Listen to the podcast episode here: Are Meet and Greets Worth the Effort?
Episode Summary: In this episode, Phil and Marina discuss whether meet-and-greet events are truly worth the time and effort in a Direct Primary Care pediatric practice. They explain that while attendance can be unpredictable and not every family signs up immediately, these events play a crucial role in building trust, clarifying how the DPC model works, and establishing strong relationships from the start. Meet-and-greets provide an opportunity to answer questions about membership, pricing, insurance misconceptions, and access to care, while allowing families to determine whether the practice is the right fit for them. Rather than serving as a high-pressure sales tool, these gatherings are most effective when they are conversational, transparent, and relationship-focused. Ultimately, the hosts emphasize that DPC is built on long-term trust and alignment, and meet-and-greets are a valuable investment in creating a connected, well-matched patient community.
Welcome to DPC Pediatricians. We’re Dr. Phil Boucher and Dr. Marina Capella, two DPC Pediatricians who are on a mission to share our love of direct primary care with you.
Welcome everyone to another episode of DPC Pediatricians. Today, we’re going to talk about meet and greets and specifically kind of debate the question of whether meet and greets are worth the effort. There are definitely some mixed opinions out there in the DPC pediatric community about this question.
I would say probably from my experience, most pediatricians I know do some sort of screening process. And the meet and greet is one of those ways to kind of screen families to make sure that they’re a good fit for your practice and for your personality and for your style of practicing medicine. So Phil, start me out. Do you do meet and greets?
And if so, or if not, how do you justify that decision? Because it is a time suck.
It is a time suck. If I was in a fee-for-service practice and seeing 30 patients a day, I would say, yeah, I don’t think we do meet and greets because it takes so much time and takes away from all of those RVU producing processes that you could be doing. In DPC, it’s much more relationship-based.
So in general, I think it is smart to offer meet and greets to anybody that wants one. Because people are looking for reasons to do something else. And if you can give them a good reason, like you have a sparkling personality and you tell hilarious jokes and you get the problems that they have and can say, oh yeah, we have a lot of families that come to us because of X, Y, and Z. And here’s how we approach those things.
Whew.
they’re going to have that peace of mind. Okay. This was the right decision. And despite the fact that we have insurance, it makes sense for us to do this for X, Y, and Z. And so in general, I think that meet and greets are really important tool, especially with getting people that might not be as familiar with it off the fence and to help them work through that. No, like trust need kind of journey that patients are when they’re finding you, they find you on the website. I don’t know, is this a real thing? I’m going to call.
I’m going to look at their website. I’m going to figure out if it’s a real thing. Is this the right thing for me? Well, the FAQ all seems to make sense, but I’d really like to go in and make sure that this isn’t just some made-up sort of thing because maybe it sounds too good to be true,
and I want to make sure that they’re real people there and all those sorts of things. I also want to make sure that they get me and get where I’m coming from. And so I think those are reasons to do meet and greets and to offer meet and greets,
especially when you’re first starting out and you’re not busy. Like you have the time to do them. And I would even suggest that if you are starting out, that you would make it even more comfy. And if your office is great, great. But otherwise you might even like do the record scratch thing.
Like when you’re watching a show and there’s like a huge change and it’s like the record scratch. Yeah. do you want to just grab coffee? There’s a coffee shop nearby. That might be easier. Would you just like to meet and grab a coffee and talk through things?
People do not expect to get to have coffee with somebody that might be their doctor. And if you feel comfortable with that, that’s a great way to really set the tone of like, this is a relationship. You’re not just, okay, you’re here for a meeting. Great. What’s your date of birth? What’s your medical record number?
Those sorts of things. This is, Hey, let’s get coffee and see if we’re a good fit for each other.
Gotcha. So you do meet and greets for anyone who wants them, but kind of reading between the lines, not everybody necessarily wants them. And so some people just sign up and never have a meet and greet, right? What percent of the parents kind of enrolling in the last year or so have wanted meet and greets? I’m curious.
I would say now that we have an established name in the community and presence and people kind of know how it works and have friends that have done it or members in our practice, the number that want to meet and greet continues to drop.
