This article is republished by the express written permission of GrowthMatrix © 2009 - www.growthmatrix.com

by Glenn Bryan, GrowthMatrix, Inc. | Branding and Marketing Consultants to Healthcare

 

 

Every time you work with a patient your goal is to get to YES.  Yes, I want you to treat me.  Yes, I believe the outcome is worth the cost.  Yes, I want to be healthy for a lifetime.  Yes, I believe you can help me reach my health goals.  Sounds like a great outcome for you and your patient – if it was only this easy. 

 

As you well know, YES is rarely achieved in a single visit.  YES, is typically achieved over time and through multiple experiences.  Why?  Because YES is directly related to trust – and trust takes time and effort to develop.  Trust is the key to success when parties in a relationship are asked to commit to one another.  And because this is what you’re asking your patients to do, make a commitment to your long-term care, then you need to understand how to influence the development of trust with your patients.

 

So, how do you build a trusting relationship with your patients?  Well, it’s important to know that you begin building a successful and trusting long-term relationship by first recognizing and accepting that you are starting your patient relationship with no trust, no history, and therefore, no basis for a long-term relationship. 

 

Begin your quest to get to YES by focusing on trust development between you and your patient.  Trust can be jump-started or hindered in the initial visits with your patient.  The first initial visits build the basis for trust development.  Don’t overwhelm your patient by conducting an intensive information dump.  You may think you’re educating, but to the patient it appears that you are trying to justify your care plan.  If this happens, you’ve hindered trust development by limiting the trust your patient is extending to you.  Just settle into the competent professional role that you’ve trained for and exude a casual and comfortable confidence.  Remember, you’re the physician and they’ve come to you for help.  You don’t have to overwhelm them.  Listen, learn, and educate your patient in stages.  Think of patient education as a tool you deliver over time to build trust with your patients – over time.
 
It’s better to begin building a trusting relationship with your patients by simply meeting their immediate needs while laying the foundation for future need satisfaction – a tricky balancing act if not handled properly.  Your patients’ immediate needs can be easily captured in the answers to four questions:

 

• Do you know what’s wrong with me?
• Can you fix the problem?
• How long will it take?
• How much will it cost?

 

That’s it… for starters.  Just keep in mind that your patients don’t care about long-term benefits or relationships when they first come visit you.  They care about their immediate need – probably pain.  It’s important that you address these immediate needs with professionalism, competence, and compassion. 

 

So, is that all?  Well… no.  Here’s why.  You begin your treatment plan, and you know what happens… about visit 3 or 4 they “feel better” and stop treatments.  The immediate need is gone (in other words they’re pain free) and they believe they are now “fixed.”  So, they stop treatments and the long-term relationship development is stalled.  Unfortunately, the typical response is to declare that, “they just don’t get it.”  Or did they?

 

Maybe you didn’t connect with the mind of the patient.  Maybe the importance and rational to have a long-term relationship is not self-evident to your patients.  Remember, all they care about is getting out of pain.  That objective is achieved, so there really isn’t a need for your continued services, so they stop treatments.  To get out of this destructive cycle, it’s important to focus on your practice brand and implement marketing tools that manage and support the development of a long-term relationship with your patients.

 

Branding and marketing involves more than just acquiring new patients.  Ideally, it involves delivering your practice brand promise to your patient in a way that they understand and connect with it.  This involves timing, proper messaging, effective delivery tactics, gradual commitments, and time.  It is important to understand the mind of your patient so you can connect with them to build trust and get to YES.

 

A full scope of this issue is beyond this article, but one approach to consider is to segment your patients into manageable groups and then deliver appropriate information through carefully crafted patent education.  Possible groups that have different patient education needs include:

 

• New patients
• Returning patients
• Patients coming off aggressive care plans
• Patients in maintenance care plans
• Inactive patients

 

In your clinic, you may have other groups of patents that are relevant to your specialty – like rehab patients.  The key is to segment your patients into groups in order to better know and deal with the mind of your patents.  By knowing what group your patient is in, you can then craft a focused patient education strategy that has a higher probability of connecting with that individual patient.  This approach will require adjustments because of several variable factors – the most important of which is your own personality and communication style.  But over time, you can craft an effective approach that works with your unique clinic and patients.

 

Knowing and working with the mind of the patient will produce better long-term results than just treating patients as if they were all the same.  Perhaps one way to think about the concept of knowing the mind of your patient is to look at how conversations between friends develop.  In a simplistic view, new or casual acquaintances chit-chat about issues like the weather because they have limited mutual experiences and a shallow depth of trust, but old friends have many things to say to each other based on a multitude of common experiences and on a much deeper level.  It’s the same with your patients.

 

Know the mind of your patients and get to YES by understanding the importance of trust in long-term relationship development.  The use of an effective strategy that manages the development of trust in a way that leads your patients to make personal commitments to their health care will serve you well.  YES just doesn’t happen – it’s managed.

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