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.
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ICD-10 Codes for the Chiropractic Practice
ICD-10 diagnosis codes in a step-by-step free webinar. See what Genesis has built for ICD-10 diagnosis codes so your practice will get paid in full and on-time. View this free webinar to see exactly how Chiropractors can choose the correct ICD-10 codes. Comments so far have been positive, “Very Intuitive” and “Easy to Use.” If you’re not already our client, then schedule a free demo. Read the transcript: Jason: Welcome, everyone. It’s really good to have you here this afternoon. It’s Jason Barnes and joining me, as always, is my illustrious co-host to these webinars, Jessica Pancoast, the head of the training and help desk teams here at Vericle. We’re really excited to have everyone and this has been a hot topic. And so we are excited to talk about ICD-10 one more time. And so this will be a recap of a lot of the other webinars that you’ve seen including some of the system updates and what we’ve learned so far. It will not include all of the content because we won’t be doing things like macros today. We are just gonna include the actual system functionality for finding codes, choosing your ICD-10 codes based on your ICD-10s, how to search ICD-10 codes when you’re not cross walking over from an ICD-9 code and making sure that you know how to save those codes, save the searches and group them however you’d like to. So we’ve had some updates there and we’re really excited to share those today. Not only that, if you have not yet actually created those hierarchies in your system, we’re gonna show you how you can go about doing that with a test patient, and to kick it all off we’re actually gonna show you how to find your most popularly used or frequently used ICD-9 codes so you know which ones need to be mapped over. Jess, anything to add? Jessica: No, I think that covers everything that we need to go over. Jason: That’s what we’re planning on doing today. So, thank you for joining us and we’re just gonna dive right into it. Today everyone watching should be familiar with the screen that’s up. This is a fake patient where we are looking at the travel card. You can see there’s x-rays, there’s no ICD-10 or ICD-9 information, and we’re gonna go over that functionality. But before we get into that we actually want everyone to take a break and think about this process as a whole. In order to figure out which codes you’re gonna need to select so that you’re ready to more readily choose your ICD-10 codes, I wanna to take you into another system. This is actually a real practice in our system that we’re showing you right now. All the names have been changed so that we’re not using anybody’s real practice information, but this is the last year worth of billing information by diagnosis code. Our recommendation is that you run a billing status report to find out which ICD-9 codes you most frequently use because what we found is, although there are a number, 10,977 visits with 11,150 code selections used, there were only 40 total diagnosis codes used last year by this practice. And if you look at them by percentage, a vast majority of those visits were covered by 10 codes, 8 codes. So what we want you to do is know how to find out what those codes are for your office. To do that, you head to reports, go down to Billing Analytics, choose your billing stats report that’s how we got here. In the bottom of this report, I recommend going back one year, but six months should be adequate, you change the date range and most importantly you have to choose Diagnosis 1. Now, this might not exist in your drop-down or pop-up, in this case of selections. If it does not that is not a problem, you go back to reports…back to Billing Analytics and then choose your billing stats configuration report. This billing stats config right here will allow you to actually choose Diagnosis 1, make a name for it, save that name and then you’ll have to go back refresh your billing status report and that way you’ll be able to access that new code that you’ve just created for your billing status report. In this case, let’s make a note that 739.1 is the most commonly used code by this particular office. A high-volume office who sent out over 2345 claims in the last year with this diagnosis code on. Jessica, do you have anything else on the billing stats. Jessica: No, that explains all. The only thing I can think of is you wanna make sure that Insurance Only and Pip Only is unchecked down the bottom. Jason: Unchecked, great clarification, thanks. Okay, so getting back to it we want you to be able to create a hierarchy, create favorite codes that will allow you not have to search each time you have a new patient or an existing patient that walks through your door to know what your 739.1 equivalent or equivalents will be in ICD-10. So we’re actually gonna walk you through that process, but the first thing we need to let you know about the three areas where ICD-10 codes are going to be relevant to you. The first you’re gonna see is the ICD-10 traffic light which I am highlighting right now with my mouse. We’re not gonna click on that just yet but most things in our systems that have a color associated with it are drillable or clickable, you can click on those things. The second are the two lines right here where you used to see just your ICD-9 codes, but now you’ll see both ICD-9s and ICD-10s. And then, in two other places, you’re gonna get the same exact interface, both the Diagnoses tab as well as your EMR Assessment tab. And everyone
