EP024: Automation vs. Personalization with Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hello. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Perfect Practice. Today we're going to be talking about automation and personalization. So I'm actually sitting in my sauna right now with my son Devin. Say what's up, Devin, what's up? So Devin and I are hanging out. I'm writing down some content, some information, some ideas that I'd like to share with you. And this actually brings me to an excellent point. Automation allows you to free up some time. So the fact that I'm freeing up some time has enabled me to spend some time in the sauna with my son. And I'm going to be sharing with you things that we've been doing in our practice that help me free up some more time, but also in enable us to have continue to have really a personalized relationship and engagement with our patients. So one of the things that I'm here to tell you is that automation is something that you want to use strategically in your office. And what that means is you don't want to automate everything. You certainly can't automate everything. And you don't want to personalize everything because you'd have to have an entire army of people in order to do that. So the key here is to find balance. Find balance between automation and personalization. And I find that most practices are missing both of these elements and certainly they're missing the balance of the two. So here's an exercise that I want you to do when it comes to deciding what you're gonna automate, start by making a list. Start by having your staff members make a list of the things that they do over and over and over again and have them document not just how often, not just what they're doing, but how often they're doing it as well. So for example, if a patient is calling in with instructions about lab testing and there's some confusion or lack of clarity around it, then that would be something to write down. And if that's happening three, four, five times a week or every time a patient starts care, then that's something that you want to make a note of, because this is tying up a lot of your staff's time, energy and effort. And it's something that can be automated. So a few examples of things that we automate in our practice that might inspire you are lab test instructions. You know, yes, we briefly go over instructions with our patients, but it's actually far more effective to record a video that explains exactly the details that you want the patient to know, because every time somebody presents this information, the only thing they can do is screw it up. The only thing they can do is forget to say something critical or important. Or the other thing that happens is patients forget, because, let's face it, they're coming in, they've got brain fog. They've got a million other things on their mind. They're not immediately going to do that test because they've got to go home and do the test. It might be a couple days, some cases might even be a week or two until they get the lab testing done. So explaining this to them in high levels of detail makes you feel good because you did your job, but it actually might leave more confusion for the patient because they're trying to remember everything that you told them, especially the really important stuff. And so I would encourage you to record a video where you explain every single detail that the person needs to know, and then this can be sent out automatically as part of your new patient automation sequence. Now, another thing that we do that you might want to consider doing is we use activecampaign. And when a patient becomes a new client, it actually triggers automation. And so we manually enter their information in and it triggers them to start that new patient automation. When they start that automation, what ends up happening is they immediately get a welcome email with a personalized video from me. And this email, you know, has a welcome note, and it's got a video of me welcoming them to our practice. Then they get a second email which immediately asks them to give us feedback. So we asked them what they enjoyed about their appointment, and we also asked them what we could have done better. And this immediately allows us to mitigate or remediate any issues that the patient might have had. But it also keeps us on our toes, and it also lets the patient know that they have a voice in our practice, that they're being heard, that they're being listened to, that we care about how they feel and we care about their needs. So a patient Survey is really simply two questions. What did you enjoy about your appointment today? And what could we do better? Now, here's the thing. When you start getting positive feedback from people, what ends up happening is those can be screenshotted as great testimonials. So if somebody says, I felt listened to, I. I felt like my needs were being addressed. I felt like my questions were being answered, well, guess what? People want to hear that. They want to see that. That's social proof that you can use on your website. So now you've basically automated the process of generating testimonials, at least for your first appointment or so. And then, you know, that's a really simple way to process, to automate, and really, really profound way to help your patients feel heard. And again, you want everyone to feel, so automate that, put that part of your sequence. Now, another thing that you can do as part of your automation is you can drip education to people. And by dripping education, it's not just about, you know, the things that you're saying in the office which the person might have to then regurgitate or not even remember. But what, what drip education does is it. It makes your content a lot more shareable. It makes your content so that the spouse can watch it, so it can be forwarded via an email to a friend or a loved one or. And you can even note that in your email sequence, hey, you know, if you found this information beneficial, that's awesome. But if you know somebody else who could find this information beneficial, please feel free to share it. Another thing that you can add to your automation are policies. So things that you want in writing. So one of the things that we add in our automation is our email policy. You know, what constitutes an email and an appropriate email and what constitutes or requires an appointment. So these are things that you can add into your automation sequence that your patients get. Really simple stuff, really easy things that you want, communications that you want everyone to get, and you want that to be automated. You know, you don't want your staff doing these things. You don't want to tie them up doing these things because they're so important. And you also don't want them to forget doing these things. Let's let the robots do the things that robots are good at, and let's have humans do things that humans are good at. So that brings me to personalization. You