If you are not selling elective and wellness services well by now…
you need to start soon. Practices that will grow into the future will not only offer traditional “therapy” services but elective and wellness services, and sell them well. Services such as…
- Stress Relief
- Fitness
- Performance Enhancement
- Massage
- Weight-Loss
- 830laser
- Yoga
- and more…
Now don’t get me wrong, I love therapy and treating patients. That’s my calling and I will never stop. But offering elective/wellness services doesn’t mean I’m somehow being disloyal to my calling. It means I want to make a greater difference in the lives of people–more than healing ailments alone–more than doing merely what insurances pay for. For example, I love regularly talking to my patients for 30-minutes or more about how to improve their running speed even though they might be there for knee pain. In the past, I would talk to them and give away my time (forsaking my documentation) but never bill it–because what would I bill it under? The knowledge I impart has great value but insurances will not pay for such a thing because it’s not considered “medically necessary”. Running, hiking, and the like is not considered medically necessary and payable. All the while, the patient values it and greatly appreciates it. The only difference now is I charge for it under my elective service as “Performance Enhancement” to the patient (since insurance doesn’t cover it).
Not only do I make money, with something I went to school for and worked hard to learn, but patients value my time and expertise even more than before…go figure.
(On a side-note… another benefit to selling wellness/elective services is you begin to rely less on physician referrals. Once you start promoting performance enhancement, massage, yoga, etcetera, you will start getting more of the community seeking you out. Most people don’t know exactly what physical therapy is so they are not sure if they even want it. But they certainly know what yoga is, and they definitely want it! So you begin to have a greater net, so to speak, by which to land more prospects and convert them into your therapy.)
Most all of my elective services not only get patients healing faster and improve outcomes but also helps me look at the whole person and make greater changes in their life–and the way THEY want to live it, not how the insurance company dictates.
“Want a Piece of Chicken?”
One of the best ways to introduce these services to patients is to entice them with a taste of it. Kinda like the way they do it at the mall. “Do you want to try our chicken teriyaki?” (the little girl says while offering a piece of chicken on a toothpick lol 🙂
This works, and works well!
The way we do it is when we are running late and we are at the brink of making a patient wait. Instead of having the patient wait in the lobby, one of our staff will take them back and give them a “taste” of our chair massage, check their body-fat, do a laser treatment, etcetera so the patient doesn’t feel like they are waiting. This method kills two birds with one stone. The patient is now introduced to one of our elective services and we don’t make them wait. (Patients HATE waiting). And that is usually when patients buy a package of services. It’s a win-win!
“It’s not the biggest, strongest, or most intelligent practices that survive and grow, but the one’s most adaptable to change.” -James Ko, PT
P.S. Here are some preliminaries you MUST follow:
- Make a menu. If it’s not written, it doesn’t exist. You are not going to sell anything that’s not on a menu.
- Price out your services with a single session cost…but then never plan on selling session by session. Rather, sell “packages”. For example, create a Six-Pack or Ten-Pack at a discount. They sell much better!
- Have a flyer available in your lobby that spells out the top 3 features and top 3 benefits of your services.
BEWARE: Some practices are breaking the law by how they are selling cash services. Make sure you know your state board laws (as well as Medicare laws) and interpret them correctly. We thoroughly cover this at the Private Practice Secrets course.
It’s your life. How do you want to live it? We can help. www.IndeFree.com