How to Use Patient Care Plans
Do you set-up care plans for your patients? Care Plans for your patients is a critical tool that you need to use in your Chiropractic Practice. How do you track the financial commitments of your patients on plans as well as their scheduled visits throughout the time period of their plan? One patient visit is never enough to completely solve their problem so how do you track it all? View this free webinar to see how to create your patient plans of care 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. Learn how with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: Jason: All right, well, we’re gonna get started. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. And one of our hotter topics, I would say, in just the sense that it comes up quite a bit because one of the features that we’re going to review today is one that is used quite often. And today, we’re actually gonna get into the nuts and bolts almost immediately. Lots of people use care plans, and let me be very clear what I’m talking about when I say care plan is this is not something…we’re not reviewing anything clinical today, we’re not talking about how to diagnose somebody, or how to treat them or even speak to them about that treatment. Today, we’re talking about how are you gonna track the financial commitments that you put in place for the patient, as well as their scheduled visits throughout a prescribed either time frame or set number of visits. So that’s the topic for today. And care plans are something that people ask about in a lot of different ways because not everybody uses them the same. Jess, you’ve gotta come across lots of folks who use care plans different from one another. Is that pretty common? Jessica: Yes. Jason: So today, we’re going to review the nuts and bolts of that care plan, how you can use it with your patient, how it’s beneficial. And we’d love to field any questions that people have regarding ways that they would like to apply it. Before we get into that, just the why, is something I always like to start with. Patient walks through your door and you want to help that person achieve and realize their health goals, maybe their fitness goals or both. And that patient at some point has to commit to more than one visit to make that happen. With almost every single clinician that we have in our system, one visit is never going to solve the problem. They’ve gotta commit to changing lifestyles, and changing habits. And our doctors are going to have to work with that patient and specifically coach them through, and treat them multiple times to get them there. That being the case, that commitment for that type of lifestyle change can span weeks, months, and sometimes even I’ve seen care plans last for entire calendar years. So today, as we’re going over those, we wanna to make sure that we understand how they’re going to be charged, how they’ll make payments, and then finally, how they’re going to schedule those visits, coupled with how are you gonna know when a care plan is off track? So we’re actually gonna go over all of those things today while talking about care plans and, Jess, this is where I’ll ask you to start jumping in and helping us here. Care plans, when somebody asks how to do it, I’d like to go through basically top to bottom creating one, setting up notifications, and then showing everybody who’s on today, how we would go about the workflow of where we would see those notifications and running reports. So can you start with the nuts and bolts on how to create one? Jessica: Sure, and I’m actually going to go ahead and create a new patient who will not have a care plan already created. So I’m just making up some information here, and create an account real quick. Jason: I looked at our webinar from last week, one Ctrl+ might do you some good just for the way that people are seeing it. And then if anybody ever has any questions, if they could chat them in, we’d be happy to answer them. Jessica: So I’m going to go into the Patient Care Plan tab, the CP tab. So this Care Plan tab is absolutely blank. It’s a new patient, never had a care plan set up a before. So what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna come down to the bottom because the top part would lift all…any care plans that are on this patient’s account. And I’m going to hit the New button. Hitting this button will give me an asterisk next to each of the required fields. So the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna name your care plan. What I see many practices do is they come up with a naming convention such as how many insurance visits over how many total visits, or wellness spring 2016, that type of thing. Most practices come up with a way to name things so that by seeing the care plan name, they have a general idea of how many visits it should have and how long it should last. So that’s different per practice but that is, in general, what I do see. So I’m just going to go ahead and name this one 12/36 2016. So, we’re going to select the start date. Please be aware that the start date will… You can set it to go back. So right now it’s the 12th of April. I can set it so that it starts on
Do you reconcile your collections monthly?