know, personalization is very critical, and this is something that I feel is missing in our, you know, traditional healthcare model. In the allopathic model, there's very little personalization everything is diagnosis driven, blood work driven. It's not driven by the person that's sitting in front of the doctor. There's also very little automation, meaningful automation that's done in traditional medicine. So this balance of personalization and optimization gives us a very clear advantage to really connect deeply with our clients. Now things that you can personalize are going to be cards. You know, we send out cards for various occasions. We send every one of our clients a birthday card because, you know, very few people actually do that. So it's our one chance a year to let them know they're loved and they're valued and they're appreciated. We give each of them a $25 gift card on their birthday and to our office so they can utilize that for any services that we offer. We also give people sympathy cards. Sometimes, you know, they might lose a pet or a loved one or they might have, you know, personal issue going on, so we can issue a sympathy card for that. But there's also things that people celebrate. So we also offer congratulations cards to our clients as well. And thank you cards. If somebody sends you a referral, then a really simple thing that you can do is send them a nice thank you card, just acknowledging them for your trust and, you know, trusting their friends health with your team as well. Now another thing that you want to personalize are emails. One thing I talk about is sending personalized emails, really after every appointment, just acknowledging that person and saying, hey, great conversation today. I really enjoyed our time together. Glad you found value. I learned a lot from this appointment as well. I'm looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks. This encourages people. This gets them pretty amped up and it shows them. Wow, like you took a few minutes to really acknowledge our time and value our time today. So a personalized email that's sent out, you know, literally this takes 30 seconds to do. So it shouldn't take long, it shouldn't take a lot of time. It should be personalized and it can just be a couple of lines. That's all it is. Keep that dialogue and communication open and acknowledge that person. I think you're going to get a lot of positive input and feedback from that. Now, on top of, you know, emails and birthday cards and thank you cards and sympathy cards, you know, there's other ways that you can create a unique experience, a world class experience for people. One of the things that we do as a bonus when any, when anybody signs up for care, we also send them a little thank you note and gratitude that we send out to them. And the way we show them our gratitude is we send them a jar and a mug. And it's a intention jar and mug which has positive words and language inscribed on it, which hopefully brings them positivity into their lives as well. So we share this with them as our complimentary gift to them. And this is, you know, something that's personalized and the process is automated, but the gift itself is personalized and mailed out to these individuals. Another thing that we do is we give our clients a cookbook based on the dietary recommendations and guidelines that we want them to follow. So that's another personalization strategy. And we also give our clients a gratitude journal. When they get a gratitude journal, we let them know that this gratitude journal is complimentary and we will replace it for the rest of your life. So bring it back in. You don't have to submit it. Just show us that you filled it out and we will replace it for you with a brand new one absolutely free. And it's a very inexpensive marketing tool for you. And you know, 20 bucks, let's say, for a year's worth of gratitude, I think is huge. And guess what? Every time they open that book, whether they like it or not, they're going to think of you. And if they're practicing gratitude, they're also going to get much better long term outcomes under your care. So these are a few things that you can start taking into consideration in terms of automation and personalization. Both are vital to the success of your practice and, you know, both are things that you should be consciously aware of. So I hope this episode brings this to your consciousness. Have your staff do the simple exercise I mentioned, write down the things that they're doing, and then make a note of how many times they're doing them. I would give it two weeks just to give you a fair assessment, depending on how busy your practice is. You know, if you're super busy, you probably can figure it out in a week. If you're just starting up, it might take you a few weeks to figure out what those things are. As I mentioned, the things that are absolutely critical to our patient care, such as lab testing, we automate that. We automate surveys that go out to our patients. We automate drip education that goes out to our clients and also our policies. These are things that we want everyone to be aware of and we don't want people missing this information and we want to give it to them in writing so they have it as well. And then as far as personalization goes, few things that you can do that. Personalize things for people. Cards for various occasions, email them after every appointment. You know, if you're pretty busy office, you're probably seeing six to eight patients a day. That's not that many emails. It shouldn't take you more than five to ten minutes to kind of wrap up your day. But that's gonna go a long way, trust me. And then you can give people gifts. You can give them little tokens of your appreciation, depending on, you know, how they're engaging with your practice. If they hit certain milestones, then maybe you can give them a gift to kind of acknowledge them for that milestone. If people are sending you referrals, depending on your state and your board, perhaps you can send them a free gift or a gift card, you know, to acknowledge them as well. And sometimes you can do nice things for no reason, just for being you and for the patient, being themselves. So don't always, you know, don't, don't do things out of generosity. Do nice things out of pure intent. And guess what? It's going to come back to you many, many fold. So I hope you're incorporating automation into your practice. I hope you're incorporating personalization into your practice. We can't automate everything. We can't personalize everything. You've got to find that balance. So start off by making the list and see where that gets you. And as always, I'm always happy to help you. If you're looking for guidance, if you're looking for mentorship, if you're looking for coaching and accountability, if you're looking for strategies, then I'm always here to help. With love, with gratitude. This is Satchin Patel with perfect practice. Make it an amazing, amazing day. Thank you.