Optimize the Patient Journey

Foreign. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my humble pleasure to be able to introduce my good friend Troy Cole here into our video series. My name is Michael King and brother, it's a, this is gonna be an exciting one today. We have got action packed content just to kind of set the frame a little bit and introduce people to what we're going to be talking about. You know, you and I first of all have combined 40 years of experience in this space and you know, we, we've seen pretty much everything that's gone on with the economy and tide shifting with practices and whatnot carry us through. From your perspective, what are we going to cover here today? What are we going to be talking about through our five part video series and the value that we're going to be dropping for different clinics, please.

But the thing that we want to talk with you about is we want to share some strategies and tactics that we're using within the practices that we work with, that we're seeing in the marketplace that are working well right now. And they're all centered around hidden assets that are within your practice. So you might think to yourself like, man, maybe we need to do more marketing, we need to spend more money, we need to, you know, do all these things. In the end, maybe you do. But where we like to start is every single practice. So you watching this right now, your practice, whether you're big, small, multi location, multi provider, whatever, you have hidden assets within your practice that when you are leveraging them properly, can lead to increases in business right now. And that is what we are going to go through as we track through this video series.

There's three things that I wanted to talk through to set the frame and hopefully serve as inspiration for people when they're, when they're going through this video series. Number one is to understand the difference between strategy and implementation. What I mean by that is that we're going to be gifting you with a lot of strategy. But the main key here is understand that just hearing the idea and doing nothing about it doesn't serve your practice. So really understand that you're going to hear some strategy, but you also want to be able to implement. And then number two is the speed at which you implement really does matter. Meaning you're going to hear some awesome content here from Troy and I. But then the question becomes, how fast after that are you able to actually get that, that into your clinic and get that, you know, giving you some data to see whether or not it does that hopeful, you know, positive effect to your bottom line? Of your business. And then, number three, it really is about deciding who is it that you want to partner with if it's not going to be in house, that you're going to have somebody to do the implementation for you? Who is it that you want to be able to trust to be able to get you that result? My belief is that you want to work with people who have already achieved that result. And one of the invitations is that Troy and I are going to be able to extend to you is, you know, listen, CareCredit has bought you an hour of our time. Every single person that is watching this video, if you would like to have a chance to chat with Troy and I about your specific practice or about a specific idea that you've heard, we'll extend an invitation for you to be able to do so. So I think one of the areas that I want to start out with first is just, you know, optimizing the patient journey. And really, that's. That's an area where I know that you and I have seen from the clients that we've worked with time and time again, Many of them sort of miss that part of it. And so just before we get into the actual strategy and actions of that. Anything you wanted to mention about the. The patient journey placement?

Well, optimize the patient journey, right now, that's kind of. That's kind of jargony, and you're not going to get a lot of jargon from Michael and I, so. So we might use terms like that, but we're going to explain what they mean. Optimize the patient journey. The patient journey, the way that we look at it is very, very simple. The patient literally takes a trip down a pathway, and they go through a number of steps before they get into your surgery suite and then turn into a happy patient that's referring all their friends and family. Right? We like to look at every single step of that process and say, okay, here's what we're doing now. What could we do to improve conversions? Create. Create a better experience, a better feeling for those patients. Differentiate your practice against others that are out there in the marketplace and empower the patient to make a decision that is right for them and for their vision. Okay? So when we talk about optimizing the patient journey, we're going to talk about specific little instances throughout the steps that somebody takes from sitting on the couch to being in your surgery suite and what you can do right now for not a lot of time, not a lot of effort, not a lot of money to go in there and actually increase your conversions and increase the leverage you have at every single one of those steps.

