How to Get Patient Referrals

Many could argue that when you have excellent results, no further promotion is necessary as one’s products “speak for themselves”. While having excellent results is indeed a great form of promotion, it is certainly not the only thing one needs to do.

But let’s break it down further: having excellent results is not only composed of high technical skill and the application of it, but also having high people skills. That takes us to the next point: the excellent results not only come from your rehabilitation activities, but from your front desk activities, accounts activities, and factually, any activity in your practice that even remotely deals with patients.

How many times have you been very pleased with a product or service, but only until you received an incorrect invoice for services you knew nothing about? Or the customer service rep. missed several phone appointments with you in a row? Or the sales person never returned your call when all you needed was to ask a simple question or two? Were you still just as pleased with that product or service? Were you still willing to recommend that product or service to your friends and family?

Most likely you were not.

I had a client who hired an additional front desk person due to expansion. Soon after this new hire, his expansion turned to contraction, and his patients were not referring friends and family either. He couldn’t put his finger on it until one day he had called into the office and that same new front desk person didn’t recognize his voice; as such, he was able to learn of their indifference, bad manners and general carelessness, towards callers and that patients were being chased away by all this! When the necessary changes were made, lo and behold, expansion started once again.

My point – to get patient referrals, you need to look at the entire experience a patient may have in your practice, from start to finish, and from every angle.