Patient follow-up
A planned call or message to a patient after a consultation or first enquiry, while the decision is still open. The aim is to bring the conversation back to the next step, not just to check in.
≈ follow-up · follow-ups · follow up · follow-up call
What follow-up is and why it decides the outcome
Many patients do not decide on the spot. They leave the consultation to think it over, receive a treatment plan, ask about the price on a messaging app and then go quiet. Follow-up is a planned return to that patient: a call, a message, an answer to their question.
Clinics often assume that if someone is interested, they will call back themselves. In practice, the patient puts it off, gets distracted or goes wherever someone spoke to them a second time. Without follow-up, the clinic pays for the enquiry and the consultation, and the patient ends up with a competitor.
How to set it up and check it
Every patient with an open decision needs a next-contact date and an owner in the CRM. The check is simple: open the list of patients who had a consultation but have not paid, and see how many have no next step. The second figure is the share of followed-up patients who then booked or paid, out of all patients followed up.
Common mistakes.
- One call, no answer, case closed.
- A generic 'Are you still thinking about it?' instead of a concrete reason: an answer to their question, a free slot with the doctor, a clarification on the stages of the plan.
- The contact date lives in someone's head, not in the system.
- Pushing and rushing, until the patient stops picking up.
What to do: agree the follow-up during the consultation ('When would suit you for us to get in touch?'), log the date in the CRM, prepare a reason for every contact, and decide in advance after how many attempts a patient moves to 'on hold'. You can see how I set this up in a clinic on the services page.