#28 - The Patient Journey with Jeff Langmaid, Part 1

FAKTR, spelled F-A-K-T-R, stands for Functional and Kinetic Treatment with Rehabilitation. Over the past decade, this unique approach to treating pain and dysfunction has been utilized by healthcare providers on 6 continents. Serving as a framework that guides clinical decision-making in patient visits around the globe on a daily basis. With this podcast, our goal is simple: to bring the best and brightest in clinical education to the forefront and empower practitioners with cutting-edge, evidence-based content that improves patient outcomes and inspires healthcare providers to continually evolve their approach to treatment. In each episode, we will feature a training or interview with some of the top minds in healthcare in a short format that is easy to consume. to digest with actionable information that you can implement into practice right away. Let's get started. Hi guys, welcome to a new episode of The Factor Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome and thank you for listening. Today we kick off a new training titled The Patient Journey: Attract, Engage, and Retain More of Your Ideal Patients. With Dr. Jeff Langmaid. Dr. Jeff Langmaid is an experienced speaker, founder, author, and creator. Driven by his passion for marketing and research, he's used his unique professional experience to help thousands of chiropractors around the world. As the founder of The Evidence-Based Chiropractor, The Smart Chiropractor, Chiro Office Coverage, and AOMSI Diagnostics, he is dedicated to helping chiropractors achieve more in practice. He's also been featured on Yahoo Health, CBS News, MSN Health, and more. In this 2-part training, we will discuss the 3 key phases that all patients move through in your practice. We'll touch on the 6 touchstones of engagements, referrals, and reactivations, and discuss how to build a flywheel of attraction and retention. I have to tell you, as a marketing professional myself, This is literally one of my favorite topics to discuss, and I encourage you to take notes and listen to these 2 episodes more than once. There are some great tips and best practices that you'll want to implement right away. And now let's cue the intro music and get started.

All right. Thank you, Jessica, and thank you everybody at Southeast Sports Seminars for having me today. I'm pumped to be here, and thank you for taking time, docs, students, and other, for taking time out of your day to come in and learn about what I think is one of the most important topics that all of us as providers need to be aware of. And that's the patient journey that is going on in your practice. And whether it's optimized, whether it's suboptimal, or whether you haven't thought of it, every single person in your practice is going to go through a journey. The question is, Are you setting them and your practice up for success? That's why over the next half hour or so, we're going to go through, set the stage, and identify kind of the basics of how to attract, engage, and retain more of your ideal patients. And I'm going to leave plenty of time on the back end because I think some of the best times to learn are when we have that active engagement and open Q&A. So as Jessica pointed out, be sure to hit over to that chat area. Drop your questions. Let us know where you're tuning in from. We're both going to keep an eye on that throughout the presentation. And again, we'll save time for Q&A at the end. So what are we going to do over the next hour or so? My goal is to help you discover exactly how you can attract, engage, and retain more of your ideal patients. Having people come into your practice and seeing people is one thing, but actively attracting those individuals that you love to take care of That sort of— you're able to do what only you can do with and really provide the best benefits possible. That's when a practice really starts to experience tremendous growth, sustainable growth, and also just becomes a lot more fun. I think all of us, whether your passion is sports chiropractic, whether your passion is geriatric care, pediatric care, whatever it might be, when you have those people come into your practice that are really your ideal patients, Man, it's fun, right? You know that you can get great results because that's your zone of expertise and experience, and you feel really comfortable having great conversations with those individuals. And having a great patient journey extends the entire length of a patient's interaction with your practice. And that's what we're going to dive into and really dissect over the next hour is how can you take those levers and kind of pull those levers To ensure that you're going through and attracting more people who are your ideal patients? That's one aspect of it. We'll dive into the details. How can you engage with those people to have them love the experience that happens in your practice? And then how can you retain them long-term? I'm not talking about necessarily about treatment plans that extend forever, but more about how do you keep them in a retention loop? How do you stay top of mind with your ideal patients? It's so clutch to have this dialed in 'Cause when you do, it makes a world of difference in your practice. So this is for you if you are tuned in and checking in right now. If you love