Doctor Habits and Our Annual Subscription

If you’ve ever made a doctor’s appointment about a concern, only to have the concern disappear before your appointment, you’re not alone. Patients often have an improvement in their pain or symptoms between the moment they make the appointment with their doctor and the moment help arrives. By the time they walk into their doctor’s office, the memory of how bad they were feeling and how frustrated they were has lifted, along with how motivated they are to avoid the pain in the future.

They made the appointment ready to “do anything” to avoid the symptom again, only to fall back into their old patterns and habits when the acute phase is over. It’s hard to be motivated to prevent something in the future, and typically, patients will cross their fingers that it was a one-time experience, even though we know as their practitioners that it’s unlikely to be the case. 

One of the most common questions we get asked about The Confident Clinician premium membership is why we only offer an annual subscription. Our answer has to do with this same “no pain today” experience, and how hard it is to change our clinical habits as doctors.

Adding technology to our practice requires a bit of learning for a huge benefit. Onboarding at The Confident Clinician is a 15 to 30-minute “pain” that many doctors won’t prioritize when they don’t have an acute patient issue. We commonly have doctors join when they have an acute pain, such as 

• A patient who hasn’t improved with their usual strategies, and they don’t know what else to do. 
• A patient who has a secondary concern that falls outside the practitioner’s niche. 
• A patient who was booked with a concern that the doctor hasn’t seen in practice before (or in quite some time). 

Between these moments of pain, it’s hard to imagine giving up 30 minutes to learn how to use a new system. If we make it through these visits without support, we’re likely to fall back into our old habits, cross our fingers and hope we never see another patient with Lupus again. 

When we decided to use an annual-only approach to our membership, it offered our members benefits that may not be obvious. 

• It allows clinicians to recognize their return on investment over an entire year, even though most clinicians exceed their ROI by the end of the first two weeks of use. 
• It allows us to hire exceptional experts and gives clinicians the security that the entire year of content will remain updated and current for their use. 
• It allows for habit-adjustment for clinicians who have never had the type of support that The Confident Clinician offers. 

Opening a new tab beside your EMR, having a repository of resources and a community for support is a new and never-before-offered system for Naturopathic Doctors. By investing in the full year, we’re committing to knowledge base expansion and support while you’re committing to practicing a new habit of being supported. We are committed to the growth of our entire profession and deeply invested in our premium members. 

You can join The Confident Clinician with a premium membership here.