Once a patient has committed
to chiropractic care, a schedule of appointments must be created for
them by you. Since it
is impossible to determine how many future visits will be needed, it
would be impossible to set a complete program of all future visits
that are absolutely necessary to keep. So how do you schedule the
appointments???
It is known fact that using a
Appointment Calendar or an multiple appointment card creates a much
higher percentage of appointments kept by patients and better follow
through. Use a multiple appointment system in your practice!
The Chiropractic Assistant
finds out the best time for an appointment, based on what is
available and what the patient prefers. This is done by checking the appointment book as the patient
and the Chiropractic Assistant discuss the appointment.
The Chiropractic
Assistant has the appointment book with her as she talks to the
patient. Once a time is picked, the Chiropractic Assistant would
then reserve appointments at this time (as an example) for three
times per week for one month, then the Chiropractic Assistant needs
to schedule a re-evaluation examination for the patient. The
Chiropractic Assistant says “John,
you need to see the doctor three times a week for fours weeks, we
then we do a re-evaluation to determine your progress. Since you
have a hectic schedule, let me reserve Monday, Wednesday, Friday at
10:00 am for you. If you need to change any of those times, just
give me a call and we can change the times for you.”
We make these appointments in advance
in order to increase patient retention, reduce missed appointments,
prevent patients from dropping out of care, etc.
The appointments,
once filled out on the calendar, copy the calendar, give the
original calendar to the patient and the CA’s copy of the
appointments are then placed into the appointment book one month at
a time. If the patient
needs to change the appointment due to a change in job, etc., you
need only erase and change the one appointment time in question
already in the book.