How to Generate More MD Referrals: A Step-by-Step Process for Chiropractors | Podcast Ep. 306

Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we're going to talk down the three pillars of relationship building. If you would like to get more referrals into your practice from MDs, from DOs, from any healthcare provider in your community, we're going to talk down those three big pillars on today's episode and and really make this highly actionable. I've seen some questions come up in various Facebook groups over the last couple weeks regarding this topic. Of course, if you want the whole system, you can head over to the evidencebasedchiropractor.com, it's what we do each and every day. But we're gonna break down those pillars on today's episode. Make sure that you are coached and trained up on how to effectively bridge the gap and build relationships in your community. Before we get started, I wanna say a few words about Novopulse. This is where recovery meets performance. If you have not checked out Novopulse yet, please, please do. You can learn more about this incredible technology that helps reduce pain and inflammation while improving function to get your patients back to the activities they enjoy. You've never seen anything like this. I said it last week. I talked to their founder. I've never spoken with anybody who knows more about inflammation science than this gentleman. Novo-pulse.com, n O V O-pulse.com I'll drop that link down in the show notes as well. Check it out, see if it's a great fit for your practice, if you are focused on recovery and and or performance. But as I talked about at the beginning today's episode, we're breaking down these three pillars of relationship building. This has been a theme, it's tied together through hundreds of episodes on this podcast is how do you use the science to get out there in your communities to not only attract more new patients, you know, the public, aka B2C marketing business to consumer getting new patients in from your community. But how do you use this as well in, in your B2B marketing business to business marketing, which basically is referrals from other healthcare providers. Now I don't care. It's easy to say MD referrals, but I don't care if it's an md, a do, a midwife, a doula, an athletic trainer. The thought process behind this is who has your patients in their practice? I'll say that one more time. Who has your patience in their practice? It's not limited by the designation or degree after their last name. That's really the crux of when you think about relationship building and relationship building based upon referrals. You have to consider who has your patients in their practice. That's really the fundamental truth. From there, there are just steps to take to execute building that relationship. So one is creating the target list. We go through all these in the five modules of the evidence based chiropractor help guide the process. But you build your target list you generate. You have to track and measure what's going on to understand the return on investment and time that you're putting in. We go through all that in great detail. But today's episode I want to break down the three actionable pillars. So once you have your list built, once you've really vetted things, you've built your office policy and procedure to ensure that you know who you're co managing with all of those things. You really want to focus on case notes, research and meetings. So case notes, research and meetings. And let's talk them down, break them down over the course of this episode and ensure that you have a good understanding. Because again, I've seen tons of questions about this lately and it's not super hard and super complicated. And quite frankly, sometimes I see really, really bad advice going on online and just not very, you know, answers that are not exactly what I've seen throughout a decade of doing this with probably over a thousand chiropractors around the world. So I feel pretty comfortable in our process and procedure because we've seen it be successful time and time again and it's really a proven process. Case notes, research and meetings. Let's start with case notes. Keep them simple. So when should you send a case note? Well, let me start here. What's the challenge with sending case notes? For so many docs out there, you might be like, oh my gosh, case notes. The challenge of sending case notes is historically, it's super time consuming and you don't really know what to send and it doesn't really do much for your problem. Those are three good reasons to not do it. Hey, I don't know what to send. It's taking me too much time and I don't see how this is affecting my practice. So we want to then reverse engineer and say, how do we eliminate those variables when sending case notes? So one is ensure that you're sending them at the right time. So sending them during your evals and your re evals is really critical. You don't need to send daily notes, but during your Evals and your re evals, those are when you send a case note. Now what should you send on a case note? This is where time consuming comes into play. We build all the templates in with the evidence based chiropractor program. However, if you want to just think about it from a high level, you should not be sending 10 pages, five pages of information. You really want your case note to be one page or less. And what do you include on that page? Name, date of service, diagnosis and treatment plan. Who did you see, when did you see them, what did you find and what are you going to do about it? Name, data service, diagnosis, treatment plan. Keep them simple. You can create a template and that expedites this even further. But just I always say this, you know this example. Just as the primary care doctor doesn't care what size screw a surgeon used, whether they did the surgery or not is what they're most interested in. The same thing holds true in your practice. They don't care about every time you did Kemp's test. Every single nuance to every single technique. The questions are who did you see? Name, when did you see them? Data service, what did you find? Diagnosis and what are you going to do about it? Treatment plan. So if you can keep your case notes one page or less, send them out on evals and re evals, you'll be in really, really great shape. Now I also want to be clear. Case notes by themselves, do not flood your office with referrals. That's why there