If it’s not a no, it’s a maybe.

I’ve been watching the trends in patient-booking-behaviour for 15 years. It’s always fascinated me how people make decisions, when they ask for help and what their barriers are to follow through. I’ve had many months of frustration, feeling like I cared about people’s health more than they did or that people were too disorganized to really improve their own health. 

At various points of my clinic, which has seen over 30,000 patients and now has 6 doctors, I’ve created systems of managing new patient leads, based on the observed culture of booking behaviour. We’ve had seasons where nobody emailed and everyone called (pre 2015 or so), where everyone emailed and nobody called (up until present day), where people called at all hours and were shocked nobody picked up (March 2020 to sometime in 2022) and where people happily booked online even if they never talked to another person. 

The current “era” of booking behaviour, and the adjustments we’ve made, are based on my observations that everybody in the world’s phone is on silent AND people want to talk to a human for purchases over $300. 

We were having a lot of people reach out and figuratively ghost us. 

I was cynical at first about these wannabe patients. Did they really have what it took to change if they dropped off the face of the earth? It was only after observing that MANY of them were coming out of the woodwork 2-3 months later, that they needed more support than we were giving them. 

I was feeling well rested, like a leader and had put on my compassion hat, I could see that patients desperately wanted to get better and fix their very chaotic lives, but they also couldn’t get out of their own way long enough to call us back. They had flickers of hope when they submitted their inquiries or emailed the office, but it was quickly squashed when the realities of answering the phone set in. 

I want people to reach their potential. Often, when they reach out, they are not at their full potential. They are grasping at straws, over-caffinating and shoving a fast-food wrap in their mouth. They aren’t operating at their full potential, which means if we want to help them, we might have to meet them where they and their silent cell phones are. 

2 months ago, we implemented a “if it’s not no it’s a maybe” mentality to chase new patients. Rather than giving up on them if they don’t call us back, we literally chase them until they tell us to go away. It’s a drain on staff resources, but it has made our team happier reaching back out to prospective patients, and it’s capturing more of the “ghosted” people that we were losing if we gave up on them months earlier. 

It’s not a perfect system, but is worth mentioning in the era of silent phones, distracted patients and an economic climate that makes every Google dollar slightly more painful. 

Once you get that person in front of you, you have so much potential to help them calm their life down and practice self-care. If we don’t chase them to book that first appointment after they put their hand up asking for help, we never get that chance.