When your practice receives payments by cash, credit card or checks, how do you reconcile your practice with your bank account every month? To reconcile your bank account with the collections you receive at your practice is something they teach in business school, but not in Chiropractic School. Co-payments are being taken from your patients every day but checks from insurance companies come in by mail, weeks after the date of service. How do you keep track of everything and everybody? How do you know the money showing in your billing software is actually arriving in your bank account? The Genesis Chiropractic Billing Software can eliminate this memory management with several built-in tools to reconcile your finances. Your Accountant will appreciate these tools because they’re very helpful to number crunchers and bean counters. Learn how with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the Transcript: Jason: All right, thanks for joining today, I appreciate it. And looks like we’ve got most of the people that we were waiting for to log back in and actually allow us to get started today. We had a little bit of a technical difficulty. I’m Jason Barnes, and with me is Jessica Pancoast. Today our topic of conversation, we realize is not necessarily the…can I just use the term “the sexiest of topics” when it comes to provider interest, but it’s one of those nuts and bolts that you don’t want to put your car back together and have left over wondering if you actually needed this for the car to operate. Today we’re talking about monthly reconciliation. And this really has two definitions. When we actually post insurance money into the system, or even patient money into the system, and it doesn’t make it to your bank account, I…not to patronize anyone, but that doesn’t do you much good, does it? It can look really, really nice that you’ve got high collections that are represented here in Vericle, but unless they actually translate into funds that you and your practice can use, we realize that all together, this is not useful for you. So today, we’re actually gonna talk about that process that we urge, and would really beg everyone to do, if we could, to actually reconcile what we’re posting in Vericle versus what actually hits your bank account. And there are some nuances, but today we’re gonna highlight those tools that we utilize to do that. And to start, you can see here that I have zoomed in quite a bit on what we call our dashboard. And you can kind of see here I’ll zoom out. In the upper right-hand corner, I’ll zoom back in here that you can see, and I’m overemphasizing this dashboard. This dashboard is what we’d like to think is a tool that every practice owner or office manager could use to see where they’re at, you know, during the month. And if you look at this, that first number in green, the $27,000 number, represents insurance collections month to date. As you look at that number, and then if you were to log in to your bank account website and check that out, you wanna make sure that the discrepancy between the two doesn’t exist, but you also shouldn’t be too surprised if they don’t match. And today, we wanna go over why that is. Why would we expect there to be one number in Vericle, and perhaps another number in your bank account reflection? So today we’re gonna focus on that, and to get us back to basics here, we’re gonna switch over and we’re actually gonna start talking about the two tools that you’re gonna use to get there. Now, you’ll notice that one of these tools is the same as a tool that we recommended last week to actually perform some of your daily or more weekly reconciliation steps, which is your credit cards, your point of sale, anything that you’re entering into the system is gonna have a payment type associated with it, and we’re gonna use this set of tools in order to make sure that something posted in the system is actually in your bank account. So the two reports that we’re going to show you today, probably are…reports is somewhat of a misnomer, in this case, Jess? Jessica: Yeah, reports usually just give you information and that’s it, but [inaudible 00:03:35] you actually do something with. Jason: Yeah, it’s a tool that can report information back to you, but really, it’s only useful if you’re using it as an input and a place to store information that you’ve confirmed is in your bank account, or, conversely, we have posted and isn’t in your bank account. So, the Check and Cash report is one, and the Monthly Invoice is the other. First things first, how do you get to them? Under Reports, you’re gonna head to your Reconciliation dropdown. This Reconciliation dropdown offers a lot of different tools for you to utilize. In this particular case, we are recommending these two tools, the Monthly Invoice right here, and your Check and Cash report, as your two monthly tools to make sure that all the money that’s posted within Vericle is actually in your bank account. Let’s get out of those. So this monthly invoice, you’ll notice here first, going over the nuts and bolts of it, is that you have some options. The first thing is is you can print this. You can refresh it, you know, if there’s a need to, but this other portion is you can actually export this to an Excel file, that Csv, the comma separated value line, if you were to actually access that, will put it in a format that will allow you to copy and paste this easily into Excel and OpenOffice, a LibreOffice, something along those lines. But, you’ll notice here that you have the month collected. Today happens to be April 5 of 2016. You
It’s About Time to Make More Money in Your Chiropractic Practice
