As your holistic medicine practice re-opens, you will need to figure out how to get your patients through the office with as minimal contact as possible. Offices are being asked to do this in a number of ways, including how you collect payment and re-appoint the patients.
You don’t want patients walking out the door without paying and not scheduled for their next appointment. Otherwise, these loose ends will slip through the cracks and cost your practice money during an already difficult time.
Here are a few tips on collecting payment and re-appointing patients.
Figure Out The Financials Ahead of Time
It can be hard to figure out how much a patient will owe ahead of the appointment. The best thing you can do is give them an estimation on their visit and collect payment information ahead of time over the phone. Once the appointment is done, you can run the treatment costs and let the patient know what the actual total for the day is. Either way, you’ve already got a payment method on file and authorization to charge the card.
Create a Process For Reappointing Patients
Getting your patients on the books before they head out the door will increase the chances that they come back. With everything going on, they are even less likely than usual to call you afterward and schedule their next appointment. Even if the appointment has to be changed at a later date, they should be on the books.
You can have the assistant that’s with them in the treatment room schedule them. Or, you can have the front desk call the patient on their cellphone and schedule them while they are in the treatment room.
Develop a Plan For The “What If’s”
Of course, there is no way to plan for every scenario that could play out in a day, but there are things you should plan for ahead of time. For example, how will you handle it if:
- A patient wants to pay by check or cash? Do you have the necessary PPE to handle those things in the office?
- What are you going to do if the person has to have someone accompany them? They will need their temperature taken.
- What’s the protocol if a patient comes in without a mask?
- How will you handle it if they need to use the restroom? Is there a designated bathroom for patients? What are the cleaning procedures after they leave?
It’s important to keep your patient’s confidence in you during this difficult time. You don’t want them coming in and thinking you don’t know what’s going on. The more “what if’s” you can come up with, the more prepared you will be when situations arise.
Take Feedback From The Staff
There’s no way you will get your procedures down on the first week back. In fact, as your office goes through the different Phases of re-opening, things are going to continue to change. Come up with a time where the staff can give feedback about the day and how it went. It’s important to come at this as a team, or you will end up having staff pitted against each other.
As the practitioner, you should create an environment where your team can talk with you about issues they are dealing with. Also, they need the platform to address their concerns in a respectful way to the rest of the team.
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Here at Functional Medicine SEO, we work with practitioners every day to increase their organic search traffic. Organic search traffic are those that find your website through a Google search. While our practitioners are busy working out how to re-open their offices and serve their patients, we are busy optimizing their websites so they can get new leads.
Contact us today if you’d like more information about our services. Or, better yet, fill out the form for our free strategy session and one of our experts will get back to you with real SEO feedback on your website. Our goal is to help as many holistic medicine doctors as possible. We look forward to hearing from you!