Think about the movie Star wars, right? And that the hero of that movie is Luke Skywalker and the guide is Yoda. You want to be the guide for your patients. And the issue that I see a lot of practices doing is they try to position themselves as the Luke Skywalker in someone's journey, in someone's life. Meaning I'm the hero. Look at how great I am. Look at what lasers we use, look at how much experience I have. And all of that is important to a certain extent. But what I'm saying is that we want to be the Yoda for the patient. And I think that hopefully could be a metaphor to kind of lock it into your mind about how you want to think about everything, especially the homepage of your site and the way that you're communicating on the phone and in your marketing and all those different things, how you can position that from, from the patient's perspective. So, you know, keep in mind, you know, if I'm thinking truly about how to make things easy for the patient to convert some of the tried and true stuff, and we don't need to get into too much minutiae about it, but if I'm looking at some ideas, what does every practice need to have? You've got stuff like a self test, you've got stuff like a pricing opt in. And I'll explain that in a bit more detail what that means. You've got to have a online scheduler. And you would be shocked and at how few practices have all three of those. What I mean by that is that a lot of the times the forms that they have are antiquated self tests or when I say a pricing opt in, you want to think about meeting the intent of where a patient is at in their journey. So if I go on to the, you know, one of the programs that we use to, to analyze search intent or amount of searches that are happening, almost half of the searches right now for one procedure, for lasik, are all about price. So what does that mean? People are searching for this term and you want to meet that intent by having the ability to have them to exchange their first name, last name, email, phone number, to have a conversation with them. And that is something that I, when you're thinking about the patient journey, it's all about conversations. The self test that you're taking is about using that as a tool to start a conversation. Same thing with the pricing opt in and then the online scheduler I don't mean an appointment request form. I mean an actual online scheduler. Because the world we live in today, people want convenience. They want the ability to get the result that they want. And I did a. When I spoke for Star earlier on this year, I actually researched Troy150 practices websites and only 27% of them had an actual online schedule, which to me is shocking. And I think that if you want to make things easy for the patient journey, think of these as these conversion assets, as we would call them, as like a little fishing pole in the water. The more fishing poles that you have in the water, the easier it is for the patient to say, well, maybe I'm not interested in that, but yeah, I'm ready to schedule a consult or whatever. I think to me, the patient journey is so important to be considering how to reduce friction in their process. What are your thoughts?

If you look at the big businesses in, not in our industry, but in the world right now, they have figured out ways to reduce friction. Amazon's the perfect example, right? Anything I want, I can get on my phone right now and order it in literally 15 seconds with about three clicks of a button and it'll be on my doorstep sometimes today, right? So you think about that. You think about, okay, well, they're reducing friction, they're making things easy and seamless for me, and they're training consumers. And this is the big piece for you. They are training your prospective patients on the level of convenience that they should expect from a company they're doing business with. Right? You look at what Amazon started with prime two day shipping, okay? Walmart, a few years later comes up with their own program where they do two day or one day shipping. Target's got the Circle thing with the Circle app now, right? Everybody comes along based on consumer behavior, which is established by the companies that are out there doing the thing. Okay? So we've got all these different companies and you can throw Netflix in there, Uber, Uber eats, right? Like Instacart. All of these things that make our life very, very convenient and allow us to operate in on our timeline the way that we want to order our groceries, watch our movies, et cetera. We need to mimic that and utilize some of those exact same approaches within our practice. Back to Michael's fishing analogy, right? Somebody's interested in pricing. You need to have your pricing fishing pole in the water of the pricing pond because that's where all the fish are snapping, right? So have something in there for that. Same thing for scheduling, right? We talk about right place Right. Time. Okay. I don't know when somebody's going to get to the point where their, why now their frustration point exceeds their continued dependency on glasses, contacts, readers, bifocals, getting their cataracts fixed, whatever it is. But when they do, I want to be top of mind and I want to have a very, very easy way for them to reach out and say, fix this, fix this. I'm tired of this. Fix it.

Yeah, Let me give you some action items because you're giving a little bit of the strategy of it. So number one, when it comes to your website, make sure it's mobile friendly. I mean like if you think about the patient journey and you're thinking about how to.

There's some sites that aren't mobile friendly. What's that? Are there still websites that are not mobile friendly?

I mean, yeah, it's shocking, right? I think that one of the things that, you know, most practices, they look at their, they look at their website on desktop but they never actually take a moment and look at how it is sitting there on mobile. And the same thing is that I would also recommend taking a look at your landing pages and one of the things that we haven't talked about is just adding on more testimonials because social proof on your homepage, on your website, on landing pages really makes a difference in the patient journey to help reduce friction and to help them to realize, hey, there's other people that have already gone forward in front of me that have had a really good experience. What are your thoughts on sort of revamping the way that a practice communicates about the modern vision solutions that they have versus just talking about one specific procedure.