Are you making enough money in your Chiropractic practice? Enough to pay your overhead, your staff, and yourself? Are you making enough to build the type of future that you and your family deserve? Or, are you just making ends meet or struggling each month on the hamster wheel of trying to bring in new patients to replace the ones that have gone inactive? Don’t you think that it is about time that you made more money in your practice? So many times when we talk about how to generate more revenue in a Chiropractic practice, we get one of two responses. The first response we see is the one of, “I didn’t go into Chiropractic for the money. I went into it to help people.” I have one answer for this and of course you went into Chiropractic to help people. If not, you would not be a good doctor. However, that does not mean that you shouldn’t make a good, even great income. Helping people does not mean not helping yourself. “I didn’t go into Chiropractic for the money. I went into it to help people.” My second answer to that is that if we don’t make enough in our own practices, what will ever encourage others to become Chiropractors themselves. To ensure the future of generations of Chiropractors to come, we have to show that we are a viable profession financially. The second response we receive from Chiropractors when we talk about generating more revenue is, “How do I get more patients to drive this revenue.” And, that is the response that I love to answer because the answer is so simple that most of the time it is completely overlooked. The answer is that you don’t need more patients to increase the income of your practice, you just need to better manage the patients that you already have. That said, how do you achieve it? It is actually easier than you may think. One simple switch can help you to better manage every task of every day, each interaction you have with your patients, encourage patient compliance, drive revenue, and create patients for life. The answer is to use a proactive Chiropractic software, like Genesis Chiropractic software that we developed for my own practice. Stop memory-managing your office and instead ensure that every patient is receiving the optimum level of care possible, not just with your adjustments but with how their appointments are made, how their billing is handled, how your staff follows up with every detail needed to show that patient that they are valued. Once you do this, you will be surprised at how quickly the income of your practice rises with fewer management and staff hours. Once you do this, you will be surprised at how quickly the income of your practice rises with fewer management and staff hours. When you know that your claims are clean, when every claim is filed on time and followed up with right when needed, when every patient is scheduled for appropriate visits and re-exams, and when you can intervene to prevent a patient from dropping off of care the second a warning sign is seen, the revenue in your office goes up dramatically. You no longer have to spend your time and your budget trying to recruit new patients. Instead, you are leveraging the patient pool you already have. Even better, this also benefits your patients by ensuring that they receive the best care possible and maximizing the possibility that they will continue care both to maximum medical improvement as well as through maintenance. That is the key to making more money in your Chiropractic practice and getting off the hamster wheel of patient attrition. Isn’t it about time to make the change to a Chiropractic software that can help you boost the revenue of your practice along with the care you give your patients?
Do you reconcile your collections daily?
When your practice receives payments by cash, credit card or checks, do you have a way to reconcile your practice with your bank account? Reconciling your bank account with the collections you receive at your practice is something they teach in business school, but not in Chiro School. Co-payments are being taken from your patients every day but checks from insurance companies come in by mail, weeks after the date of service. How do you keep track of everything and everybody? The Genesis Chiropractic Billing Software can eliminate this memory management with several built-in tools to reconcile your finances. Learn how with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the Transcript: Jason: All right we’re gonna get started here. We’re just going to type out the message one more time to the people and then we’ll get going. And I’m grateful as always to have Jessica Pancoast, head of our health [inaudible 00:00:12] training team here with me. My name is Jason Barnes, and today we’re actually talking about something relevant to every single practice out there. Each day you’re seeing patients and there are all sorts of things that you wanna track and make sure that it went well, you know, how many patients were checked in versus checked out, how much money was brought in checks, cash or maybe even in patient payments versus insurance payments. You wanna make sure that, you know, there wasn’t something that went really off the rails for that practice…for your practice that day. And today, we’re gonna talk about how to reconcile at the end of the day to make sure you’re tracking all of the things that are important to you, number one. And number two, how to help your staff gain clarity on what their job and what their role is so at the end of the day when they come to report to you or they’re able to leave the practice for the day, they know that they’ve got everything done that they were supposed to. And that clarity really leads to ownership and in our experience where we see that front desk person or the office manager really has an understanding of how that practice is supposed to run, and what’s supposed to happen at the end of the day to make sure that all money was collected and all patients got taken care of, then they typically feel much more vested in the success of the practice. So, that’s the subject matter for today and that’s how we’re gonna go about tackling this. Two, we’re gonna divide