Mega Trends

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

About four decades ago there was a book written entitled Megatrends. It was written by John Naisbitt and he predicted the major trends that were going to happen in the United States in the next years and decades.

Now, it's been 40 years and we look at his trends and his ideas, and they were almost all correct. He had one chapter named Electronic Cottaging, and Electronic Cottaging meant that people were going to stay home and not go to buildings to go to work downtown, but were going to stay home and do their work out of their home with the use of electronics like computers and things like that.

Now, that was a bold prediction because then the internet wasn't really set up like it was. You were paying for time by the minute on the internet, and facts weren't that reliable, and people wondered whether it was going to be true, but it became true and you're good witness to that. Then the fact that you right now during this COVID-19 time are probably doing most of your work from home, or at least by yourself in an office, so you're Electronic Cottaging.

The other chapter that struck me on that book was entitled, High Tech, High Touch. He said people are going to go high tech, but they're going to realize after a while, we got to go high tech and high touch both to maintain our customers. He said, "We'll go high tech, which the therapists have done, and then you're going to have to go high touch." My question for you is this, you've done a good job going high tech, you're seeing everybody online now, tele-mental health, but what did you do to improve your high touch now that you went high tech?"

There are some things I would suggest you do, but you could pick out your own things to do as far as high touch is concerned. One of the things you could do, just a simple example is you could call the patient between the first and second visit and say-- Of course with their approval, and say, "I would like you to do one other thing, I wanted to call you, would you start journaling?" You'd explain to them how to journal. That's one thing you could do. Another thing you could do is you could say, "Let's have our first meeting in person." You could do the first meeting in person, and then the rest you could do high tech by tele-mental health.

Those are just some examples, but here's what's important from this message. When you've gone high tech like you have, you have to find out some things and do some things to go high touch to maintain your patients and maintain good patient compliance.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.