Nice.
Usually for new parents, like expecting their first child, they still want a meet and greet. But if they have three or four kids, they’ve already been burnt out by the other practice in town or the other practices in town. They already know they’re familiar enough with it. They’ve done the math.
They’ve read the FAQs and they just have decided this is for them. And so my approach is it’s not required to do a meet and greet, but it’s offered and you can do it or you cannot do it depending on your comfort level.
Yeah, I, so I offer meet and greets for expectant parents and typically the ones that are coming and want that are having their first baby, which is totally understandable, right? First baby syndrome, you do all the research, you get all the things you, you know,
blog or book told them like, go meet your potential pediatrician for that. It would be weird if they’re like, no, we don’t do those. You either sign up or you don’t.
I agree. And I think it’s a lovely opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed those meet and greets, those, those expectant parents, because it’s like, there’s so much anxiety of like the unknown for them. And to just like meet their pediatrician and have that vibe of like, Oh, okay, you seem great. You seem like a good fit.
Like we can text you. Oh, that’s amazing. Right. That’s just peace of mind for them. So I love those. And I would say like, I don’t think I’ve ever had a, well, I think only one time have they not joined. And it was because the baby ended up in the NICU and it became more complicated
than they expected. And they ended up I think because of the finances really reevaluated. But yeah, those are lovely. And I think it’s just such a good opportunity to like market yourself, to make a good impression, to really develop that relationship that will probably last many years. Because most of the time, parents who join the practice,
families who join the practice with their newborn or with their babies, they tend to be the most long lived.
They’re the sticky ones that stay.
From the very beginning, you were their pediatrician from the time they were born.
Right. And they didn’t have to break up with their old pediatrician or anything along those lines. This is totally a fresh.
Exactly. Yeah. And, and usually most of us have those tears. So as they get older, the price goes down and it’s, it’s, it’s hard to say goodbye to the pediatrician that has known your baby since they were born. Right. However, so I do that for expectant parents. I don’t offer them for just anyone.
For me personally, I just felt like I didn’t. My time was too valuable to be doing that for everyone. However, in the beginning, I was essentially doing a meet and greet for the first couple of years. because I was the one taking the phone calls from interested new families.
And so essentially they were getting like a five or 10 minute phone conversation with me was, which was essentially a meet and greet of sorts. It was just via phone call instead of coming into the office. And I would say that that was a good way to still establish that relationship, get their questions answered in the beginning.
And then they can make the decision based on that phone call.
So that’s something that you can imagine that this parent calls and they’ve called three offices in town and they’re expecting to have to leave a voicemail. They’re expecting, yeah, he can see you for a meet and greet in six weeks at 345 on Friday. And that’s his only time available.
And then they call your office and you answer the phone and you’re like, well, you can come in, but you just want to chat right now. What are you looking for? Yeah. totally different experience and just the peace of mind of wait,
they answer the phone and it’s not 17 layers and it’s not pushed to and leave a voicemail. My doctor literally answered the phone just willy nilly. I wasn’t, they didn’t know I was calling, but she answered the phone. And so just establishing that as the initial experience. And I think even if you’re doing meet and greets,
like you’re going to have much more availability than the other practices in town. And that’s going to be their first experience of, well, they told me they could see me in two months, but this doctor can get me in next Thursday after work sold.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I will say that for those of you who are maybe listening and just exploring the option of DPC and you’re thinking, oh my gosh, I have to answer the phone forever. That may not sound as appealing. So no, I’ll tell you kind of how I shifted.
I was doing that for the first couple of years and then I got busy enough. I now have a virtual assistant. She doesn’t even live Here she lives in another state, but she’s wonderful. She’s also bilingual, which was important to me. She was a young mom with kids and wanted a part-time job.
And she’s been wonderful as my kind of membership management virtual assistant. So all of those phone inquiries and website inquiries and everything get funneled through her. And I’ve given her permission to schedule those newborns for an in-person meet and greet. And then I also kind of give her permission.