helping people become healthier, if you love helping people get benefits, this is going to be a conversation that you want to be in tune with. If you believe in building relationships instead of transactions, then this is a conversation that you need to be dialed into. And here's what I mean by that. If you're doing, let's say, deep discount advertising, you might not be attracting your ideal patients because you're transactional by nature. But if you're trying to build a practice based on long-term relationships, Relationships, then this is going to be something you want to be, again, acutely tuned into. And number 3, if you want to consistently keep your schedule full, then you want to ensure that your patient's journey is seamless, that it's streamlined, and that you are maximizing every opportunity to communicate with your community at large throughout them becoming a future patient, becoming an active patient, and then in your proactive patient retention loop. We'll dive into all of the levers that you can pull along the way. And again, I want to emphasize, this is happening in your practice already. The question is, have you thought about it? Have you set a structure and a process that enables you to be as successful as possible? So that's what we are going to explore. So what are you going to discover over the next 40 minutes or so is how to easily guide a patient from prospect to proactive patient through those 3 phases. That is clutch. You have to know what the field looks like to know what plays to run, right? So we'll dive through how can you easily guide a patient throughout that process? What are those 6 critical touchstones? So throughout those 3 phases, in each phase, we've determined 2 critical touchstones of your patient journey. And then number 3, how do you create that flywheel of attraction and retention on the backend that enables your practice to thrive long-term? Why is this important? Well, when you have a great patient journey, When you have a smart patient journey that guides people from future patient to active patient to proactive patient, it creates way less stress on you as a business owner and as a provider because you're seeing more of your ideal patients more often. It also enables you to create more revenue when things are running smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. That enables you to save money. You don't have to overspend to get people in your front door. The 6 touchstones, and specifically the 2 when we talk about future and potential patients, that's going to be what you're going to want to keep an eye on there. And then number 3, less vulnerable. I think over the last year we all saw, man, there can be a lot of vulnerability in practice. And I want you to minimize that vulnerability. How do you do that? You do that by building a tribe and curating a tribe of people who know you, who trust you, who like you, who you do a great job for. And it's by having those systems and processes totally, totally streamlined. So that's the big why. So if you're looking to have less stress, if you're looking to create a little bit more revenue, And you'd like to have your practice be a little less vulnerable and a little bit more durable, then your patient journey is where you wanna start. So let's dive in. If you are not interested in going through a smart patient journey, you're probably gonna see compounding practice stress. I think we've all been there at some points in our career. It just seems like it wasn't working. We're not attracting the people. And it comes back to the very simple patient journey. Schedule that never seems to be full. If you feel like you're on a treadmill or the kind of the yo-yo effect that I think all of us have felt, Chances are you have some holes in your journey. You're not guiding people and you're not enabling them to make the best decisions for their health. Or if you just feel like, man, I got a lot of patients here that just don't get it. Questions are, are you attracting your ideal patients? And how are you going through your active patient phase into that retention loop? If these things are seeming like they are creeping up more often than not, I'm going to say you have a patient journey issue, but we're going to solve all of that. On today's webinar, so here's a little bit about my story. My name is Dr. Jeff Langmaid. I run a company called the Evidence-Based Chiropractor. I run a company called the Smart Chiropractor, AOMZ Diagnostics, as well as Chiro Office Coverage. And for me, a lot of what we're going to talk about today was crystallized in the middle of what you see on your screen. I was fortunate to be able to really practice in almost every way possible. Of course, I was a student. Then I was an associate doc. Then I owned my own small boutique practice in Providence, Rhode Island. And I had the opportunity to practice in a very large orthopedic. That's where Florida Orthopedic Institute is there. So I was the co-director of the Orthopedic Total Wellness Program. They're like a 50-surgeon, 12-practice group. So that really leveled up and scaled up what I saw larger healthcare organizations doing. And a lot of what we talk about today are tenets, best practices that I've kind of curated over the years, and I don't think are being utilized as often as they should in chiropractic practices.

