Does X-Ray and Posture Software Make Your Practice Better?
X-Ray and Posture Software That Makes Your Practice Better!
Handling the Mission Critical Points of the Chiropractic Patient Experience
In a previous blog article, we talked about how using proactive Chiropractic software to quantify and improve the patient experience can take your practice to a new level. Chiropractic software can do this by handling the mission critical points of the patient experience, making sure that no detail is missed. So, what does mission critical mean when we’re talking about the chiropractic patient experience? Mission critical points for your practice are things that you have to follow-up with in real time or risk losing your patient. Every task performed by you and your staff each day, from scheduling to billing, inventory, collecting recurring cash payments, etc. From the first exam to following up on chiropractic insurance claims will have an impact on the experience your patients have in your office and will determine whether they continue with or drop out of care. Think about how many tasks you and your staff must perform each day to achieve a perfect patient care experience. Exams, adjustments, chiropractic SOAP notes, diagnosis codes, billing, taking patient payments, credit card on file, asking for referrals, scheduling future visits, and following up on no-shows and expired care plans are just a few of the mission critical points your practice experiences every day. These all have to be monitored in real time or the patient experience suffers. To retain just one chiropractic patient, there are an estimated 331 tasks that have to happen perfectly every single time. But, why are these tasks mission critical? Let’s take no-shows as an example. What does a no-show really mean to not only your business but to your patient. If a patient was going in for chemotherapy and they had to miss a visit, would they be waiting for you to call them to reschedule that visit? Absolutely not. Would they walk out of chemotherapy forgetting to schedule their next visits? Or, would they reach the end of their treatment, get their testing done, and not follow-up to get their doctor’s recommendations for the next phase of their care. Never…it is too important to them. So, when a patient in your chiropractic practice no-shows for a visit, walks out without a future appointment, or is not excited about their re-exam, what are they telling you? They are telling you that they don’t value their care. It is no longer important to them. They are telling you that they don’t value their care. Patients visit a Chiropractor and sign up for chiropractic care for the right reasons. They don’t sign up for 36 visits if they don’t understand the value Chiropractic brings to their lives. The problem is that they forget. And, they don’t tell you they have forgotten. They show you they have forgotten by not showing up for their appointments and forgetting to schedule new ones. If you don’t monitor and follow-up on these things in real time, you are in immediate danger of losing that patient. This is mission critical. A proactive Chiropractic software, like Genesis Chiropractic Software brings real value to your practice by monitoring each and every mission critical point in real time. It ensures that every one of those 331 tasks that have to be performed to retain each patient are not only assigned to the best staff member to handle them but also have been completed, giving you the ability to create an outstanding patient experience. Managing these mission critical points is the ultimate key to building patient loyalty, boosting patient retention, decreasing staff frustrations, increasing referrals and dramatically increasing the revenue per patient on average.
Chiropractic Software ROI Increases with Higher Patient Retention
We’ve talked about how important the patient experience is to the success of your practice. We’ve also discussed how using proactive Chiropractic software and technology to quantify and improve that experience helps you to run your practice at the level of big business. Now, let’s look at it from a purely marketing perspective and break down your Chiropractic software ROI (Return On Investment). Most already know what return on investment is. For example, if you gave me one dollar and I gave you back five dollars that would be a 5 times return on investment, a good ROI. But, if you gave me five dollars and I gave you back only one dollar that would be a bad return on investment. Almost every Chiropractor knows that they should be calculating their return on investment when they put an ad in the paper or send out a mailer. However, what these same Chiropractors don’t realize, is that they need to calculate their cost of marketing and getting new patients versus their Chiropractic software ROI of increasing patient retention. According to Harvard Business Review, it costs you five times more to get new patients than it does to retain patients you already have. Five times more. So, what does that mean? It means that you give me five dollars and I give you back one dollar – a bad return on investment. Bringing in new patients is five times more costly than utilizing a solid patient retention program. Yet ironically, most Chiropractic marketing software and systems focus on increasing the number of new patients rather than boosting your patient retention. It is interesting that the best businesses in the world are also the best at customer retention. Take the Ritz Carlton for example. Every single thing they do is broken down into small steps to ensure no detail is missed, every customer experience is personalized, and each person that stays at the Ritz receives the ultimate gold-standard care. The Ritz Carlton focuses on customer retention and in return achieves a huge return on investment with customers who return time and time again, happy to pay their five hundred dollars plus rate per night. It is time for Chiropractors to understand what the largest, most successful businesses in the world already know…retaining your current customers or patients equals a higher return on investment than marketing for new customers or patients, a five times higher ROI. This means that increasing patient retention by focusing on improving the patient experience is vital to achieving success in your practice. Any business person knows that you put your money where you will achieve the highest return on investment. For Chiropractors, the greatest ROI is not found in new patient marketing where most of the marketing dollars have traditionally been spent. Instead, investing in a solid patient retention program, similar to the Ritz Carlton, where each step of the patient experience is broken down and quantified so that no detail is missed, will generate the highest possible return on investment for your practice. Don’t miss our next post where we will discuss managing the mission critical points of the patient care experience.
