These tips come from the experience of doctors who have already been successfully working in their communities. With these tips, your meetings and efforts are more likely to be successful. We provide an important part of a comprehensive solution, but how we communicate it will determine whether it is accepted or rejected.

1. Work as a team. A team of two tends to be most effective. Three chiropractors in any one meeting can feel like a crowd or overwhelm the others, while having just one can appear to be serving only himself. You are not there to get a new job, and you don’t want that to even be a perception. You represent chiropractic physicians in your community that can provide a great service to hospital patients and help answer the hospital’s needs.
2. Offer help not a mandate. Approach the meeting as offering help to the hospital to meet a new mandate involving services or providers that they may not be familiar with. Don’t go in telling them what they have to do or the discussion could quickly become defensive.
3. Start small if needed. Hospitals are more likely to be looking for the simplest, easiest solution, not the biggest change they could possible make to serve their patients best. Allow room in the discussion for the hospital to consider various options, but look for a way to at least get a collaborative relationship started that could develop into much more in the future.
4. Focus on spine pain and NMS conditions. The Joint Commission standard is all about pain, so focus on helping the spine and NMS pain cases we know they need help with and we are the experts at managing.
5. Communicate the support for non-drug treatment options for pain, but emphasize chiropractic. Mention guidelines and recommendations for treating pain first with a variety of non-drug treatment options like heat/ice, massage, physiotherapies, acupuncture, rehab exercise, etc. We recognize the value of these methods and provide many as appropriate within our clinics. However, there are many practical and evidence-based reasons to use chiropractic physicians to manage this care: as physicians we don’t need referrals, can diagnose, test, treat, refer. There is better chiropractic coverage than many other non-drug treatments. There is easier access to chiropractic care than others. We are familiar with many of these options and can refer to them if we don’t provide them…Note that the only first-line non-drug treatment option in the Cleveland Clinic’s spinecare path is spinal manipulation, which has the strongest evidence.
6. Encourage a hospital champion for the issue. Complex organizations often need someone providing a push from the inside for successful changes. If you can find someone at the hospital to take the lead and champion more chiropractic collaboration, work closely with them to give them the support they need to make changes.
7. Follow up. Nothing happens in one visit or speaking with one person. Regularly follow up and provide additional helpful information when possible.
8. It’s all about the patients. We know we can deliver better quality care, that’s more cost effective, safer, and results in better patient satisfaction. The changing model of health care is emphasizing these qualities, so we can help hospitals achieve other goals all for the greater good of the patient.