Three Step Management
Everyone, Dr. Brian Capra here from Genesis Chiropractic Software. Tonight we’re going to talk about the three steps to management and this is where your software, your practice management software, ironically fails you. It’s about management at the end of the day. Practice management, air quotes, software that’s on the market these days really, I don’t consider management software because it doesn’t help you manage. It does some really cool stuff. When I started my practice, I used other software to be frank, I used Platinum System. It was cool. It did a lot of great things. It did a lot of automation. It did somethings for me that really helped. If you know my personal story, I encourage you to go listen to that. It really didn’t actually help me manage my business. It made things easier in certain circumstances, there was good reports, but it didn’t help me actually manage my business. As a chiropractor, I think I said this in my last video, it’s really important that we start to really shift from a doctor a business owner, pulling ourselves more and more and more out of the day to day life or being in practice, being an employee in our own practice. As a business owner, as a chiropractor, you have to understand that you really are two things at the same time, which really puts you in a very unique situation. You’re not only a business owner, but you’re an employee in the business. To be an effective manager of business, there are three things that you must do, and this is not chiropractic, this is any business. Give you a little perspective, you probably know by now, I own Genesis Chiropractic Software and Billing Network. We are a chiropractic software, we serve thousands of clients in the cloud, but we also do insurance billing and collections for thousands of providers and users in the cloud. You’ve got to understand that I have learned, I wish I knew what I know now, by building this business over the past 15 years, I wish I knew this when I was in practice because it would have saved me a lot of frustration, number one. It would have freed my time up so I could have been focused on things other than my practice while I was outside of the practice, I wouldn’t have had to be always thinking about all of the processes and procedures my team was supposed to be doing and whether or not they did it and thinking about which patients I haven’t seen in a while. I wish I would have known this 15 years ago plus, because that’s when I was in practice. I had a great practice, 400 plus visits a week. I wasn’t super high buying, but I did corrective care so we had a great practice, huge collections and it was awesome. We did some insurance, some cash. Here’s the thing, there’s three steps. This comes from the experience of building my company over the past 15 years, reading every business book I can get my hands on possibly and now I just want to just give this to you. It’s just three steps. Ultimately at the end of the day there’s only three things you have to do. It’s simple to understand, I’m not saying it’s simple to do. Okay. Number one, quantify. We talked people, process technology. We talked about process specifically. We talked about revenue, retention and compliance and the three types of processes in any business. So, this is quantifying means developing your processes. Step by step by step, clarifying your processes. If you have a new patient, it’s not that you just have a new patient, you have the phone call, you have the script. You have to schedule them. You have every step of what needs to happen in your technology. When they check in, after they’ve checked in, there’s a whole bunch of steps that have to happen after that. The doctor has to do their exam for it, the doctor has to do the recommendations for care. Somebody has to create their financials. Somebody might have to call insurance and verify benefits or maybe there’s no coverage. Then that has to be coordinated, create a financial and that has to be presented to the patient. After the first visit, a lot of times in practices that I know, I know I did this, I would call the patient after the first visit, the phone call. That’s just the new patient. There’s several steps right. Every single daily visit, there’s several steps that have to happen and they have to happen perfectly because like we talked about in people, processes and technology, like we talked about in process where we have revenue and patient retention/patient experience, everything has to happen perfectly. If it doesn’t happen perfectly, you’re affecting the patient relationship. If the relationship doesn’t happen perfectly, you’re affecting the ability of that patient to really understand chiropractics, stay longer, get great results and refer other people. This is, when you think about this stuff, it should be thought about with a sense of urgency. Managing should be in your life blood. It should be part of your core of who you are. It’s not like you want to manage a business. It’s just that you want to manage the patient experience the best you possibly can. Quantify the work, again management three steps. We’re going to talk about quantify. Sorry if this is, I don’t know if this video is kind of backwards, but it’s just the technology, the way it’s working right now. Quantify the work. That means your processes, and not just your processes, but every single step in a process has to be documented perfectly in detail. It has to be, like I said in the last video, it has to be revisited on a regular basis. I’m not saying every week, or even every
Three most common people problems
Hey everyone. Dr Brian Capra here from Genesis Chiropractic Software with another episode. Today I want to talk to you about the three most common types of people problems. And I mean, by people I mean your team, and when I mean problems, the things that cause them or prevent them from performing to their fullest level and serving the function in your office and your business. Number one is a training issue. So we talked about recently, people process technology. We talked about how the technology should, especially with Genesis, would show you by the end of the day how many tasks, or during the day, how many tasks each person in your office would have to perform. And then by the end of the day you’d know what was left, if anything, which there shouldn’t be anything. But what if there was something left over that wasn’t completed before the end of the day? It’s an easy conversation. It’s proactive, you’re proactively managing the patient experience. So now you go on there and you go to your team member