Chiropractors: You Must Be On Time

The more patients you have who are on time, the more YOU have value for your time and for what you provide. It’s a direct correlation!

If you have a bunch of patients walking in late or missing their appointments, or showing up without an appointment, you may need to re-evaluate how you value your own time. Here are three things you can do to

Let Your Team Handle It

You must allow your team to step up, protect you and your time. You can implement a process or setup guidelines on how to handle patients who are late, but you must allow them to step up for you and be the gatekeeper.

No Exceptions

Figure out what you are comfortable with… 15 minutes late… 30 minutes late? What constitutes being late in your office? You cannot make an exception based on WHO the patient is. That would be unfair. But you CAN have a grace period, or have a handful of situations for which you could make that exception. We all have traffic, we all have work, we all have kids or family… and most of us work around those. Make sure your team doesn’t allow an exception tardiness become a habit.

Don’t Be Late to Your Patients

The number ONE complaint I get from the CA’s I work with, is that the doctor is always running behind, and keeps patients waiting. If you ask your patients to respect and value your time, you in-turn have to be respectful of their time as well. The last thing a patient wants is to wait for more than 5 minutes over their appointed time. If you are chit-chatting about your weekend plans with the last patient, or carrying on seemingly unaware of who’s waiting to be seen, can cause a lot of animosity in the patient’s subconscious.