As doctors / Medipreneurs we come across many patients / potential
customers each day. But they all are not becoming our regular patients for the
entire lifetime. There may be many reasons for a patient to change their
consulting doctor / hospital. The normal doctors are not bothered of such people
who wander and do ‘doctor shopping’ (constantly jumping from one doctor to
another). It is a good practice, NOT to be disheartened to note the fact that a
patient whom we treated with so much effort and sincerity doesn’t come back to
us anymore. BUT, it’s always good to learn form the mistakes. Though we need
not go behind / wait /brood over the patients who left us, we can always
‘Remember the Lesson and Forget the Mistake’
Objection Diary: We should keep a diary (or digital note pad in your
mobile / laptop) and note down the points / reasons for which people leave us.
When a patient raises an objection to the service / treatment we offer, we can
note it down in the diary and reflect on these points once in a month. There may
be points like ‘medicines are too costly’, ‘medicines did not give the expected
results’, ‘doctor is not available when we came to clinic more than once’ ‘too
much waiting time’, ‘no parking facility,’ ‘there is no appointment facility’,
‘medicines have a distaste’, ‘too much of medicines’ …. …… list goes on.
Many at times, we may have to guess these out of our intuitive thinking,
because most of them don’t come back to tell the reason why they don’t prefer
us. When we provide specific treatments protocols … like may be for hair fall,
infertility or backpain… they may also have objections regarding the general
management measures which we have advised or diet/ exercise regimen. If
more than three persons is telling out a same objection for a particular medicine,
for example the medicine has a bad odor / taste, we better rework on the
prescription to add in a better medicine, instead of the old one.
Maintaining an objection diary will always help us in getting ready made
‘to-do’ list to work on our profession in a daily basis. Even our pharmacist/
front office staff, also will have points to add in this objection diary. At the
beginning or end of every month, if we can check this list and take necessary
actions to correct / edit / update / ignore the mistakes/ objections, in course of
time you will have less of objections and you will grow will grow your practice
in a short while.
Thereby overruling objections for the benefit of our clinical practice !
Launch your Graphy