Hey, if there’s a family who just, they have questions that you can’t answer. Just schedule on my schedule, put a 15 minute phone call block. And I will call the family and I’ll answer those questions. So I still kind of like you feel like for those who really want it or need it,
I still give some sort of touch point availability because I realized that with the membership model, we’re not allowing them to just come one time. And I used to do try it out visits and I got rid of them last year. So now that I don’t have that, people need to feel some sense of like, okay,
this is going to be a good fit before I sign up for, in my case, it’s a minimum six month membership. So they have to feel some sort of confidence about that. And that’s a way to do it as well.
I think that makes sense. And I think that another issue that I see oftentimes that I think is worth mentioning too, is that you want to make sure that they are a real person and a safe fit for you as the clinician, especially because in DPC, you often don’t have the layers of other people in the office.
You might be the solo person in the office and you want to make sure that they’re a good fit coming in and you’re not worried. The vibes aren’t off. They’re not sketchy, those sorts of things. And so I think that’s another good reason to consider meet and greets is just to establish.
And maybe that’s establishing that at a coffee shop. Like I said, like if you’re not sure you’re comfortable with people that you don’t know, just showing up the office, there have been, and we’ve talked about this before in the pediatric DPC Facebook group. Is there some,
really weird sketchy people that reach out to like learn about the practice and i think a lot of practices have experienced these very specific phone numbers and people that are calling and like interested in establishing care and asking very specific questions that turn out to be completely fraudulent no one’s really
figured out the why of that but i think that’s a good reason to have a little layer of before this person signs up i kind of want to know who they are and what they’re hoping for in the practice.
Exactly. Yeah. And I will say like you get to tailor this to your personality. Some of the pediatricians who maybe their goal is to have much smaller panels or they do home visits and you have to feel safe in that home environment as the pediatrician, right?
That’s where it becomes more and more important to do universal meet and greets because you have to feel comfortable going into this family’s home and having that really close relationship. And I would say this is where vibes really come in. like trust your vibes. If you, from the beginning, something is telling you,
and even if you can’t explain it, a lot of us will feel discomfort and then we’ll try to rationalize it. And if you can’t make a rational sense of it, we might just, we might say, Oh, I’m just being oversensitive or I’m, I don’t know. There’s something wrong with me because I can’t make logical sense of it.
And then we go ahead and sign this family up and then things happen and then we’re like shoot i should have followed my initial gut feeling my initial vibe about this family so please please listen to those because your body sometimes senses just like those kids that
manifest anxiety as abdominal pain like there’s something going on their body is telling them there’s something wrong right get those vibes too so listen to that and you don’t have to sign a family up if you don’t feel comfortable then this is one of the beauties of dpc is you don’t just have to take any family
whose insurance is accepted at your practice and just have to deal with it we do have more autonomy because especially i really believe that in order to have a therapeutic relationship you have to have a relationship that’s healthy on both sides if you have a family who
just seems really entitled or really demanding and they just want you to validate everything that they already want to do, that’s not going to be a therapeutic relationship, right? Just don’t even open the door to that.
Yeah. And I think that’s a common concern when people are starting out too, is I’m going to have all these families that are super demanding. They’re going to tell me what to do and expect that I do it. And I haven’t had that experience. We’ve had a few that have been a little bit more that way,
but oftentimes we just say this, the evidence doesn’t support that. This isn’t how we practice. And most of them actually just are like, okay, well, all right. Well, in the past, I just kind of pushed and my doctor did what I want, but I hear you.
And I also hear that like you want to avoid unnecessary antibiotics, which I also want to do. So maybe that would be good. Okay, let’s try it out. And then the ones that don’t, we’ll just move on to somebody else that will do what they want. And those weren’t the right fit for you either.
So I think that that’s a common concern that comes up is that they’re not the right fit for you. And being able to talk with them, decide if it’s a good fit is really helpful for a lot of those.
Yeah. And in the beginning, you might be more desperate for patients and you might be tempted to go with families who you just don’t get a good vibe about. I would say just… be careful because it may end up being way more painful than it was worth. And you’ll look back and think, why did I do this?