Automate Your Care Plans for Chiropractic Patients
Care Plan Automation: Your Chiropractic Patients can have it! Your patient’s care plan – would you like to automate them? View this free 20 minute webinar to see how to create your patient care plan and then apply automation to them. Automatic care plans will save you a lot of time and you won’t have to memory manage any of it. You can even setup a notification when visits are running out. Plus, projecting staffing and cash flow levels will be easier and more accurate. Read the transcript: Jason: Hello and welcome. My name is Jason Barnes and I’m really excited to be here with you today. The subject that we’re talking about is near and dear to my heart and it’s something that has helped hundreds, literally hundreds of providers that I’ve worked with, and in thousands of clinicians simplified a way that they describe how they’re going to implement their plan of care with their patients. So today, we’re gonna talk about that problem, why it’s important, why it’s difficult to solve, and finally, what are our approaches to it so that we can hopefully make your like a little bit easier, too. So let’s get started. And as we do get started today, we’re going to go through this step by step making a difference in the way that you actually look at this problem. So, what is it exactly? You got patients that come in, that don’t have standardized care. It’s not like you can set everybody up with the same exact problem. The diagnosis and the evaluation that you arrive at is going to dictate what this program is gonna look like. So some patients are going to have a hundred visits, some patients only 36 visits, but you’re gonna have to be able to explain how you’re gonna charge for those visits, especially if those patients come in with insurance, gonna switch over to cash, whether or not you’re gonna offer discounts to some, and you want to do so compliantly. Maybe even somebody’s got a coupon for a couple of free visits and you have to be able to put that in there. You have to be able to discuss the patient responsibility upfront and make sure this patient not only understands how you’re gonna treat them to get them better but what their out-of-pocket cost is going to look like so that they can make an informed decision right up to the front. And when you resell that patient time and time again you are able to reference that conversation that you had. So, those discounts that we talked about can lead to enormous compliance problems and you, unless you’re gonna standardized those patient payments across visits and across payers, right, it’s not a good idea to charge one patient who’s got Medicare on one thing and another patient who has Medicare on another thing, that can lead us to some hot water. So we have a system in place that can help with that, then actually scheduling all of those visits. And for a lot of those practices that we talk to who are not just looking to schedule visits with the one doctor but they might want to schedule it with a chiropractor, a PT, a nurse practitioner, a physician assistant, or a massage therapist, how do you make sure all of the appointments get on the right calendars, especially, especially when you’re gonna have those step-down visits where you’re gonna come in three times a week for five weeks, two times a week for five weeks, etc. So we want to reduce that complexity. By reducing that complexity we’re gonna make it easier for you to explain to your patient exactly what those financial commitments are gonna look like and how you’re gonna implement them, whether or not you’re gonna charge upfront, whether or not you’re going to take money as you go, but we do have to make sure the charges that you put in, even though they can be different from week to week, don’t change the expectation financially for the patient that you’re working with. So when you have to write off those amounts, you know this system will write off the amounts for you. When you have to adjust those amounts, you know that the system will adjust the right amounts for you. So taking a step further, those long-term plans, they were part of a bunch of things. First of all, you’re gonna track them and you want to make sure that if they go from acute care to maintenance care that, you know, number one, you make insurance changes should you need to, right? Most of the insurance plans out there aren’t gonna pay for maintenance care, they’re only gonna pay for acute care, and we can set that up. We’re gonna have those reminders in place not only for the evals where you can make that decision, but even if it’s during a daily visit or a regular adjustment visit, we notice that the progress has been achieved that you want to. But, again, if you end up manually trying to adjust those amounts off and change that plan from acute care to maintenance care, it can be messy. If we automate that for you with a click of quite literally a button, where we just move the remainder of the visits on that care plan over to maintenance, we can really change how your practice operates. All right, so, again, what is our approach? So you’re making some pretty outrageous promises here, but I want to actually talk about how we go about doing it. First of all, our care plans are a financial commitment. We create that agreement when we’re gonna assign a value to a result that you are going to deliver. You know you’ve done it before, you know you’re able to get the patient to where they want to be, but we want to make