The more procedures that you have. Right. That's a double edged sword because on the one hand you're able to help more people. You're, you have more unique aspects to your practice that set you apart. Like ICL is a good example. Not a lot of people are doing that. Right. So you're able to differentiate with that as well. But at the same time you don't want to pigeonhole somebody into thinking like, okay, Lasik, Lasik, Lasik. And then they come in and they're a candidate for something else. Okay. And probably the best example for this is like if you look at it categorically, look at it categorically, you've got laser vision correction type procedures for age 18 to 45 year olds and then you've got lens, more lens based procedures. I mean, ICL kind of goes with the younger, but you've got you know, refractive lens exchange lens type procedures for people with the reading glasses. Those are two different demographics. Those are two different problems, essentially. And so you want to be able to talk about those in different ways. So even if you're like, man, do I need a, do I need a little pathway for all these different procedures? In an ideal world, that would be nice. But if you're starting right now and you're like, okay, like, what's, what's bare bones, how can I really start to differentiate in a meaningful way and provide value to our patients? Just splitting it down the middle there and saying, okay, anybody in this age demographic, we're going to give them more information around LASIK, ICL, Smile, etc. Anyone in this demographic, we're going to start to educate them more on RLE and some of those options too. If you can just do that, it's going to significantly increase the value of, in terms of like, the meaningfulness of the, of the information that you're providing them. It's going to improve that as well. And the big piece of that is like, we're talking, we're sitting here and we're talking about the first part of the patient journey, which is like gathering the leads, getting all those fishing poles in the water. Everything that we're doing here not only gets you more leads, which is more opportunities to create patients, but it also, the more education we do, the clearer we can be on that, sets up the rest of your team as the person goes through the patient journey, sets them up for success.

Action item number one, look at all the automated. Hopefully you're automating your emails and your text messages that are going out to prospective patients and review them and just see if you are a prospective patient. Is it keeping in mind that there are other potential procedures? And it's, you know, because if the first time someone's hearing about ICL is when they come in to a practice, then I think, and it's right at the, oh, sorry, you're not a laser candidate. ICL for you, then I don't think you've set it up properly. So I highly recommend you take a look at, just do a bit of an audit and like, what are patients receiving? Another thing that I'd recommend as a specific action item is if Jane Doe schedules a consultation in your practice, a huge opportunity that you have is to be able to. So if it's for, if it is for ICL or RLE or Smile or Lasik or whatever, think about what are the specific things that you could Potentially text to that person or email. Number one, could be a welcome video from the surgeon. Number two, it could be an office tour. It could be a meet the staff video. It could be testimonial videos. It could be some of the most common questions about insert procedure, whatever it is. That's the type of stuff if you're thinking through as a patient on their journey, you can create more impressions and also help to reduce no shows and cancellations, but by sending them content that is relevant to the, to the journey that they're on. And I really strongly believe about video content because that's how we are consuming information today on these devices. Right? This is the new TV is. And that's how people are consuming information. So anything you want to add to that, Troy?

Well, you hit the nail on the head, dude. It's bring value, it's provide value. Like, it's great if you're doing outreach and ongoing outreach, very, very important. But if you're just saying like, hey, are you ready to schedule? Hey, you ready to schedule? Hey, you ready to come in? It's like being desperate for a date guy, right? It's like being the desperate boyfriend where you're like, hey, we go out with me, Will you go out with me? Like, let's do it. You know, the fact that you're doing that actually doesn't help you and in fact hurt you. Right? If you do it in that way. But if you're providing value. Hey, I was thinking about you. I wanted you to see a little bit more information on icl. Here's a video from a patient. Hey, I know you were asking about pricing the other day. We actually have a buyer's guide that I wanted to send over for you. Here's a link, right? That's providing value and it's, you want to serve and lead the patients through the process versus just waiting to take something from them like when they come in and out for the consultation.

You know what it is, Troy, is that think about what you want to do is have natural human to human conversations.

Don't text like a person.

