A few years ago, I was working with a chiropractic clinic owner who was struggling to grow their clinic.  They had developed some excellent patient lead generation strategies and were doing a decent job at attracting new patients.  However, they just could not make the financial breakthrough they were seeking.  When I asked what they were doing with old patient records, the main administrative employee showed me a file on her computer of all the clinic’s inactive patients. There were well over 600 of them just sitting there. I was shocked and all I could say to them was “You have a GOLDMINE in those files.

The fact is that it generally costs SIX TIMES MORE to attract a new chiropractic patient into your clinic than it does to keep a current chiropractic patient in place.  The reality is that many chiropractic clinics are not effectively working at keeping patients active after their initial care plan has been completed. Does your clinic have a process to continually contact patients who no longer seek care from your clinic? And I mean more than just your email newsletter or your Facebook posts. Or are you just accepting the fact that your patients are totally healed, and they don’t ever need to come back thereby forcing you to spend exorbitant amounts in marketing year after year?

You might be thinking right about now what that chiropractic clinic owner asked me all those years ago.  “Kevin, are you expecting me to have my team members start calling all these hundreds of inactive patients?”  My simple answer to you, as it was to my client is YES!

Let’s break this down into time and numbers.  If you pay an idle team member on a slow day to pick up the phone and call these inactive patients, you might be able to get 1 out of 20 to schedule an appointment (with a good script it might be 1 out of 10). If you pay your assistant $18/hour, and they take 2 hours to finally get one lapsed patient to schedule, that will cost you around $36.

But let’s say that lapsed patient has a subluxation, and needs treatment that gets billed out at, say, $500 for 6 visits, and you have a 40% margin in your practice.  That’s an extra $200 in your pocket just by spending $36 dollars in labor, a 555% Return on Investment.

Now let’s say that same patient gets back to doing regular wellness visits with you and spends another $800 with you over the next 5 years.  With a 40% margin that is an additional $320 off that $36 labor investment. That doesn’t count all the referrals that happy patient will send your way because you got them back under treatment.

What are you waiting for? Get started today to contact your lapsed patients 

Kevin Weir - 9/19/2022