Are you converting 90% of your report of findings into a care plan?
If not I would highly recommend you keep reading as what is contained in this article may be the key to improving your conversion by better understanding your patient's personalities and learning styles.
Every patient is unique.
This is why scripts can be difficult.
Every script will not work for every person because every person has a unique personality and learning style.
The better you can understand personality types and learning styles the better you will be able to communicate with each individual person.
This is why it’s better to focus on milestones rather than scripts in your consultation, exam, and report of findings.
Understanding that you need to hit certain points with every patient is important not necessarily saying the same words or saying them in the same order with every patient.
For example, here are the 7 consultation milestones that we recommend to our clients:
When you hit these milestones during the consultation you are almost guaranteed to have the patient want to move on to the next step. A solid consultation sets up a strong exam and an effective report of findings.
But it’s also important to be able to interact with different patients differently. This is why it’s so important to understand the 4 basic personality types.
There are 4 main types of personalities that can be described with the DISC acronym:
This of course is a simplistic view as every person is a little bit different but it is useful to understand that there are these 4 main types of personalities.
But it’s also important to understand that personalities do change over time and so you personally are not pigeonholed into one personality type because personality isn’t permanent and can adapt over time based on experiences or environment.
Let’s take a look at these 4 basic personality types in more detail.
A person primarily in this DiSC quadrant places emphasis on accomplishing results and “seeing the big picture.” They are confident, sometimes blunt, outspoken, and demanding.
A person in this DiSC quadrant places emphasis on influencing or persuading others. They tend to be enthusiastic, optimistic, open, trusting, and energetic.
A person in this DiSC quadrant places emphasis on cooperation, sincerity, loyalty, and dependability. They tend to have calm, deliberate dispositions and don’t like to be rushed.
A person in this DiSC quadrant places emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise, and competency. They enjoy their independence, demand the details, and often fear being wrong. This is the analytical personality.
In a classic episode of the Upper Cervical Marketing Podcast, Dr. Jeff Scholten and I discussed how he applies this concept in his practice. Here are some paraphrased quotes from that conversation:
“As an example, when I do my report of findings, I start out by asking:
“If a zero is I’ve already talked too much and a ten is teach me everything you know, how much do you want to know about what’s going on with yourself?”
This is an absolutely fantastic question to determine the personality type of the person. In general, a high D or a high I will not want very much detail. The high S and definitely the high C will want lots of detail.
Their answer will either be:
“I don’t need to know much, tell me the basics.”
“Tell me everything.”
“Based on their answer I will try to zone in on that.
And I will tell them:
“If I tell you too much, try to glaze your eyes over and I’ll try to pick up on the non-verbal.”
“It’s about matching the patient’s personality.”
Here Dr. Scholten focuses in on serving the patient by communicating with them in a way that is going to help them understand best. He goes on to describe what you can learn from how the new patient paperwork is completed as well.
“It’s so key to understand patients’ personality types. Even a set of paperwork that’s filled out by hand can help you identify what their personality style is. Are they writing really, really quickly? Are they missing information? Or is their handwriting completely meticulous?
When you have somebody who has all this information on this one piece of paper with meticulous handwriting, this suggests they are analytical (high C). They will likely want the small details. If somebody has crossed three things out and left things blank, you probably don’t need to tell them much of anything. Just get them in and get them out (high D). The more you talk the less likely they are to start care because you’re annoying them. So, let’s not annoy people. Let’s not be weird.”
“The key is your ability to match other people’s social styles and move in between social styles effortlessly. The more you can do that and match the type of person you’re interacting with in the moment the more successful you will be at giving that person a great experience.
And that’s something that I think we forget as we’re working so hard to make the patient understand what we want to share with them. We have it backward. We need to share with them what they want to understand.”
Along with understanding personality types, it’s also important to understand different learning styles. In episode 52 of the podcast, I discussed the importance of understanding your patients learning styles with Dr. Andy Gibson.
Dr. Gibson has a Masters in Education and has been able to apply much of what he learned in his communication with patients.
Let’s take a look at the different learning styles and how to utilize them when communicating with patients.
There are 7 ways that human beings learn information.
These 7 learning styles are:
According to recent research visual learners are the largest group. This is important for you to understand when working with new patients to communicate ideas and understanding related to upper cervical care.
When conducting your report of findings with new patients the more effectively you can utilize visual demonstrations of the upper cervical misalignment the better.
One of the best ways to connect with those visual learners while at the same time utilizing the latest technology is with Dr. Kerry Johnson’s My Misalignment Software https://mymisalignment.com/. Dr. Johnson has developed software that can actually create an animation of the patient’s specific misalignment and how your precise upper cervical technique will go about correcting it.
It’s a very innovative software and it’s a great way to communicate upper cervical during your report of findings. The software can also be a very effective tool for a patient to communicate what’s going on with them to their spouse if they are not at the report.
But you also want to keep in mind the other learning styles.
We tend to default to our own learning style when presenting information so it’s important for you to understand what your learning style is so you know your tendencies. If you don’t already know your learning style you can take this learning style quiz.
If you combine an understanding of the 7 learning styles with the personality types you can develop a custom consultation, exam, and report of findings that will effectively communicate with all people who come into your practice and convert 90% of your new patients into active practice members.
