More Info slideshare.net/keithwassung1/chiropractic-digital-posters-38752199
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 17:49:19 +0000
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