Chiropractors are always asking for advice on how to get family members to come in with their new patients after they've signed up for care. Certainly, there are several ways you could accomplish this, but wouldn't it be better if you just got the family enrolled from the beginning?

Wouldn't getting the family first be more effective and exciting? It's easy to accomplish this goal when you make the "family focus" a cornerstone of every system in your practice, from your office communication to your marketing materials to your financial systems.

Your marketing system and patient education literature should communicate why every member of a patient's family should be under chiropractic care. If your marketing system does not have this as part of its foundation, then it's time to change your strategy. (The Family Practice marketing system offers the "Chiropractic Mothers' Morning Out" and "Human Potential" programs, two pieces that can immediately be put in place to bridge this type of communication with your community.)

Your referral system also needs to have families as its target audience. It should communicate the lifetime chiropractic message to people of all ages and levels of health. One way to create and communicate the lifetime value of chiropractic is to have your referral and marketing systems focus on "the people" in your community not their "conditions."

For many chiropractors, this is a massive shift in thinking that will alter the way they approach referrals, and execute their internal and external marketing campaigns. Almost everywhere you look today, educational material focuses mainly on symptoms. However, the more effective message is one that will zero in on how people of all ages and health backgrounds can benefit from chiropractic through every stage of growth and development.

In addition, all of your communication systems should target families.

One great question you or your C.A. should always ask your patients is whether or not they are scheduling an individual or a family appointment. This query will immediately establish that you are a family practice chiropractor. You should follow it up by asking whether the appointment is for a wellness visit or for a specific health problem. This conveys to your patients that your practice is not just concerned with backaches (or symptom treatment), but is about something much larger -- the generation of optimum health through holistic, drug-free health care.

Granted, you will always have some patients who prefer to participate without their families, but when you have the systems and strategies in place to support multi-member care in your practice, your patients will be more likely to start bringing their families with them right from the beginning.

It's exciting when we hear that our Family Practice D.C.s are attracting up to five new families at a time, rather than enrolling just two or three new individual patients, although both are beneficial. Can you imagine the type of impact that this sort of focus could have on your practice?

Implement the systems and procedures that will support you in a family-oriented focus. Make sure you display "family" -- pictures, artwork, photos -- everywhere in your practice to reinforce this message.

Remember, families can and should come first. Bring family lifetime chiropractic consciousness into your into your marketing, communication and referral systems and see how it will influence the quality and commitment of the kinds of people who seek your care.

More importantly, when you've aligned your practice systems with this type of vision, you've made a choice that's in line with your chiropractic truth.