Hi Doc, this is Jeff Langmaid, and as a chiropractor who's owned my own practice as well as being on the leadership team at one of the largest orthopedic groups in the world, I've been able to see under the hood of exactly how successful healthcare marketing works. And I'm Dr. Jason Deitch, and I've been helping chiropractors now for over a decade use social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to grow their practice. To get your message out to your community and collectively to the masses. I think together we've probably influenced over 100 million positive impressions over the years by working together like this. What Jason and I have learned is that most chiropractors don't have the content or the consistency you need to be successful marketing your practice. So we became obsessed with creating automatic marketing solutions that can drive more new patients into your practice. Now, you probably didn't become a chiropractor so you can learn how to become an expert digital marketer or entrepreneur. You probably became a chiropractor because, like me, you want to help people. You want to help people understand their potential to heal themselves naturally and help people avoid the need for dangerous drugs and surgery. This is a crazy time and there's a lot of uncertainty, but in my opinion, this is the perfect time to amplify your message, build your health tribe, and We all know that growing a chiropractic practice can be really challenging and difficult, especially during these times. You don't need to spend countless hours learning about everything to do with social media. You can work with partners like us to support your success. If you're a new doc or a veteran, we'd love to have you. The Smart Chiropractor is a completely automatic marketing system for your practice. We provide the content, the automation, the training, and the community to set your practice up for success. Our success team is waiting to help you get started. Thanks, Doc. We'll see you soon.

And finally, Laser Spine Institute. I was the director of Total Spine Care Network. That company, in its heyday, I can tell you we were spending $5 million per month on advertising. And I was in on a lot of those decisions. So understanding where really big healthcare organizations are putting, filling the holes in their buckets, so to speak. And when we talk about a patient journey, if you're not hitting those touchstones, if your phases aren't clearly defined, you got a lot of holes in your bucket. You might have people going out before they've completed active care. You might have trouble getting people in the door to begin with. And certainly you could have difficulty in your retention loop. So this really touches, I know often chiropractors, we, myself included, sort of think about things In terms of, and I used to be this way. Well, there's marketing and then there's clinic operations and then there's all of these buckets. And while that's true, if you think about it from the lens of having a patient-centric approach to care, it really is experienced throughout your patient journey, whether it's marketing and advertising on the front end, having prospective and future patients become active patients, whether it's your patient communication internally in your practice when somebody's an active patient, or whether it's building processes and systems for reactivation on the back end. Through proactive patient phase. All 3 are critically important. All are, again, make or break to whether or not your practice seems to be on a yo-yo or whether you seem to be growing and climbing up the mountain. So why do I want to teach you this? Because I believe it's important for all of us to have proven systems for consistent growth. If you're guessing out there, if you're hoping for the best— hope is not a marketing strategy, as they say. I firmly believe that. So you really need to understand the tenets to then be able to action them. Number 2, so you can help more people in your community. When you're attracting more of your ideal patients, when you have the systems for patient acquisition dialed in, you start to be able to help a heck of a lot more people in your community. I think that's needed now more than ever. You've heard me talk about the research side of things through the Evidence-Based Chiropractor. I'm passionate about that space. We're going to talk mostly about the patient journey and marketing today, but we got to get out there. As conservative healthcare providers, we're needed now more than ever. The data overwhelmingly proves that, but we got to take those action steps. And number 3, so you can lower your stress and increase your revenue. I think this is an important part about everything. Too many docs out there. I know too many chiropractors and conservative healthcare providers that are super stressed out and they're just not making the revenue that they could, should, or deserve to make. And a lot of that comes down to systems and processes, and a lot of it can be traced back to a patient journey. So we're going to talk about the 3 phases of that journey in detail. We're then going to talk about the 6 Touchstones of attraction, engagement, and retention. And finally, we're gonna touch on how to build a flywheel of proactive patients in your practice. What are those 3 phases of a smart patient journey? And I wanna be clear, when I say smart patient