There’s a hole on your schedule this afternoon. Two on Thursday. Nobody cancelled. Nobody’s mad. They just aren’t there.
Meanwhile your EHR has every patient you’d need to fill every one of those holes for the rest of the year. Hundreds of them. Patients who got results on your table and liked you. You already paid to get them in the door.
They haven’t heard from you since their last visit.
So let’s ask the question straight. Who in your clinic owns reaching them?
Not who cares about it. Who owns it. Whose Tuesday is it.
If you paused there, that’s the answer. And it’s the same answer in almost every clinic I’ve worked with in fifteen years. Nobody. The doc means to. The CA has forty other jobs. The list sits in the EHR while you pay somebody else to go find strangers.
Why do chiropractic patient follow-ups keep falling through?
Because the clinic isn’t short on patients. It’s short on somebody reaching the ones already there.
The patient who slipped off eight months ago isn’t gone. They got busy, they feel a little awkward about it, and they’re waiting on a reason. One real email from your office is that reason. But nobody sends it, because it’s nobody’s job.
That’s the actual shape of it. Not a marketing problem. Not a belief problem. An ownership problem. (Most of them left through the feeling-better exit, not because chiropractic stopped working.)
Try this: Pull today’s schedule and look at the holes. For each one, ask if that patient is even gone, or just sitting in your EHR, unreached.
Why do reactivation systems in chiropractic clinics quietly stop working?
They don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they’re an extra.
Three weeks of newsletters, then the CA is out and it stops. A welcome campaign half built and never loaded. A reactivation list pulled once and back in the drawer by week nine. Nobody decides to stop. It just stops. Same reason patient drop-off never shows up on your books either. Nothing invoices you when the list goes quiet, so nothing forces anyone to watch it.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s a staffing reality. Reaching a quiet list is real work, and real work needs a name attached to it every week, not a good intention attached to it once.
Try this: Name the last system that started strong in your clinic and quietly died. A newsletter, a welcome sequence, a reactivation push. Whichever one you thought of first never had an owner.
Who should own patient follow-up in a chiropractic clinic?
Whoever’s name is on it every single week, not whoever has time for it that week.
Follow-up that survives looks the same in every clinic that has it. A specific person hears from your patients within days. Every Tuesday. Every new patient. Every quiet name on the list. And every month somebody actually reads the report and hands the front desk the names who are ready, while they’re still warm.
Not a dashboard. A person, and a job that’s theirs.
Try this: Ask out loud in your next team meeting: whose job is this? If the honest answer is nobody, you’ve found the fix. It isn’t more software. It’s an owner.
What This Means for You
- ✅ The patients to fill your schedule are already in your EHR
- ✅ The reason they're not on it is nobody owns reaching them
- ✅ That's a staffing reality, not a character flaw
- ✅ Whoever can answer "whose Tuesday is it" owns the fix
Pro Tip: Give follow-up a name, not a checklist. A task on a to-do list gets skipped the first busy week. A task with somebody’s name attached to every Tuesday is the only version that survives month nine, whether that name belongs to your CA or to a team built to own it for you.
Inside CC with Nerissa: We Lost Dolly Today and I’m Saging the Whole House Over It
It’s Tuesday. After 5pm.
I just DoorDashed bourbon. There are support tickets open and a call I owe somebody. 🥃
And Dolly’s gone.
I was between calls when I saw it today. Immediately planned to sage the house tonight, because whatever demon took Dolly from us needs to be saged out of here.
Back up a little, I skipped last week. I rarely do that. I aim to miss one, maybe two a year, and I’ve sent well over a hundred of these by now. But I was sending so many Masterclass emails I decided the newsletter could sit one out.
Also we installed Jeremiah back at college for his second year. So maybe the break was my minor breakdown over that. LOL. Who cares. I’m back, and I hope you missed me as much as I missed you.
I didn’t even see his dorm room. 📦
His friends met him at the truck with carts. They emptied the whole thing, he hugged us bye, and he was gone. He already had plans and didn’t need us holding him up.
So yeah. He’s happy.
Anyway. This past few weeks have been a whirlwind.
I’ve met with a ton of new docs and learned how things are actually going in clinics across America. Three hours of calls today before the Dolly news hit.
Bruh. One doc booked a 15 minute call with me. Two hours later we were besties. I can’t wait to work with him. 🤝
There hasn’t been a practice I’ve met with yet that didn’t need Chiro Connect in their life.
That’s how I know what we’re doing has meaning. Not just another bullshit thing to sell to docs who are struggling.
Which brings me back to Dolly.
I grew up 90 minutes from where she grew up.
As a business woman from Appalachia, she was a powerhouse. She used her fame and her money for good. She was an icon.
Being an Appalachian girl, a girl from nothing, a teen mom who worked so hard just to be a “regular person,” who worked so hard just to have something. Losing one of our own is a loss we’ll always carry.
We should all hope to be a little like Dolly. 🦋
We’ll all remember where we were the day we lost Dolly.
And just like that, life goes on. 🌄
What does a Chiro Connect newsletter actually include?
Every newsletter ends with a Week of Wellness, a simple daily calendar that gives patients something to check and use all week, and a reason to open the next email. Here’s the one that went out with this issue.
FAQ
What are chiropractic patient follow-ups?
Chiropractic patient follow-ups are the messages a practice sends to patients between visits, especially the ones who’ve gone quiet. That covers reactivation outreach to lapsed patients, regular newsletters to active ones, and welcome sequences for new ones. The list already exists in the EHR. Follow-up is just whether anyone reaches it.
Why don’t chiropractic patient follow-ups happen consistently?
Because they’re rarely anyone’s actual job. The doc means to send something. The CA already has forty other tasks. A newsletter runs three weeks and quietly stops. Follow-up dies from lack of ownership, not lack of intention.
Is patient follow-up a marketing problem or a staffing problem?
Staffing. The patients aren’t missing and the message isn’t hard to write. What’s missing is a person whose job it is to send it every week, whether that’s someone inside the clinic or a team hired to own it.
Who should be responsible for patient follow-up in a chiropractic practice?
Whoever’s name is attached to it every single week, not whoever happens to have time. Some clinics assign it to a CA as a standing task. Others hand it to a team that owns nothing else, so it never competes with the rest of the front desk’s day.