and you say, “what happened? There’s 10 of these tasks left over.” And you look at them, let’s say they’re all 10 are no shows. You might be concerned, you might say, “Hey, you know what? Why haven’t you followed up on all these things?” And they may say to you, “well I just started on Tuesday and I don’t know how to do that one thing.” So there you have a training issue and they just need better training, but at least you were proactive about it. All right, so that’s a simple one. Training issue. Second example, the second most common problem is a capacity issue. Capacity is very simple. “There’s 10 things leftover. What happened? How could I help you with these 10 things that are left over?” “Well I did 50 and those are just the 10 that are remaining.” So now we can see that they are just purely out of their capacity to be able to do that amount of work for that simple problem in the practice. So now they go in and you say, okay, we may need more team members, we may need to automate certain things. Maybe if we turned on text reminders and appointment reminders and emails and things like that, maybe that would decrease the need for how many no shows are happening in the practice. Maybe you see a 2000 patients a week and there’s only 10 left at the end of the day, yet you still have a capacity issue. So you can automate in those cases or sometimes you really just need another person. The third type of thing that can happen, pretty simple is a wrong seat, wrong law office type of problem. So in that case, you have a situation where you go to that person and you say, “how come you haven’t called all the no-shows or how come all these re exams didn’t get scheduled today?” Or whatever the case may be, they may say to you, “you know, I really, really hate doing that thing, that type of task, I hate doing it. It’s too confrontational for me. What I’d rather do is call companies and follow up on insurance claims or handle care plans or financials or whatever.” So in that case, you have a great person on your team that wants to work real hard, but they’re just in the wrong seat in your practice, meaning the wrong role in your business. And so you have a good person in the wrong seat. So that’s a wrong seat problem. Now, the wrong practice, wrong business problem. Now you have a real problem. So this should be mitigated by some of your upfront hiring protocols, how you hire people, how you find people, how you find people to apply for your office, your application process. I definitely recommend you work with Chiro Matchmakers if you’re a chiropractic office. It’s a staffing company for Chiropractic offices, they do a lot of profiling, making sure you’re hiring the right person for the role you’re looking for. But if you get somebody in your office that understands the mission of your business, your why behind your business, your core values in your business, and you hire them for a certain role and then they tell you they hate it, it could happen. It does happen. They’re just in the wrong seat or the wrong business, They’re working for the wrong type of business. Now, what’s great about technology with Genesis, since you know right there and then, the day that there’s too many tasks that are left over, and as soon as you confront the person about that, and it’s not confrontational necessarily, but you’re going to approach it in a proactive way and say, “how can I help you with that thing?” And they tell you, “you know what, I hate doing that thing and I never am gonna like it. And I hate this.” Basically, it’ll come up pretty quickly. You’ll figure out, you might shift them into a different role and they don’t perform there either. So then you have the wrong person in the wrong business. So we talked about there’s three types of common issues with staff, with people in your practice, your business. One is training, two is capacity and three, wrong seat or wrong business. So this pretty simple short video I definitely, to prevent, the capacity and the training issues are easy. Even the wrong seat is relatively easy. Preventing hiring the wrong person, that’s a bigger problem. You want to make sure you have really good hiring processes. I definitely recommend you work with Chiro Matchmakers to make sure you get the right person for your business, before you find the right seat for them. Okay. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you soon.
What if your server crashes
Hey everyone, Dr. Brian Capra here from Genesis Chiropractic Software. Today I’m going to talk to you about what you have to do if your server crashes. Of course what I’m referring to is a client server based system. That’s your Platinum, your ChiroTouch. Any other system that’s not in the cloud. Genesis as you know, has been in the cloud for 15 years or so, so we know quite a bit about this or I know quite a bit about this. I actually had a client service system before we started Genesis. This was one of the scariest things that I had to think about as far as the software in my office running. If this thing ever crashed, what would I do? There’s always like a disaster recovery process, right? Yet hopefully you’re backing up your data every single day at least. Hopefully your software company has taught you how to test whether or not that data recovery is actually working. But what you’ll have to do if that server crashes, and when I say crash, not just crashes but is fried, and that that’s going to happen every three to five years. So, when – not if – when that happens, of course you have to buy a new server. The first thing you got to do is find some type of expert; some type of network expert that knows how to work with different components of a network in your office. Contact your expert. You’re going to have to get a new server of cost. You could expect to spend 2,500 to $5,000 on that. Get that server. You’re going to have to configure the database. It’s not like you just get the server and plug it in. You have to configure the database, then you have to load the software, whatever software you’re using on that server. Then you have to network that server to all your other computers in the office and get that network back up and running. Somewhere in there you have to restore the data, and hopefully that data backup worked. Now, this is a stark contrast from other systems like Genesis in the cloud. First of all, we have multiple site, redundant server backups in real time, so it’s not the end of the night or anything like that. It’s actually backing up every second or two as you’re actually using Genesis in the cloud. Everything is backed up, so if your server