this into a couple of different categories and we’re gonna start out with money. Money is just never a bad place to start out with, right? So one of the simpler things that each practice expects to be done every single day is, patients walk through the door, they’re paying copayments, coinsurance, deductibles and deductible season is rapidly coming to an end, but I still see it happening. And all of that money that came through the door, in addition to any paper checks or even electronic trust funds transfer, [inaudible 00:02:21] for the day, how do we make sure that all of the things that get posted in the system in Vericle are actually, you know, getting to the bank account? So we’re going to start out with how to we’re gonna actually reconcile those two things. So just one little recommendation as far as where should they go and what should they look at first if they’re going to try and reconcile how much money came into the practice versus what they’re actually gonna deposit for that day? Jessica: Well, there is a number of different reports in our system. What I usually recommend for reconciling the cash and the paper checks that they got from their patient is actually in the checking cash report. It breaks it down…the cash, of course, is all on together and nothing specifically add in a random code in the check number when they’re adding it on the patient account. But the check in cash report will break it down by each check number, so it’s a lot easier to match it up check number by check number. And that way as something’s entered in the system, they’re able…and can’t find the check they know exactly what check they’re missing and exactly which patient it’s from and vice versa. If they have a check and they can’t find it on that report, they know that that check was not entered. Jason: Oh, perfect. And we’ll show them that in just one second. But I’ve visited a lot of practices, and I’ve been there at the end of the day. I was in Vegas last year with a real high volume practice. You know, they had a couple of inboxes, right? And they had the drawer where they have the checks from the patients and the cash from the patient, you know, they have a credit card machine right then and there. Hopefully, they’re using an integrated credit card solution where they’re able to run that report and see exactly, you know, what number was associated with credit card bookings for that day. But, in the drawer right next to it was backed up all the checks that they received from the insurance company. So, what you’re describing, though, wouldn’t just help them with the cash, right, that they received from patients. They will use that same process for any insurance checks that they got as well, right? Jessica: Yeah, so any insurance check that they got, if they are using one of our billing teams, they’ll send over those BOPs [SP], the team will post them and then they’d be able to match it again on that same exact report. If they are posting those checks themselves, it’s just the same as posting patient payment so they’d be able to verify it right away. Jason: Thanks, nice. All right.
How Many Office Tasks Does a New Patient Generate?
When a new patient comes to your Chiropractic Practice, how many steps must your Front Desk person take to create a new patient account? Typically, a new patient comes in to fill out forms and then your Staff has to remember to copy their driver’s license and their insurance card. Next, the patient’s data has to be typed into a computer. Co-payments also have to be collected and future appointments need to be scheduled. Are all of these tasks being completed for every patient? How do you know? The Genesis Chiropractic Software can eliminate this memory management with a tool we call a Task Checklist. All of the steps are written down and turned into tasks that can be automatically assigned to your staff members. The Task Checklist is launched with every new patient and your staff will know exactly what to do without being told. The Practice Owner will be able to see at a glance if every task was done for every patient, which ensures a consistent patient experience in your office. It also gives you and your staff peace-of-mind knowing everything is done at the end of the day. Learn more with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: Jason: Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome. Jason Barnes and Jessica Pancoast here for this week’s webinar, and this week we’re actually talking about all of those tasks that have to be done for every patient or for every day or for every month in your practice and remembering to figure out what those tasks are and making sure that they get opened and then done. Today we’re gonna talk about how we can more easily manage all those repeatable things that need to be done in your practice. So we’re going to…I think the term Jess, is reintroduce, reintroduce the task checklist because, you know, if you haven’t been reading all the release notes, we’ve got some new things which I think are kind of exciting, different ways we can manage these. So that’s what we’re talking about. We’ll give it another minute or two before we get started. Okay, let’s get started. I’ll do another brief intro. Jessica Pancoast is the head of our help desk in our training team. My name is Jason Barnes. Today we’re talking about operations of a practice. Those things that need to be done for let’s just say every new patient or every day you want your staff to do an end of day reconciliation, and there are steps that they have to remember to do, make sure they tally up the cash, make sure they tally up the…kind of previewing for next week, Jess…tally up all of the insurance payments and make sure we know what’s going in the bank account versus what’s posted in the system. Maybe you want to do inventory control on, you know, a certain time of the month, whatever it is. As a