Now, that being said, don’t be too picky either, right? Like a lot of us in DPC end up attracting families who are not as comfortable with vaccination, for example. And you always have the ultimate decision, but I would say that in the model DPC, where we have more time, we can really have the longer conversations with families.
It takes a lot of the anxiety off of that issue when we spend more time talking to those families and really understanding their perspective and allowing them time to let their guard down and let that veil of kind of fear melt away because they’re like, oh, this is a pediatrician who’s finally listening to me.
And just even if they don’t agree, they’re hearing my concerns and they’re compassionate about them.
makes a huge difference on both sides of the table. And I think that that’s one of the things where we really get to have those long conversations with families and get that relationship rather than the, I don’t really have time for you and your concerns.
And that goes such a long way for both the therapeutic side for me as the physician and also for the family.
Absolutely. Yeah. So you ultimately get to decide how you do meet and greets if you do them for everyone versus a subset of your families. I do think that we both agree that there’s value in them, especially when it comes to finding families that are a really good fit for you. and your practice style.
Just you have some flexibility about how you do them. Don’t make them an hour long visit, please, because then they’ll start asking you all the medical questions. You can make them for 15 minutes. You can make them order. Dr. Noemi Adame, actually, who’s in Indiana. I like her model.
She ended up getting busy enough that she said, I can’t do meet and greets for everyone. She has a once a month kind of group visit, meet and greet. And I think I’m going to start adopting that model too, because I end up answering a lot of the same questions
over the phone for families so either creating a better video that explains it or having some sort of monthly thing that they can sign up for online so i like her idea and i might be adopting it soon
Well, I love that too. And the one thing that I was going to add that I had forgotten to mention earlier too is I think one of the fears is that somebody books a meet and greet and they come in and you do the song and dance of like, tell me about your baby and pregnancy and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you get to the end and they say, what insurance do you take? And you’re like, did you not read the website? And so, and that can happen. And so what you want to do is protect against that by making sure that throughout
the process that they understand that your practice is direct primary care and what that actually means. So that there’s no, I had no idea. You don’t take Blue Cross Blue Shield. And then here’s what inevitably happens is if both parents are there, the husband says, what are we doing here?
Yeah.
When you get that, like that is just so classic. And so you want to prevent that by, if you can, after they book the appointment, maybe reach out and say, Hey, looking forward to seeing you guys next week. Here’s a little bit more about my practice and send them back to the FAQ page on
your website or send them to your Instagram or wherever you can send them so that they can let it sink in over and over again, that you do not take insurance. that they can use their insurance for blah, blah, blah, but this is a direct primary care practice so that no one is surprised.
And the dream is they come in for their meet and greet and they say, I already know everything about your practice. I know the costs. I know these sorts of things. I just wanted to make sure that you’re a real person and that your jokes are funny.
And that you get me and my problems and I’m ready to sign up right now. Like that is the dream of a meet and greet. It’s not a bunch of questions where you’re like, this is on the website. How do you not know this?
Yeah, exactly.
Getting to start that relationship because you, they already know you and you might know a little bit about them, but they know what, how your practice works.
Yeah. Speaking of that, great point. It’s hard to overstate that because people don’t read websites apparently. I had in my first year of practice a family who reached out and they were like, oh, we reviewed your website. I’ve seen your social media. We love your approach. We’d like to schedule.
And so I assumed I made the mistake of assuming you’d read my website. That means that I don’t take insurance because it’s very clearly stated on there. And it’s very clear and transparent. And so I went ahead and I scheduled her and then they show up and they start signing the little agreement with the
the fees and they’re like, wait a minute. And then of course that husband, the wife looking at the husband, the husband’s like, didn’t you, why are we here?
What are we doing here? That’s what they all said.
And then they, I couldn’t see them and I felt terrible turning them. them away so you just don’t make those mistakes that we’ve made because it’s painful and just make sure that you’re clear about that all right well hopefully you this has been enlightening for you making your decision about whether to do
meet and greets or not and not just about whether to start out doing them but also understanding that you can shift how you do them how often you do them and the style of doing them over time as your time maybe becomes more limited you get busier you can
You don’t have to do it for everyone forever if you don’t want to. All right, everyone, until next time.