Yeah, exactly. Don't text as if we are a corporate brand, et cetera, et cetera. I'm of the belief that text the way you would to a best friend or to someone that you care about and do so in a way that is engaging and that is meant to elicit them to engage with you. Because if you just sort of broadcasting information out and, hey, this is XYZ procedure. Do you want to schedule consult? Want to schedule consult? To your point, you're kind of feeling a little bit desperate because it's all about what you want them to do. And as opposed to meeting them with where they're at. Let me actually close the loop on a quick action item, which is video and practice, and be like, yeah, great. I'd love to be able to send video or create video content. To be blunt, my surgeon sucks on video. They're very awkward. They don't like, they want to have scripts, they just listen. I have in 20 years of being in this space, most doctors aren't really good on video. And I say that with love and respect. So what do, what do we do to create content? Well, what I do is, is I will literally interview that surgeon via Zoom and we'll talk about this a little bit later, but in a bit more detail. But very quickly, we interview them via Zoom. We have the top 10 questions or top questions about insert procedure. And what's beautiful about that is, is it hi fi. Is it like, like the most pristine video quality? No, but that's not the point. The, the real point of that video is to get the surgeon to talk in a way that's organic and in the way that they actually speak to patients. So the quality of that video from an engagement standpoint, from a relatability standpoint, is way higher. And then that 15 minute video that I film, you get 10 pieces of content that you can drip out and emails, text, social media, landing pages, website. That's the way you want to think about it, is it's better to get something done than try to make it overly produced and spend thousands of dollars to bring people in and, and all that stuff. So that's just a quick action item. Troy. I want to pivot here. And as far as the patient journey, I want to talk about data because this is something that is very near and dear to my heart, which is really in order for practice to understand because we've given some good nuggets for them to be able to deploy and implement. They really got to be able to measure the effect of it, because spray and pray is not a good marketing or strategy in a practice. And so some of the things I wanted to talk about that I got.

A quick question, I got a quick question for you because I know, I know you're going to get into some key data points to look at the thing that I see, and I feel this with myself too. We've, we've, we've gone from like no data, say 15, 20 years ago, or you're Just kind of tracking on spreadsheets and doing formulas, which worked okay. But I've got a lot of practices now. They do have CRMs, they do have Salesforce, they have other things and there's a ton of data and it's like, this is great. We've got it all. I don't really know what to look for, what to look at. Right. So it's like we've kind of, that pendulum has swung and it's actually becoming a problem that, that is, that is not easy to sliver this thing down and actually see what matters. Right. And separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of all the different data that you've got. So walk us through the key data points that you like to look at so that people can at least dial in and like, okay, well if I look at these two or three or four data points, that's at least going to give me an idea of, of where we are, if we're going in the right direction.

I think one of the most important data points that you want to have on your fingertips is what, what, what I call your weekly lead to consult conversion rate. Meaning every single week you get a bucket of leads. All right? And, and from day one to day seven, I get a bucket of leads. On day eight, I want to know how many of those leads that we got in that last seven days have scheduled a consult. Why?

Because.

Because I want to know how effective our team is at converting somebody to either a virtual or in office consultation. So having that at your fingertips on a weekly basis is incredibly important, especially if you're trying out different platforms like TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and Google and you got organic and all that stuff. You really need to have it on your fingertips because it gives you a lot of information. Number two, your lead response time. What do I mean by that? I mean when Jane Doe actually requests information, takes a self test option for pricing, even scheduled a consultation, I want to know how fast your team is at responding to that person via two way text, via phone. You know, those are things that I really want to be able to look at. Obviously the conversion rate of a patient counselor, what their conversion rate is to surgery. You know, you could look at that weekly, but especially you want to look at that monthly to sort of see how effective the team is. Troy, I know that there's some other, you know, there's all stuff like from the website, in clinic, anything you wanted to add to that? I've got some other thoughts, but I want to bring you in well, you.

May want to see what your conversions are to consult, like we're talking about, and then also consult to surgery and then separating that by procedure. Right. It's not uncommon for say an RLE conversion to be a little bit lower or to be a longer conversion than say a LASIK conversion. Right. But, but you still want to be able to see those things. What are those conversion rates? And then if even breaking it down by counselor. Right. Or surgery scheduler, what are the different surgery schedulers by procedure? Because what you'll find is you're going to find that certain surgery schedulers, like, man, this person's super comfortable with a LASIK consult, but like on the cataract side, they're really not comfortable. Right. Or vice versa, or with rle or what have you. But you'll be able to drill in. And that doesn't necessarily mean like, okay, this person's only doing lasik, this person's doing that. They're like, you want to have the cross training among your team in case you lose somebody, in case somebody's on vacation or what have you. Like, you need to have that. But that will at least show you where the opportunities are for the coaching and the improvement for your individual team members to keep those metrics moving in the right direction. And we'll talk about that in a separate module when we discuss the team coaching part.