is research in meetings. All of these work on different aspects of the relationship. Meaning the the case notes are gonna work on building trust and rapport, showcasing that you exist and showcasing the benefits that the patients receive that you're co managing. Now the research is going to showcase, it's gonna fill in the gaps between the case notes. It's also really going to drip, drip, drip. It's going to give you that consistency that you need. With case notes alone it's very unlikely, unless you have a super busy practice already that you're going to be able to touch everybody once a month with a case note. You probably just don't co manage that often with this small subset of docs. So if you're going more than a month without a touch point, then you're never going to get out. You're stuck in the mud. You're never going to get out of the starting gates when building a relationship. Once you have the relationship, you don't need to touch that doctor as often. However, when you're building that Relationship, you need as many touches as possible. And case notes being sent once a month, you know, once every couple months, twice a year. You, you're never going to build the name recognition, the no trust and like factor. So part two is the research. Research enables you to stay consistent in our research briefs. Probably no surprise, they're one page as well. One page because docs are super busy. So we're not trying to tell them everything that they never wanted to know about chiropractic. During every single note. We're actually with the research going to be showcasing an interesting study and why it matters to their practice. So we built a template for this where you. So at the top we cite the research paper, then we have a couple short paragraphs explaining why this is important, we have a couple quotes from it and a little chart if applicable. And that's all branded to your practice. When we do that through the evidence based chiropractor so that you can help fill in those gaps between case notes. Now who do you send this research to? Well, you send them to your target list. That's the importance of building that target list early on. Is that sort of your North Star to say, well, who am I sending this stuff to? And you know, your target list is going to be the list that you send your monthly research briefs to. This enables you to have what I call a controllable marketing asset, meaning you control that it gets out each and every month. So you know, everybody on your target list is seeing your name in a positive way each and every month. Why? Research, quite frankly, because the doctor doesn't care if you send them coupons. Right? This is really getting pragmatic about what works. Right? If coupons worked, I'd probably say go that direction, but they're not gonna work, obviously, if you anticipate sending coupons to another doctor. So the question is, well, how do I stay? If that doesn't work, then what does? And research has tended to work time and time again. And a lot of this goes back to when I worked at a large orthopedic group. I went to grand rounds every single week with our physiatrists, with our surgeons. And I discovered that they were actually making a lot of their decisions based upon what the current research said. And every week they were actually doing basically a research review. So I thought to myself, light bulb went off. I said, wow, I wonder if I give these docs research supporting what I do, whether that would educate them, whether that would showcase what I can do a little bit better than me just Saying it myself and lo and behold, it started to work. That's when I started to expand it and say, wow, if this is working, if I'm building referral relationships with docs that I are colleagues with in this group, I wonder if it'll work for us other docs in the community. I started to do that and I saw that it started to work. Now this is a long term growth strategy. You know, this is not something where you're going to send one research brief and 25 patients are going to be referred in the next month. This is really about getting that first referral and building momentum off of that. So research is absolutely critical to that because if you only send case notes and case notes alone, you are not going to get out of the tracks. So the research gives you the opportunity to touch these doctors at least one time a month, sprinkle on the case notes anytime you can. And now you've built in some consistency with your outreach and your marketing. And you've heard me say it before, the number one predictor of success with marketing is consistency. So absolutely critical to get out there each and every month with your research. One question I saw online was, do I send this to everybody in the group? Do I send it to individual doctors? You definitely want to send it to individual doctors. If it is sent to everybody in a group practice, it goes to nobody in a group practice. So how do you get it ready? This is a balance between efficacy, or should I say efficiency and efficacy. So if you want to be super efficient, you can send these out via email. But you're going to be less effective because your email open rate is lucky to be 20%. And it's really hard to get doctors email addresses. It's free, it's easy, you click a button and it gets sent. It's efficient, but it's not going to be very effective. That's where we recommend, you know, print them out, hard copy, mail them out. It costs you 50 cents to mail to a doctor, however, you know, in postage in the, in the U.S. but that 50 cents is well worth it because when you address it from your, from you as a doctor to them specifically each individual doctor, it will end up on their desk. And nine times out of 10, eight times out of 10, your open rate is going to be 80 and 90%, not 20% with email. So hard copy over email, it's a little bit less efficient, right? You have to print them out, you have to mail them, but it is far more effective. So that's what we've Seen over a decade. And finally, I want to talk a little bit about a meeting. I know if you're like me, you know, on the introverted side of things, you know, it really wasn't exciting for me to get out there and start conversations with people I don't know, specifically other doctors. And quite frankly, it was a little bit intimidating. So that's really where having a process and a system, when you go out there and have conversations comes in so