The Savvy Practitioner will teach you how to develop your niche, showcase your unique offering, leverage your time more profitably, and deliver on your ultimate goal of maximizing your impact - and your income.
Today we're talking about how to evolve your practice to align with the needs of your patients by moving from a transactional to a transformational care delivery model. We’ll reveal how moving to a transformational model not only improves patient outcomes but also ensures the long-term profitability of your practice.
Key Takeaways
Patient Expectations Are Changing
Practitioners are taught there is only one way to practice: The patient comes in and we focus on their primary concern. We send them home and then they come back and we're like, OK, great, we fixed it. Thanks so much. See you next year.
But today, many patients are actually looking for a long-standing transformation in their health, and not just a “natural” version of what they are receiving in the traditional health care system. People don't want a health vendor, they want a health partner. They want someone who knows them and is vested in keeping them healthy.
The ACTION Framework
To help practitioners move away from the transactional model of health care delivery towards a transformation model, we developed a framework we call the ACTION Framework. ACTION is an acronym just to help us remember what each step looks like.
- A: Alignment
We need strong alignment in terms of the expertise of the practitioner and the patient - and to also make sure there is a good melding in terms of personalities. It can be really difficult to engage in transformational care when there isn't a good alignment.
- C: Communication
Once we've done that initial intake appointment, we create a document, a roadmap, that explains to the patient where we are going with their care. They understand why there are touchpoints - like testing for example - along their care journey and there's an understanding of the timeline it's going to take for them to get better.
- T: Traction
Traction is a tool that helps to establish engagement between appointments. It’s about creating accountability between appointments to ensure the patient is doing their “homework”. In some cases, practitioners will hire a health coach, someone who bills out at a lesser rate per hour, to help establish traction or make use of online tools to keep their patients on track.
- I: Investigation
Patients are looking for these opportunities to look at their health in a different way. So engage the patient in their own health journey by using quizzes and therapeutic testing. Having objective measures of a patient’s health status at the beginning and then throughout their journey is critical towards outcome.
- O: Others
Which other practitioners are part of the patient’s therapeutic team? When you have a strong area of expertise that you establish at the beginning, one of the things that we look to do is to stay in our “wheelhouse”. It helps to reinforce your authority and confirms for that patient that as a practitioner, you have their best interests at heart. Part of the transformational journey means we're bringing other professionals to the table.
- N: Next
Every time we have contact with the patient we must reiterate why we are seeing them today and where we are going next, so that we are constantly reinforcing the context of each of the steps along the journey.
We are emerging from the transactional model of care that is inherently familiar to our patients into something new, so we really need to continue to remind them why they are here now and where we are going next.
Diversify Your Offering
Transformational care should always be a core offering within our practice. However, we can also have smaller offerings. The more niche we are, the more innovative we can be and the more we can leverage technology to deliver these smaller offerings. We can start to create these big transformational programs for people who want all the bells and whistles, and we can start to create a streamlined version of the offer for people who don't need as many touchpoints.
Profitability & Patient Outcomes
In most practices are built in such a way that interactions with a patient start to become profitable after the fourth appointment. But if you are delivering only a transactional experience for each of these new patients, most will never make it past appointment four, the point where your practice becomes profitable. That means that not only are we not getting effective outcomes for those patients, but we're missing out on the most profitable element of our relationship together.
Key Quotes
“If we're going to do these bio-psycho-social intakes, then we need to make sure that we are creating a care delivery framework for patients that addresses each of these elements within their patient journey. The “journey” part is really key because if people don't know where they're going, they tend to not stay the course. If we show up to do a hike in the woods and we have no map and we don’t know how long we are hiking for, we might get a little uneasy. On the other hand, if we say this is a two-kilometre hike and you can expect to see X, Y and Z, we all understand what we're walking into. We might even enjoy the hike”. Dr Meghan Walker
“There's a twofold benefit to evolving your care delivery model from transactional to the transformational model. First, we're almost always going to get better patient outcomes. Secondly, we get to benefit from the long revenue of that relationship over the longer term”. Dr Meghan Walker
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The opinions expressed in this Nutramedica program are those of the guests and contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Nutritional Fundamentals For Health Inc.
This video is intended for licensed or registered health professionals and students of health professions only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Information contained in these programs is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