Yeah. There's some other items that I know you and I talked about, which is, you know, what happens in the clinic, meaning how is your patient satisfaction? What is your no show cancellation rates? Like, what is actually happening? You know, how satisfied are people with your experience in the practice? You know, how many reviews do you have for your practice? Are you being intentional at being able to get those from, from your, from your patients, if you will. And I think that let's actually dig a little bit deeper, Troy, into the in clinic patient journey. I know you had a few comments on that. Whether it comes into, you know, just digital forms or the check in process. Anything about the patient journey you'd like to add as far as how to be able to optimize that and make it more of a modern experience?

Yeah. First and foremost, like go through your patient journey or have somebody you trust do this.

Yes.

Secret shop your practice, because this is just going to reveal all of these things. Okay, go fill out your form. See if you get the call back. How quickly do you do it? Like Michael, like Michael's alluding to have somebody come in and go through the process. Did they have to fill out Paperwork was, Was there an online check in? Did that work well for them? Right. What do those different pieces look like? How convenient was it? And get some feedback or experience it for yourself. But back to the convenience part. How do we. How are we more like Amazon? How are we more like Netflix? Do we have online check in, right? Can I book online? Can I check in online? Do I have to fill out a bunch of papers? Right. Which is kind of a pain for your patients and. And for your team. So do you have digital forms? Do we have text and email reminders and pieces that are going out? Hey, excited to see you for your appointment tomorrow morning, Mr. Jones. Here's a quick map to our office link. Right. Do we have those kind of things that are happening? Right. And what you might find, which you will find, you'll find this at some point, is that your answer is like, yes, Troy, we do have those. And the response is actually, yes, Troy, we're supposed to be doing those. Right? Because you think it's happening, but it's not. And so you'll discover things that you're like, man, I just, I thought we told every patient this, man, I thought we gave everybody that brochure. Man, I thought we did this with everybody. And for whatever reason, it's not happening in your practice. It's an easy fix. Easy fix to go on and do that.

One quick other action item I wanted to mention has to do with online scheduling. And this is, I think, a missed opportunity for many practices that they don't take. And that is when Jane Doe schedules. I like how I'm using Jane Doe. Using John Doe. That's perfect. When Jane Doe schedules the consultation. Virtual or an office, I really believe that you want to have a human. Actually, if they're doing it digitally, have a human being to connect with them. Jane Doe, hey, just wanted to give you a greeting from ABC Practice. Thank you so much for scheduling online. Really excited to be able to see in the practice or whatever it may be. Right. That right there connects them to a human being and it makes them less apt to forget about it or, you know, whatever it is you can remind them, hey, you're going to get some text reminders. And speaking of which, you should be immediately giving people a text reminder and you can consider giving them a text reminder two days before, day before and the day of. Why? Because we live in a world right now where there is a plethora of things that are vying for people's attention. And anything you can do to be present, to be relevant and to make sure that you. You're reminding them of this commitment that they've made that is going to be helpful.

Do not automate your way out of a personalized patient experience. Okay? You. I've worked with practices who have so much automation in place and so many different. Like, all these things are just going off and happening and. But there's never that personal touch with the patient. And so there's never that connection. There's never that feeling of obligation like, I need to show up for this appointment. Right. And so everything streamlined and processed, but that personal touch is never made. So make sure that you're still keeping some personal touch elements.

Well, listen, if you have gotten value out of what we have been able to serve up for you here today, we'd love for you, number one, to watch the other videos that are in our series. But more importantly as well is that we want to help you to be able to take action. So if you'd like to have a chance to connect with Troy and I, we're going to give you that opportunity. CareCredit's bought you an hour of our time and that could give you an opportunity just to have a human conversation with us straight up, just where you're at and how can we be able to kind of serve you in the right direction, Whether it's working with us or somebody else doesn't really matter. I just want to be of service to you, to help you to be able to get this stuff implemented in your practice.

Troy, stay tuned for the rest of these videos. And we're covering everything from marketing tactics and approach, team training and development. Like, we're going to hit on all these different elements that are the hidden assets within your practice to really help you optimize what you're working with right now. So looking forward to seeing you in the next one. Same with you, Mike. Until then, adios. Ra.