Patients who have met their deductible are the cheapest care plans of the year. October is when to find them
Sixteen weeks remain in the insurance plan year. The 30-day plan for finding patients whose out-of-pocket just dropped to a copay, and getting them started.
Your schedule looks fine in September and it will look fine in October. The trap is that a fine October hides the fact that the most profitable patients of the whole year are sitting in your files right now, and nobody is calling them.
Here is the situation. Most insurance deductibles reset on January 1. That leaves about sixteen weeks in the plan year. Anyone who had surgery, a baby, an ER visit or a big imaging bill since January has met their deductible or is close to it. From now until December, their out-of-pocket for a visit with you drops to a copay or coinsurance. On some plans it drops to nothing.
For that patient, a twelve-visit care plan that would have cost them a thousand dollars in March costs them a few hundred in October, or zero. It is the easiest yes you will hear all year, and the window closes on a fixed date. That is the play for the next 30 days.
Week one: build three lists
You do not have to guess who has met a deductible. Your billing already knows most of it.
Active patients whose recent claims show it. Look at the last two months of remittances. When patient responsibility on a visit drops from the allowed amount to a flat copay, the deductible is met. Your biller can pull this in an afternoon. If you use a clearinghouse, run a batch eligibility check on the active list instead. It returns deductible remaining for each patient and costs cents per check.
Inactive patients, six to eighteen months out, with insurance on file. You do not know their status, but the message still works because it asks them to check. This is the same list the slow season plan starts with, and this is the best reason all year to work it.
The people your front desk remembers. Somebody mentioned a knee surgery in April. Somebody had a baby in June. Somebody's kid broke an arm at camp. Ask your front desk to write down every name they can think of. It will be a longer list than you expect.
Week two: the message
The message is about money, not symptoms. Keep it clinically vague, because a text that names a condition can land on a reassigned phone number and become a disclosure.
To active patients whose claims show a met deductible, by text:
"Hi [first name], this is [name] at [practice]. Quick heads up. It looks like you have met your insurance deductible for the year, which means visits between now and December 31 cost you only your copay. If you have been putting anything off, this is the cheapest time to take care of it. Want me to get you in this week?"
To the inactive list, by email, from the doctor, three short paragraphs. Subject line: "Have you met your deductible?" First paragraph says what a met deductible means for the cost of a visit. Second says the practice has openings before the end of the year. Third is a phone number and an offer to check their benefits for them if they call.
Then the front desk calls the active list. One call, one voicemail. This is the highest-converting touch and it takes a couple of hours for a few hundred names.
Week three: book the whole plan
A patient who starts on October 20 and comes twice a week finishes a twelve-visit plan before Thanksgiving. A patient who starts on December 3 does not finish before the reset, and the last four visits cost them full price in January. Count backwards from December 31 and say so at the report of findings: "If we start this week, the whole plan lands inside this year's deductible."
Book every visit at once, not one at a time. A plan that exists on the calendar gets completed. A plan that lives in the patient's intentions gets three visits in.
Then look at capacity. The people who have met a deductible are the people who just had a surgery or a baby, and a lot of them cannot come at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Only 21.4% of the 71,195 practices in this dataset list Saturday hours. Adding one Saturday morning a month through December puts you in front of patients most of your market cannot see.
Week four: turn it into next year's marketing
These patients finish plans in November and December. They feel better, they paid almost nothing, and they are grateful. That is the moment to ask for the review. The median practice in our data has 15 reviews and 44.6% have fewer than ten, so a strong finish to the year moves you a long way. The exact ask is in the reviews guide.
Also add one page to the website titled for the search: "Have you met your deductible? What that means for chiropractic care in [town]." Almost nobody has that page. It ranks with no competition, it gets quoted in AI answers, and it is what your front desk links to in the text.
If you are a cash practice
The deductible play is not yours. Yours is the flexible spending account. Many FSA balances expire at year end or shortly after, and people forget them until December. Run the same three lists with a different sentence: "If you have money left in your FSA, care with us is an eligible expense and the balance may not roll over."
Both versions work for the same reason. The patient's cost just dropped, the deadline is real, and you are the only practice in town that bothered to tell them. The full picture of where your market sits is in the benchmark report.
Reactivation texts, the deductible page and the review follow-up are all things you can have built for you in the free 14-day trial, any service, no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, chiropractors among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor