This is a quick statement of sales. In healthcare, we are preprogrammed by administration, or bosses, to take your money. It doesn’t always sound this sinister, but it may sound like one of the following:
- Make sure that we don’t have a waitlist. We don’t want people to have to wait to get in for an appointment. This sounds very altruistic, but what we could hear if we fine tune our frequency is: don’t let this patient get better over time or make sure that this patient doesn’t hang up and go somewhere else.
- If you have something else to work on, make sure that the patient is completely satisfied with their stay. This could also mean that you haven’t treated the patient for enough visits to make as much money from the patient as the doctor has enabled us to make. For instance, if the prescription says 3x/week for 4 weeks, but you are better after 3-5 visits, then any visit not seen up to 12 is considered loss of potential revenue.
- There is nothing wrong with making patients feel good in order to get them to do what we want them to do. I hear: modalities are easy to apply and we can get paid to do them so…why not?
- “A good salesperson works hard to ensure the answers are all just different shades of ‘yes’”
If you want something, don’t take no for an answer. As much as I agree with this, I also have to disagree with this. You have to be willing to establish how important it is to “sell” your wares. For instance, regarding physical therapy that “ware” that we are selling is the new evaluation. It pays the most and leads to many additional visits. We have to ask ourselves if we are willing to sacrifice and what are we willing to sacrifice in order to get that new evaluation? Are we willing to sacrifice a lunch break? Are we willing to pay our employees overtime (most companies have gotten around this by going salary)? Is the employee willing to stay late? Are we wiling to sacrifice patient care by double booking a patient? We have to establish our priorities, so sometimes it is okay to say no if it doesn’t “make the boat go faster”. Again, Google this phrase…it’s that important.
This was a quickie, but still needs to be said.
Excerpts taken from:
Quatre T. WHY THEY BUY: Because They Cannot Say No. Impact: Private Practice Section of the American Physical Therapy Association. 2016;May:13