Hey docs,
We all wear many hats as chiropractors. We are doctors, small businesspeople, trusted advisors and sometimes we find ourselves doing fun Reels on Instagram or TikTok’s. All of these personas fit together because what drives us is a passion to inspire and educate the public about the importance of chiropractic. We risk ourselves in business and in building long term relationships so we can deliver life enhancing care.
It becomes a full-time job just organizing this work!
One way to keep it all in perspective is to recognize the importance of what I call the Patient or Practice Life Cycle. It encompasses the 4 critical stages in a patient’s learning and experiential journey as they decide to include chiropractic in their health and healing paradigm. To say these 4 steps are important is an understatement! The great news is that you already know and apply these foundational steps. Everyone who is in practice intuitively knows and dabbles in these 4 categories but the real masters, the ones who create jaw-dropping practices and deliver incredible and predictable results, are the docs who have mastered the 4 dimensions of the Patient Life Cycle.
As we introduce each of the 4 components, I want you to think about become aware of how each of the stages makes you feel. Some will excite and inspire you. Other stages will be dreaded and spawn a lot of excuses. For example, I loved the Clinical Stage of practice, but the Attraction Stage was a blind spot for me. It wasn’t until I looked myself squarely in the mirror and stepped INTO my fears and limitations that I was able to create the legacy practice I had always dreamed of.
Now, let’s take a minute to talk about each of the 4 stages of the Patient Life Cycle that will help you dive deeper into this great adventure known as Chiropractic practice. Please know that any new changes or advancements that I have made to the INSiGHT scanning technologies and the scanning software are based on these 4 Stages! It should come as no surprise that this technology sits at the hub of the world’s most exciting and productive offices!
As I mentioned earlier, the first phase of the Patient Life Cycle is Attraction. This is just another way to say marketing. You’ve all heard how everything from what we wear, to how we speak is ‘marketing’. It’s also quite apparent that the very essence of any practice and business is becoming and staying ‘visible’. Attraction is the art of knowing, without a doubt or hesitation, that you are the very BEST at what you do and that you have enough space in your office and your life to take on anyone and 100 of their friends and family members right now! Attraction can be described as a sense of happiness, knowingness and certainty all wrapped up in every sound bite, media piece and conversation you create. I hope that you can see that this first phase of the Patient Life Cycle, is about bringing the right person into your life! ‘Selling’ isn’t even on the radar when the ‘telling’ is coming from the right place.
There’s a great counter culturalist who stated, ‘You can’t get wet from the word ‘water’. This statement becomes evident in the next phase of the Lifecycle, Clinical Excellence and the Use of Systems. It is all about bringing chiropractic to become a reality for the person in front of them. Great chiropractors are great clinicians. They are crystal clear on what their consultations and exams are focused on. They dedicate themselves to being on the leading edge of the clinical application of chiropractic. This invariably leads them to support themselves with great systems and great team members. They invest in the right technologies that keep them laser focused on finding the cause of the disruption in a person’s life through the lens of chiropractic. They know that they need to get ‘wet’ every moment in the information gathering side of the Patient Life Cycle. After all, it is what the next two steps are based upon.
I describe Reporting to be the third step of the Patient Lifecycle. We are all taught that we must ‘Report our Findings’ after an examination. However, I like to consider this a time to ‘Relate our Findings’. It can be so much more than simply reporting clinical results. Many doctors get confused at this phase and may actually lose the plot. Some take the new practice member on a metaphysical journey steeped in existentialism while others try to emulate the dryness of a medical specialist. I suggest that this is a chance to build rapport through certainty and invitational language but most importantly it’s a time to focus on the ‘RRTB: the Real Reason To Believe’. In consideration of this, INSiGHT scans and their reports were specifically designed to embrace these necessities of communication.
Care planning, the fourth phase of the Patient Lifecycle, is where the rubber meets the road. The effectiveness of the first 3 phases, culminates here as you get a chance to invite the patient into your chiropractic worldview. At this point, they are not being asked to commit to you, or even a treatment plan. Rather, they are committing to their body’s performance; it’s ever-expanding health and ultimately their untapped potential. There are a lot of hurdles and steps along this journey and your Care Plan takes all of that into account. It’s a manifesto of what you believe in and what you know you know you can deliver.
I’ve been quoted as saying, ‘You get paid to the level of certainty that you bring to this conversation’. I think it’s time for you to get paid handsomely for choosing to be a chiropractor.
Thanks for investing the time to get familiar with the Patient Life Cycle. As I said earlier in this blog, the masters who build their perfect practices invest their time in identifying how they can improve these outcomes in all 4 categories. Welcome to the world of CLA and the essence of scanning with the INSiGHT. Dig in! It pays to be a part of the CLA movement.
Dr. David