in your office crashed, if you have a server, you don’t need one for a cloud based system but it would have literally no effect. But if your computer crashed or something like that, still has no effect because you’re literally just accessing all your data every time you log into Genesis. Remember now, with a cloud based system, there’s really no issues with that. We also got to remember with a cloud based system like Genesis, your data is being stored and backed up in real time in a HIPAA compliant data center. As opposed to your data being on a server in your office, which has all kinds of HIPAA compliance risks where somebody can hack that server and get that data and that would be your liability, hundred percent on you. Make sure you have HIPAA compliance insurance. But if you have a cloud based system and you’re outsourcing basically your HIPAA compliance and your data backup, you don’t have that level of exposure. So again, the data and for a cloud based system like Genesis is stored in a HIPAA compliant data center. You can’t even get into the building without a biometric scanning and things like that. The other thing to remember is servers break all the time, right? With Genesis, we have multiple servers running all the time, so if one crashes, the other one kicks in and so on. The users would typically never see a downtime at all if one server just crashed. The other one would just pick up where it left off. But something to remember, in these data centers, they have server experts, technology experts on staff 24/7. So if anything, God forbid, happens, we know. We have people on site. It’s not dependent on somebody at our company 24/7 around the clock. Hopefully what you’re seeing with this, there’s a lot of extra costs associated with a client service system, there’s a lot of extra exposure with the client server system, and there’s a lot more risk just generally of downtime. Because even if your server goes down and you know what to do, it’s going to take you quite some time to get back up and running. Hopefully you can understand the differences between downtime with a client service system and a cloud based system. That’s all I wanted to talk to you about today, so thank you so much and stay tuned for the next video.
How to beat insurance companies at their own game – The “claim” lifecycle
Hey everyone, Dr. Brian Capra here. Tonight we’re going to start getting into how we’re going to beat insurance companies at their own game. So I’m going to quickly review something here, just kind of a little bit more of a schematic. This is my first screen sharing, so hopefully this is working for you right now. What we’re going to do is first of all talk about just overview of what we’ve already spoken about. Number one, insurance companies, we know how they get money, they get premiums from either employers or just patients out there that buy health insurance on the market, right, so they get premiums. Then what happens is the doctor over here, poor doctor on the right hand side over here, submits a claim to the insurance company. The insurance company delays reimbursement. We’re going to go into more depth about this, but we’ve already kind of talked about how the whole process is rigged in this way, where, how do they delay reimbursement? Part of it is just preventing you from getting the claim out to begin with. Forget the fact that they get the claim and deny it and all that stuff, but making complex coding systems and all that is part of the issue. So delays in reimbursement. They collect money. So as soon as they don’t pay you at the time you saw the patient, interest starts accruing on the money that’s yours still sitting in their bank account. So they’re going to collect that money, that interest, that’s called the float. They’re going to put that money, they actually reinvest that, there’s some very complex financial mechanisms that they use, so they’re going to reinvest that. Then they take all of those profits combined, they either keep the profits, they invest in better systems, technology, automation, and also invest in audits. All right. Eventually, hopefully they pay us, but then we have denials and underpayments, et cetera, that we have to deal with. So this is just kind of, I put together a quick overview. What I’m going to start talking to you about right now, we’re going to go into a lot of depth about each one of these steps, is how are we going to beat … What I talked to you last video about was how are we going to use their people, the types of person that they use, or our people? When I say people, our staff, our teams, how are we going to start to reposition those things, use them in a different way, use different types of people, leverage technology, automation, artificial intelligence, and leverage different processes to basically beat them at their own game? We’re going to go over a quick overview and I’ll come back to this and go into more depth that the way you beat them at their own game is on the claim level meaning every single claim you have to beat them at it. All right, so the claim starts when a patient actually checks in the door into your office, and then we see the patient, create a document, and we got submit the claim to insurance. I’m going to get back to cash in a second here so don’t get scared there. The claim is accepted by the insurance company. The AI, I’m going to go in depth about this, artificial intelligence looks for errors, submits it back to the office. We have EOB posting, secondary claim submission, secondary EOB posting, same process to find claims that need followup. The claim is fully processed, now we have a patient balance. If it was a cash patient, we just bypass all those steps and the claim, whether it’s cash or insurance, a claim is a claim. There’s a diagnosis code, there’s procedure codes, there’s the associated fees that go with those procedure codes for, you can have a different payer system even for cash patients. But we wind up with the patient balance and then we have all kinds of automation and technology that we can use to get that patient balance down to zero as fast as possible. So the name of the game is to leverage people, process, and technology to get that timeframe from time of service, the time the patient was seen in your office or checked in, to the time you have a zero balance for that patient. Obviously for insurance, that gets more complicated. So I’m going to go into more depth, little bit step by step in the next video. Stay tuned. Thank you very much. Again, this is Dr. Brian Capra From Genesis Chiropractic Software, and I will see you soon
