It’s About Time For Us to Show Our Support for Chiropractic
We’ve been talking about a theme, “It’s about time…”. There are so many things that we can say about that when it comes to our profession, but today, I want to talk about one of the most important ones. It’s about time that we as Chiropractors show our support for Chiropractic and the place to start is with our pocketbooks. We have to begin giving our money only to companies that support Chiros and stop funding companies that support anti-Chiro legislation. Chiropractors and the Chiropractic profession itself have been under fire for a quite a while now and make no mistake, it is not over. In order to preserve our livelihoods, our profession, the message of Chiropractic we bring to our patients, and the good we bring to their health and their lives, we are going to have to take a stand for what we believe in. Too many of the companies that Chiropractors give their money to every day are not pro-Chiro. Instead, they not only support legislation that is damaging to Chiropractic, but many of them want to turn us into medical doctors, forcing us to give vaccines in our office and ignore the basic principles of health that Chiropractic was founded upon. When we choose to do business with these companies, whether they handle our phone service, our billing, or our electronic health records, we are helping them in their fight to mold Chiropractic into the medical model, make us subservient to the MDs and the insurance companies, and even put us out of business completely. We need to choose where we spend our money more wisely and use our dollars to show companies that we as Chiros will stand together. We can and should do business only with companies who support Chiropractic and by extension support who we are and what we believe. There are so many good pro-Chiro companies out there that it is not hard to find them. We must be diligent in researching and choosing with whom we do business. By choosing to spend our money only with businesses who support our profession, we can send a message that we will no longer tolerate these companies attacking Chiropractic and by extension ourselves and our practices. Let’s start putting our money where our mouths are and start spending our hard earned dollars where they can do some good, with companies who are clearly pro-Chiro, who work to advance our profession and who believe in the power of Chiropractic to change the lives of our patients. It’s about time that we support Chiropractic by supporting the companies that work so hard to advance the profession every day.
It’s About Time for Chiropractic to Become the Profession to Choose
In my last post, we talked about getting back to the beginning and starting with why…why we became Chiropractors in the first place, why Chiropractic works, why we do what we do every day. Now, I want to take a look at the next generation of Chiropractors and whether or not we are doing enough as a profession to make Chiropractic an attractive choice for those students that are trying to decide what to do with the rest of their lives. Don’t you think that it’s about time we made Chiropractic a great career choice? Yes, it should be about the satisfaction of helping others but we also need to make Chiropractic an economically viable choice as well. Let’s face it…getting an education today is expensive and most students who come out of college are carrying student loan debts, probably in the tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, according to an analysis of government data, the average amount of student loan debt for a graduating college senior is a little over $35,000 and 71% of these graduates have loans to pay back. Add to that the statistics from a 2014 study published in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association estimating that 88% of Chiropractic students graduate with between $100,000 and $175,000 in student loans, a massive burden to any Doctor first out of school. In order for students graduating from college to decide to go to Chiropractic school, spending more time, and taking on more debt, they have to be able to see a future where Chiropractic not only allows them to pay off their student loans but also provides them and their families with a nice life. The problem the Chiropractic profession has experienced for many years is that so many of us struggle just to make a living, much less the nice income that we should be able to expect in return for the number of years we spend becoming Chiropractors, the risk we take opening and running our own business, and the hours we devote every week toward improving the lives of others. In fact, in 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median wage for Chiropractors at just over $67,000, not much in comparison the $140,000 to $300,000 incomes reported by Osteopathic Physicians. I think that it’s about time we made Chiropractic an economically viable profession choice for future students. This means that not only do we need to see more patients, we need to price our services to reflect their importance to the health of our patients. We also have to put systems in place to manage and improve the patient experience so that more people continue Chiropractic care not just through corrective care but also to maintain their health. We must also scrutinize our processes to ensure that every step we take each day is done in the most effective and efficient way. Our offices should function smoothly and at the end of the day when we go home, we should know with 100% certainty that everything has been done and done to the highest possible standards. Making the choice to become a Chiropractor has never been and never will be solely about money. I firmly believe that myself and my fellow Chiropractors have a calling to help others and improve the health and lives of our patients. Still, we can no longer ignore the economic realities and disparities of income experienced by Chiropractors in comparison to other healthcare professionals. We have a duty to future Chiropractors to increase the income of our profession as a whole and make Chiropractic an economically viable choice. It’s about time.