practice owner or an office manager, you wanna make sure that those tasks get done but sometimes just remembering to assign them to people can be a task in and of themselves. So today we’re going to talk about how we can, number one, identify what work in your office needs to be done on a repeated basis. Number two, figure out how we can create those items in a list somewhere. Number three, figure out how we can best execute those on a regular basis so that you as the practice owner or administrator can keep track of the fact that this work actually got done. The concept of what we’re gonna call a task checklist is not new. We used to call them ticket macros in our system, and Jessica just created or corrected me saying that they’ve been around for four years, not for three years. We’ve seen them more widely used in the last year or so by many of our practices. So, first of all, what exactly is a task? For anybody who’s not using our system which I believe most of the viewers end up being our users. They know what tasks are, uses are. But anyone who doesn’t know, a task is not an email. It’s not a notification that something happened. A task is an action item that needs to be done within [inaudible 00:03:12] by a certain individual. That task…and can you bring up a task work screen, Jess? Those tasks can range in varying spectrum from order more coffee cups to follow up on a no-show to get my credentialing done for Medicare. Any way you look at it, none of these tasks are created, you know, people ordering coffee cups is in no way on par with getting my credentialing done with Blue Cross Blue Shield. And so these tasks have a couple of things, and their anatomy is important. They have a priority associated with them, the critical tasks all the way down to low priority. And for us, we want everybody to understand that those priorities actually mean something. When we need something done, the people we assign it to, typically is not the only thing we’ve asked them to do, right? When I’m looking at an office manager role versus a front desk role, very different roles within an office. The front desk has to remember to do a lot of things though. Somebody checks in, how many things are they required to remember at that moment? Ensure they have an insurance card. Do they have a balance from a previous visit? Did they have their next visit showed up? I can keep going. How are they gonna remember to do all that? There are some old rock stars out there that do remember it every single time. But if you add to that saying “Order coffee cups,” or, you know, “Make sure that we get more vitamins in for this particular type,” that’s when you can start to throw people
It’s About Time We Made Chiropractic the Dominant Healthcare System
Haven’t you heard ever since Chiropractic school that Chiro should be the dominant healthcare system? I know that I have. Chiropractic allows the body to naturally heal itself, awakening the potential of our own nervous systems. With this power, why isn’t Chiropractic at the forefront of every healthcare journal, study, and the primary choice of care for the majority of patients? It should be. That is why today I want to talk about what it would take to actually make Chiropractic the dominant health care system in our country and what we can do to help because it is about time. Should Chiropractic be the Dominant Health Care System? Studies show that there is a tipping point in any movement. If you can get a certain percentage of the population to embrace an idea, from there it spreads organically. That tipping point is 20%. For us, this means that once 20% of the population embraces Chiro as a first choice for healthcare, the rest of the population will follow. The question is, how do we reach that tipping point? We only have approximately 50,000 licensed Chiropractors in the U.S. and not all of these are even in active practice. In order for this number of doctors to see 20% of the population, each one would have to see more than 1,000 patients every week. Is this possible? Maybe it is for some DC’s in high-volume practices but not all Chiropractors would want to complete that many patient visits each week. This means that we do not have enough Chiropractors in practice in our country to hit that goal of making Chiro the healthcare system that the majority of patients choose first. Without more students choosing to become Doctors of Chiropractic instead of medical doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. Chiropractic cannot become the dominant system in this country. That brings us back to the same problem we have talked about in the past, the problem of making a career as a Chiropractor an attractive choice for these students. We have to show them that Chiropractic is not only a vital profession but can also provide them and their families the lifestyle they need and desire. To choose to be a Chiropractor, they can’t live in fear that they won’t be able to run a successful practice, see enough patients, or make enough money. They have to know that the time and money they invest in school will pay off in the future. There is only one way we can do this. Each of us as Chiropractors has to make our own practice successful. We have to use every tool available to us to improve the experience of our patients, bring in more patients, and create a thriving business. Every Doctor out there who is a success, who cares for patients every day, and who is spreading the message of the power of Chiropractic is showing those future students that it can be done, that Chiropractic is great career choice. We need those students, those future Chiropractors. We need more Chiropractors to see more patients. That is the only way we will ever reach that 20% tipping point and it is the way to finally make Chiropractic the dominant healthcare system. It is about time that we all work together to reach that goal.