journey, I mean it. Every patient's going through a journey in your practice right now. Have you thought about it? Have you identified the phases? Do you know those handoffs? Do you know those critical touchstones that could become holes in your bucket? If you don't take an active approach to it. If not, you might have a patient journey, but it might not be a smart patient journey. So what are the 3 phases of a smart patient journey? Well, it starts with a potential or a future patient. That then leads into, as we discussed briefly, active patients, right? Active patients under your care. And ideally in the smart patient journey, they then flow directly into proactive patients. So we're gonna dive into all of these, including the touchstones. Let's start with a potential patient, which is really phase 1. Who are these people and what is the goal? These are the people in your community. These are the people who are not yet patients, but that's where your marketing and advertising comes in, is to be able to inspire these individuals to take the next step. So the other aspect of it is it's not only the people in your community. This is where I'm going to encourage you to think bigger. I'm going to blow your mind a little bit right now, but it's also the people in your online health tribe. These are your followers on Facebook, on Instagram, on your email list. I know a lot of us think in terms of the circle of our practice, and that's true, right? Who's going to drive in to see you for the hands-on care you deliver? And that's a majority, 99.9% of the revenue for many docs out there. But I want to encourage you, when we talk about the proactive retention loop, we talk about this in a little more detail. I think it's important for all of us to have avenues to service individuals beyond just our circle of practice who might know, trust, and like us and be in our health tribes. For instance, I know a bunch of docs. Dr. Chad Teague's a great example. He's up in the Cleveland area. And he takes care of a lot of Cleveland Browns, a lot of professional athletes, and he has a really big following on Instagram. Now, many of those people on Instagram don't live within his circle of practice, but as he builds in a nice patient journey, he can offer and have opportunities that benefit individuals that might not include the hands-on care he delivers in your practice. That sounds kind of complicated. We'll get there later. But the bottom line is I want you to think of your potential patients. Your future patients can extend far beyond Just the 5 to 10 miles around your practice. We'll get into details. What is the goal? Well, the goal at that point is to build trust and rapport. If somebody's not an active patient right now, they're a potential patient, they're in your sphere of influence. Your goal is to build trust and rapport. That's why you're doing marketing. That's why you're doing advertising, is to ensure that you are building relationships with these individuals, that you are building trust and rapport. And we're going to talk about how you do that in great detail as we get into those touchstones. But let's talk about phase number 2 before we get there. Phase number 2 are your active patients. Who are these and what's the goal, right? Who? These are the people actively under care in your practice. So pretty clear explanation. If somebody's actively coming in and treating in your practice, that's an active patient. What is the goal for that individual? Well, improvements in health is number one, right? I think that's the top of all of our lists. People are coming in because they have some sort of issue or they want some sort of performance benefit, and that's our number one goal. But our secondary goal is to garner testimonials. We want them to not only have a great experience, we want them to talk about that great experience. So again, I want you to think bigger in terms of who's doing what in your practice. There's a bunch of people out there. Those are your future patients, but you want to ensure that your goals are clearly defined, that you're going to build rapport and trust with those individuals. So because an active patient, your operations, your systems, your processes, your journey should emphasize the fact that yes, you want to number one, Get them the benefits and improvements in health they desire. But number 2, you want to start thinking about gathering testimonials. And finally, as we dive into proactive patients, that 3rd phase there, this is where I see a lot of— it's a mess in most docs' practices, if I just say it very nicely here. We're going to talk in detail about this as we go through. So who are these people? They're the people that have completed active care. These are your patient files, right? People who might not actively be treating in your practice right now. But have come in in the past, and an overwhelming majority of those as conservative healthcare providers have had an awesome experience. Gonna use that to our advantage. What's the goal here? The goal is continuity. Talking a little bit about that on the last slide. We'll dive into detail later. Reactivations and referrals. That is one of the largest areas of opportunity for most chiropractors out there is reactivations. And very few docs really have a system and a process to create a retention loop on the backend. And it's hurting a lot of practices out there.

Mm-hmm.

