Are you tired of missed visits, MIA patients, and patient dropouts?
Do you find yourself spending more on marketing and promotions, but your schedule still isn’t full?
Do you even feel like it’s hard to get patients to do what they’re supposed to?
If you said yes to any of these, let’s talk about your ‘Visits Kept Per Week‘ metric.
This is one of the most important metrics you should be tracking.
Visits Kept Per Week also play an essential part in Cancellation Prevention
Visits Kept Per Week (VKPW) is measured per patient and can also be averaged across your entire current patient list.
VKPW represents how well patients adhere to their weekly prescribed visits and is a crucial part of cancellation prevention.
And you want this percentage as close to 100% as possible because this means your patients are maintaining their weekly plan of care.
When patients maintain their weekly plan of care, they can:
- Reach their goals faster, which reduces prolonged care
- Cancel less because they don’t get bored with treatment (due to prolonged care)
- Are less likely to dropout or go MIA because they can see and feel results
- Achieve full recovery or meet their goals for care
- Are more willing to tell others how amazing your practice is and how it helped improve their quality of life
How to increase a patient’s willingness to adhere to their weekly plan of care:
- Develop a relationship and trust when they call to schedule the initial appointment
- Ensure the provider gets the patient’s agreement to the plan of care
- Schedule them for their full plan of care immediately after the initial appointment
- Use a Cancellation Prevention program
- Reschedule them when they call to cancel
- Good communication between the provider, patient, and your Patient Care Coordinators (PCCs)
- Maintain a call list and note patients who don’t reschedule
- Track and measure visits kept per week
Train your front desk team about cancellation prevention
Each team member is responsible for properly managing patient care, handling patient objections to scheduling, and ensuring patients arrive for their weekly visits. Following a cancellation program ensures patients don’t drop out of care.
Most patients want to be compliant, but sometimes life gets in the way, worries set in and objections to occur.
So, your PCCs must manage your patients throughout their plan of care and get them scheduled and arriving for their weekly prescribed visits.
Here are a few things to consider:
- When patients cancel an appointment and do not make it up in the same week, they’re not meeting their prescribed visits.
- A patient who misses their weekly prescribed visits is more likely to have slower or non-existent recovery from their injury or illness.
- When their recovery is slower, patients are more likely to become dissatisfied and drop out of care.
- Patients who drop out don’t achieve full recovery.
- And a patient who doesn’t achieve full recovery will lose trust in your practice.
- They won’t reach out again if care is needed in the future.
- And they won’t tell their friends and family that you were able to help them.
- And worse yet, their health problem is likely to get worse.
Your entire team must ensure all patients are managed well and have the best chance of achieving their goals.
To achieve this, the front office team must be well-trained in schedule control, patient management, and objection handling. This results in effective cancellation prevention.
If you’re:
- struggling with patients who aren’t maintaining their weekly prescribed visits
- have patients who are dropping out of care or going MIA
- dealing with lost new patients or same-day cancels and no-shows
The Front Office GURU Training Academy can help by teaching your front office staff how to control the conversation with patients, build trust, develop lasting relationships, schedule the plan of care, and be well-versed in cancellation prevention and patient no-shows.
With this virtual training platform, you’ll have everything you need to train your new hires and longtime team members.
Click HERE to learn more about The Front Office GURU Training Academy®.
I look forward to having you and your team join my front office family.
Wishing you the best, today and always,
Dee