Starting with My Why
I recently read the book “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek . It really hit home with me that the reason behind why we do something is often so much more important than our actions themselves. This made me re-evaluate my life, my business, and the Chiropractic profession as a whole. In many ways, our profession has come so far but looking at it from this new perspective, I could see how we have often gotten away from our true values, what made us Chiropractors in the first place. It made me think of one phrase, again and again…”It’s about time.” There are so many things in Chiropractic that it’s about time for, don’t you think? It’s something you are going to be hearing from me over and over because it is time for progress. In that spirit, I think that it’s about time that you know my background and why I became a Chiropractor in the first place. It’s important because my why has made me who I am. It’s driven me to not only help patients but to help other Chiropractors improve the patient experience and build practices that get back to the root of the profession, making sure that every patient understands the importance of Chiropractic in their lives, in their health, and in creating their futures. I was always an athlete and into health and wellness. I always steered away from medications. I was also very into science and found that I was good at biology and math, so in my second year of undergraduate, I decided to become a biology major. The problem was that I didn’t have a direction, a passion. By the end of college, I still did not know what I was going to do until one day, my mother gave me a call. She told me that she worked with a woman who had a son who was a Chiropractor. He was going to be speaking and asked if I wanted to check it out. I wasn’t expecting much because I had a cousin who was a Chiropractor and I had actually seen one myself for an injury in high school but had never heard anything about the Chiropractic philosophy. Still, I went to the seminar and when he began speaking about what Chiropractic was really about and how it really worked, I knew with 100% certainty that I had found my life’s work. It was a moment of total congruency and surety that only happens a few times in your life. I drove back to school that night where I was just finishing up my biology degree and said, “Hey, I’m moving to Georgia and going to Chiropractic school.” The Chiropractic philosophy became “my why”. It is the reason that I knew with such certainty that Chiropractic held the path for my life, that it was my passion. It is still the reason that I get up each day and work toward improving the patient experience in all Chiropractic offices. The Chiropractic philosophy is the reason behind everything we do in our profession, so isn’t it about time that we all remember why we became Chiropractors in the first place?
Care Plan Compliance built into Genesis Chiropractic Software
Care Plan Compliance can be Increased for Your Patients Automatically Care plan compliance – Do your patients comply with their care plan? What happens when your patients start to miss their visits? Are you notified? Do your care plans automate patient reminders? Discover how to automate your patient’s care plan with this 30 minute webinar. Learn more about our care plans and how you can more effectively utilize them and all of their features. Please fill out the form below and the video will begin to play right on this page. We know it’s a lot to ask for your email address, but we promise to never sell your email to another company. Read the transcript: Jason: All right, so welcome everybody. It’s about four minutes past the hour and we’re talking Care Plan Compliance today. Jessica Pancoast, head of our training team and our help desk, is with us, here to keep me on the straight and narrow path, which she can no longer do this week anyway with an odd glance or two because we’re in separate locations which happens infrequently. So she’ll have to figure out some other way of doing it. That being said, we’ve got quite a few people today that are joining us. We’re going to start sharing screens right now and we’re going to get kicked off. So because so Jasony people are with us today and almost as always, please…what do we have here? You’re going to have to chat in questions and please, you’re welcome to do so. We still have a discrepancy of about six people, Jess, that are in the web portion of it but not in the audio portion. Jessica: All right. I’ll send another message while you start sharing your screen. Jason: Awesome. Thank you so much. A patient walks through your door. Maybe they’ve never heard of the type of treatment that you’re going to propose and they’re not necessarily up on, you know, what they can do to help themselves get better. They’ve been on medications forever. They want to make better choices. They’ve never thought about health care costs being what they’re proposed. When you see them, they’ve only paid some copays throughout the year and the drugs always seem like they were so worth it, but they don’t feel right and they’ve never felt right and what you’re telling them to do is a complete and total deviation of what they’ve been told their entire lives constitutes health care. Today we’re talking about that big change that needs to take place, how patients perceive it, how often they need to be talked about to…how often they need the reminder, I should say, of how important the commitment they made is, and if they don’t do it all, that they’re not going to see the results. You might be asking yourself, “Well, I really just want to see a care plan that helps me with the finances.” We’ve actually gone over the financial aspect of care plans in this forum before. We’ve created those webinar links and they’re available. We can send them to you, you know, send us some feedback at the end of them if you’re struggling to find them. We will make sure we email out those links to the webinars we’ve done in the past about the financial portion of it. But today we’re talking about those patients that, they were committed at the time they walked through the door, they went in for a report of findings, they signed up for our care plan, and they knew it. Intellectually it made sense to them, academically it made sense to them. They committed to a care plan of x number of visits, but it’s a complete and total lifestyle change. Everyone here knows that they need to be sold again. They need reminders. What types of reminders are we talking about today? Today we’re talking about those reminders both in and out of the office. We’re talking about automating those reminders, we’re talking about reminding them of the commitment that they made, we’re talking today about how you can use a system to prompt you and your staff to make those connections. We know that not every single patient will stay a patient for life, but we can do whatever possible to make that number as large as it can possibly be. And without these reminders, we found that practices have…not all of them, but a lot of them have struggled to get the results that they’re looking for. So I want to make sure that everyone viewing today knows it’s available to them. A patient comes through the door…let me move this over here and we’ll start back from the beginning…for their first appointment. Their first appointment, you can set up all sorts of reminders. Let’s make sure they get calls, text messages, emails about the appointment. That’s the first set of reminders that we can talk about here. And I’ll just bring up one example of a third party carrier…and we talked about this last time…that we’re really pleased with and we’ve got a lot of good feedback on and that’s Zingit. Zingit reminder call, we have a lot of other options, but this is one of the premier ways that you can use to keep in touch with a patient, reminding them of a visit. However, is it just reminding them of a visit that we want to do or is there more? So today there’s also now SMS marketing that they’re offering. So if you’re using us right now or you’re considering using us as a platform to meet your practice’s needs, we want to talk about reminders that not only are targeted at letting them know, “Hey, you committed to a visit,” but why they’ve committed to a visit. We don’t offer this ourselves as a technology platform, Vericle, but what we do offer is the access to get information. How is it