So number one thing you can do to build and grow your patient base— we always say this in The Smart Chiropractor— who's your next best new patient is keeping your current patient, right? And what does that mean? That means keeping yourself top of mind, staying engaged with those individuals, and creating a patient loop on the back end so that when they are ready to raise their hand to come back in, you are the first clear and obvious choice. And doing that is not a reactive, it's a proactive endeavor. That's the mindset shift I want to make sure that you take into accord as we go through the information today. So Those are the 3 phases. Potential patient, or future patient, you could call them. Active patients, and then proactive patients. Those are our 3 phases. So we've talked about those 3 phases. Future patient, phase 1. Active patient, phase 2. Proactive patient, phase 3. Now let's talk about the 2 touchstones, 6 total for 3, of attraction, engagement, and retention. This is where the rubber meets the road, and this is why it is so important to be able to identify these phases And have the systems, tools, and processes to power one phase to the next. When we start, we talk about that future patient. What are those two touchstones of a future patient? Two touchstones are teach and invite. Your goal, your job for your future patients when somebody's in that step of the journey, meaning they haven't become an active patient yet, you have two touchstones, two action items, and that is teach and invite.

Teach.

And invite. Let's break it down. Let's talk about it. How can you teach and how can you invite? And why is this so important? If you've listened to somebody like entrepreneur like Gary Vaynerchuk, you might have heard him talk about jab, jab, jab, right hook. So teach, teach, teach, teach, invite or offer. An invitation you might have heard as a call to action. And that would also be true. But calling to action or having a call to action should always be After you've taken the time to teach something, how do you teach something? It could be anything that's entertaining, educational, engaging. How do you do it? Well, a couple of the ways you can do that are through social posts, lead magnets, weekly emails, and videos. This is what we do each and every day with the Smart Chiropractor is powering each one of these steps for our docs. But as an example on the screen right here, in terms of a teaching moment, this was from four days ago at Mike Mills Chiropractic Center, and you can see this is teaching, right? Showcasing what is arthritis, teaching. Them something, and then you can see at the end, give us a call today and schedule an appointment. That's the invitation. Teach and invite. This is how you enable future patients to raise their hand, to take the next step, to schedule in your practice, is by getting out there and consistently teaching and inviting. Now, I don't care, quite frankly, how you go about teaching. You might choose to do it through social posts. You might have a podcast. Maybe you send out a weekly email. Perhaps you have videos. All of them are really good ideas, by the way. You can choose based upon who your ideal patient is. Where are they hanging out? What are they doing? There's a lot of ways you can teach, but every time you teach, I'm gonna encourage you to take the opportunity to invite somebody to take a next step. Now, every time you invite them doesn't need to be schedule an appointment. It could be comment down below, share this with a friend. There's a variety of ways you can go about teaching. There's a variety of ways you can go about inviting, but when you think about future patients, Building trust and rapport come down to 2 words: teach and invite. That is what is critically important and what you have to have dialed in if you expect to have great new patient flow in your practice. If you are not teaching and inviting consistently, a symptom of that— cause and effect, right? A symptom of that will be you do not have a bunch of new patients coming in. If you have a lack of new patients, You're probably not getting out there and teaching and inviting consistently enough. And that is the take-home message of how you bring a patient from future patient to active patient— by teaching and inviting. Utilize these tools. I'm going to show you some stats at the end of this that are going to blow your mind in terms of what we've been able to gather in terms of reach regarding social posts and getting out there on Google My Business. But man, teach and invite— write that down. Now, phase 2 is an active patient. What are those 2 touchstones there? Educate and retain. We have future patients, we're teaching and inviting so they become active patients. When they're an active patient, okay, somebody under active care, right? We define that. Somebody under active care in your practice, what are the— what are you trying to do at that point, right? What's the goal? Well, we talked about the goal is to get them the best benefit for their care. The second goal is to get testimonials and really start to build that relationship. How do you do that? You do that by educating and retaining. Probably nothing new here, but I want to shift your mindset in terms of the importance of this. Patient education is a term that's been around as long as chiropractic, I think. And, and sometimes it can feel almost old-fashioned, right? Patient education. Ah, patient education, patient education. It's critical. It builds