Why Patients Don’t Schedule Surgery

By Karen Zupko

There are dozens of reasons why patients seen in consultation do not schedule surgery. Let's look at five common reasons. Many plastic surgeons neglect to track the all-important Patient Acceptance Rate (PAR) – both overall and particularly by procedure. PAR information definitively allows you to examine your consultation processes and make adjustments that will improve the number of patients who agree to accept the solutions you propose. We discuss these and how to get patients to "yes" at our 2006 Taking Your Practice to the Next Level course.

1. The Prospective Patient Wanted Wal-Mart, not Nordstrom.

Sometimes external marketing efforts backfire and result in a high volume of phone calls and appointments from people who are not appropriate for your practice. For example, many of these prospective patients choose a surgeon based solely on price. It is a total mismatch from the start. The patient needs financing and you don’t offer it; they are looking for a "deal" and your fees are set at premium levels.

2. The patient was from Venus, you are from Mars, and the staff are on Saturn.

From the start, you, your staff and the prospective patient all failed to make a personal and meaningful connection. Think back a few days – the consultation started almost an hour late, was rushed, and there was no real time to build a relationship or gain trust. The patient left the consultation wanting more time, additional procedure information, or help sorting through the surgical options. No one identified what motivated the patient, what the timetable for the procedure was, or the budget.

Never confuse seeing large numbers of patients with being successful. In fact, in some cosmetic practices, the schedule is tightly engineered to see exactly the right mix of consultation patients based on the known PAR.

3. Time Waits for No One – Including Plastic Surgeons

It is fundamentally a bad idea to irritate patients from the start. We find that ignoring the value of the patient’s time is common. If someone waits six weeks to see you, waits an hour beyond their scheduled appointment time in the beautifully-appointed reception room, then heads to the exam room for another 30 minute wait, feels rushed during the consultation and then has to cool her heels to see the patient coordinator while the coordinator rushes around printing fee quotes – is it any wonder the patient doesn’t schedule? Many times, we observe that these patients leave angrily without the scheduling or fee information. Our strategic scheduling recommendations can help you improve your scheduling.

4. Would Tiffany or The Ritz Hire Your Patient Coordinator?

Handling the duties of patient counseling in a mature plastic surgery practice requires skill and sophistication – not clerical ability. Assessing a prospective patient’s needs, quoting fees, overcoming objections, establishing a value proposition, and offering personalized service extras are not skills that everyone has. Most plastic surgeons would benefit by envisioning their patient coordinator as a "concierge" at The Ritz who is accustomed to dealing with high-end service requests. Often, patient coordinators lack the finesse the position requires. Sometimes prospective patients are turned off by your coordinator’s insistence that "this is the way the doctor does it", inferring that the needs and wants of the customer are of secondary importance.

KZA offers training that can make a difference.

5. Nobody Followed Up

Many prospective surgical patients leave your office saying "I want to think about it", and they do. Then they have to get beyond their own inertia and distractions of their daily lives. Before they left your office, the patient coordinator did not pre-arrange a time or a reason for the follow-up call. As a result, making the follow-up call is an experience dreaded and avoided by the patient coordinator. In this scenario, you never know why the patient did not book.

Pre-arranged follow-up with the prospective patient is a key to success. Skilled patient coordinators know this re-positions the call from one of "do you want to schedule?" to a service-oriented step with permission from the patient to call, based on the patient’s articulated timing needs. These techniques are demonstrated in our workshops.