important. When I say a process in a system, this is really understanding and having a destination of where you want to go. There's too many docs out there and I speak to docs each and every week through the evidence based chiropractor program that are building relationships. And inevitably when they come on board, we do an implementation call and I'm asking them, what's been your experience? I'll say the same thing I said 10 minutes ago. Docs go in to a meeting, they don't have a plan and they try to tell this other healthcare provider everything that that guy or gal never wanted to know about chiropractic. And it's, it's, it's ineffective, it comes off like weird, it probably doesn't make you feel good and it's not going to give you the result you desire, which is that doctor to say that that person seems cool, I could see myself referring. And I understand who should go over there, right? That's the end goal. You want to walk out of that meeting not with any sort of closed business quote, unquote, but what you want to walk out of that meeting is feeling confident that that other doctor knows who you are, they feel comfortable with who you are as a provider and they can identify very clearly who those first couple referrals should be. Now, how do you do that? You go in with a plan and you go in leading with questions, not with statements about chiropractic. So first of all, you have to understand we've boiled it down really to a process that involves three direct questions. Or one of them is, you know, are you seeing a lot of spine related complaints in practice? Are you seeing a lot of low back pain? You can insert and tailor that to you and your practice based upon your specific interest. But are you seeing a lot of spine related complaints in practice? That's a great opening question to ensure that your patients are actually in their practice. And again, you tailor that to what symptom or complaint works for you and your ideal client and patient in your practice. Number two is what are you seeing more of Is it mostly older people? Is it mostly younger people? Is it, you know, what are they seeing more of? Are they seeing mostly neck issues, low back issues, helping them determine and you understanding what they're seeing in their practice day in and out, even if it's well, we see a little bit of everything. Great. Now you have great context as you ask that third question. Well, what do you currently like to do for these people? What's your treatment protocol? Once you get the answer to that, I can tell you, you're going to know more than 99, you're going to know more than every other provider in your community about their practice. You're going to know what they're seeing, you're going to know what they're seeing more of and you're going to know their treatment protocols on let's say in this example, spine related complain. And once you know that now you are in a powerful leverage position to highlight your own practice specifically and on the back of their interests and their current limitations as opposed to this generic chiropractic pitch which quite frankly just doesn't work. So we break down throughout the evidence based chiropractor super detail everything that we discussed today. But I wanted to really highlight those three pillars of case notes, research and meetings and why they are so important to building relationships. Each of them does a specific item and of course on the meeting side of things we talked about case notes build that trust and rapport. Case notes show that you co manage. Case notes show great results. We know that the research fills in the gaps between case notes, provides you a consistent marketing tool, provides you an actionable marketing tool that you could control. And then we know meetings basically are I call the gasoline on the fire. So meetings really build trust and rapport faster. They also give you the opportunity to learn more about that provider's practice. So during any of you or your team members follow ups, you can be way more specific. And the more specific you are, the better off you'll be. Before you receive 100 referrals, you have to get one. So it's really about identifying with those new providers, those target list providers that you want to bridge the gap with that you know, have your patients in their practice and believe me, they do. We see that with 90% of people experiencing back pain, 50% of people experiencing headaches, and I'm not even touching and getting into the performance benefits that we can provide. So there's no question that majority of providers out there do have your patients in their practice. The goal is to find out what they're currently doing build that relationship brick by brick, step by step. Because unlike an advertisement that goes away the day you stop paying, a relationship that you build today can last an entire career. That's why it's worth investing in. That's why it's worth taking the time to understand the process and the system. You don't need to wing it, you shouldn't wing it. You really want to have a great first impression with these docs. So whether it's with the Evidence based chiropractor or whether it's somewhere else, ensure that you have a system and a process and you have the tools needed to help guide your success with it. Because I think it's one of the most important things that we can do as chiropractors out there today. If you have any questions about this, please hit me up jeff the evidencebasedchiropractor.com Also, if you have not left a rating or review for this podcast, please do. It helps more and more people find out about who we are and what we do. We have over 11,000 docs listening in each and every week, which is absolutely awesome. And before we wrap up today, I want you to know that every EHR sells features, but few have Echiro's expertise. If documentation and compliance mean something to you, please check out Echiro ehr. It is an EHR that is built on absolutely fantastic documentation standards on compliance and it is absolutely fantastic. For finally, with Chiro Matchmakers we have over 150 open jobs. So if you're listening to this and you are looking for your next chiropractic job opportunity, we're talking $75,085,000 per year and more with benefits in almost all cases. Please Visit us@chiromatchmakers.com and let us help you find your next great chiropractic job opportunity. I hope you have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.