the opportunity to have a retention loop. And how can you do that? Well, you can see a few ideas on the screen right there. In-office video. We stream Research That Matters TV into our docs' waiting rooms, reception areas. Each and every month, new content going in wirelessly via an Amazon Fire Stick. That's modern patient education. Patient education handouts that change with the weekly topics that you're talking about in your practice. This is patient education in the 21st century. Onboarding emails. This is patient education as well. When somebody becomes an active patient, are they getting an onboarding sequence via email that enable them to know exactly what's going on, that reinforces the buying decision that they made to come into your practice, that emphasizes and supports their decision? That's important. And then building into that retention part, review and testimonial emails, critically, critically important. So here we go with a couple examples of this. This is a patient handout right now in August. We have our monthly content campaign in Smart Chiropractors all around opioids. And week number 2, which was last week technically, was finding relief without opioids. So this was the patient handout our docs were printing out, getting in those adjusting bays, getting in those exam rooms, putting on their front desks, and changing these out every single week to match that weekly topic within the monthly campaign is really how you can get tremendous traction and look like a total pro. So education and retention is where you want to be and what you want to think about with the active patients. Are you doing things proactively to educate and retain your active patients? So the question is, are you? If you're not, you probably have an issue with patient retention, right? Because if education and Educate and retain. If those things are struggling, you got— you're not going to be able to retain very many patients. You might have people dropping out before they complete their initial care plan. You might have people that don't come back for any maintenance, for wellness, and maybe they're not calling again in the future at all if you're really, really struggling with this. So how do you do this? Well, how you do it— 3 examples are on the screen. This is what we do at The Smart Chiropractor. Reception area video: turn off the news. If you have the news on in your reception area, You're blowing it. Turn off the news, get pro-health, pro-chiropractic, get great research-based content on your screen and ensure that your rest area, your reception area is a place of refuge for the people that are coming in. This is their opportunity to learn more about their body, to learn more about how you can help them, to learn more about how they can help themselves through the care that you're delivering. Don't blow that opportunity. Number 2 is patient handouts. I'm not talking dusty old trifold brochures. But make sure you have fresh stuff going out. We have fresh stuff going out weekly for all of our docs, because we've seen that that makes a super impact in their ability to communicate. And finally, onboarding emails. And there's more to all these. We could go through laundry lists of all this, but I want you to understand and just write these down. If you're missing some of these key components, this is what you want to search out for people that can help you get it dialed in. So onboarding emails. If you don't have an email onboarding sequence, if you're relying on your front desk staff member to do all of the onboarding, Well, when you have a front desk staff member change, what happens? The onboarding changes, and now you start to lack continuity, lack systems, lack processes, lack results. So onboarding emails support your team, your staff, so that as they have conversations, you know, there's a consistent message going out onboarding people. I bet you, you buy a $10 bottle of vitamins and you're getting onboarding emails. People spend a lot of money and time, effort, and energy coming in hurt. into our practices. And if they're not seeing a professional onboarding email campaign, you're missing out on an opportunity to really wow them and really to increase your retention long-term.

That's it for today's episode. Be sure to tune in for episode 29, where we wrap up part 2 of this training And discuss how to build a flywheel of attraction and retention, as well as the 6 touchstones of engagement, referrals, and reactivations. You won't want to miss it. Episode 29 drops in 2 weeks, or 1 week for our Patreon subscribers. In the near future, we're also planning a few special Q&A episodes, as well as interviews with some of the top professionals in the physical medicine world. So please be sure to click on the Q&A link in our show notes And ask any burning questions you may have. You can subscribe to The Factor Podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or the podcast app that works best for you. Please give us a 5-star rating to help us grow the show. Every little bit helps. And last but certainly not least, be sure to visit the show notes for a link to download the PDF of today's full presentation, as well as learn about any special offers that we featured in today's episode. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-store.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R-store.com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to Be sure to also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.