How to Detect Insurance Underpayments
How can you tell if your Chiropractic Practice is being paid in full and on time by insurance companies? How can you tell if there’s an underpayment? Underpayments by Insurance Companies for the services that you render is a constant problem that you need to pay attention to. The Genesis Chiropractic billing software can detect insurance company underpayments and then you’ll know the details you need to address the situation. The elimination of insurance industry underpayments is a challenge because their goal is to not pay for anything until they absolutely have to. Their next tactic is to underpay and hope that you don’t catch on. They also try to delay your payments until you forget about it, and they typically take 120 days to get around to your payments. Our built-in tool will help you to detect and then to fight underpayments. Learn more with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the Transcript: Jason: Thank you for everyone who joined us today and we’re gonna get rolling with our topic today. We touched on this topic really a few months ago, but we’re coming back to it, on how to manage collections in your office, very specifically, with measuring collections. There are two ways that we recommend as best practices. I’m not sure there is a third or fourth way to measure collections. Number one is, that all your visits get paid, and number two is, that they get paid the right amount. So today we’re actually focusing on that second portion of, “How do you know if your visits got paid the right amount?” So that will be our topic of discussion and we’re going to make some disclaimers here at the beginning. Is the right amount is specific when it comes to all the insurance companies that you’re in network with, and a little more of the guesstimate, when we’re talking about all of the pairs that are out of network. So we’re gonna go through, to the best of our ability, our options. But if you know a number that you should be getting paid for an insurance company, we’re gonna talk about how you can make sure that we are going to, number one, identify an underpayment. Number two, create workflow that will assign that underpayment to a specific person. And then number three, make sure you can follow up on it and know that you got paid the right amount. So practices are constantly concerned and worried about whether or not their collections are what they’re supposed to be. And it’s a challenge to try and come up with some formula, or algorithm to make sure you got that. So I wanna talk about, first of all, measuring collections. And then, you know, second, whether or not you guys can utilize the tools that we’re talking about to measure your underpayments or potential underpayments. So, collections, when we are talking about a practice and you look at a number in the upper right-hand corner here. And I’ll make it slightly bigger, and now we can use a few of our tools here to help annotate this. You know you’ve got collections… Jessica: Oops, I’m gonna select the color. Jason: You’re looking at, you know, the theory up here of $27,000 that you’re going to get paid, you know, in this month. How do you know that’s the right number? Well, each and every time that you look at that, you have to be saying to yourself, “Could I be getting more?” Every doctor I talk to thinks, or practice owner thinks they could be getting more. If all of your business have been paid and you check out that every single one of your date of service has had a payment posted to it. The next laudable question is, “How do I know that, that got paid the right amount?” Oh, how do I get rid of that? Jessica: Go to top first. Jason: Back to the top, perfect. And, today, we’re gonna bring you over to a couple of other accounts, and we’re gonna show you two reports that will work and help you understand, the first is your billing staff’s report. Your billing statistics report will help you run some trend analysis. And what I’ve done here is I’ve opened up our billing statistics report under billing analytics, billing steps. And the first thing that I’ve done is selected a date range. For this particular report, I selected all the way from January 1st to December 31st of 2015. So looking at the entire calendar year. And there is a lot of useful information that comes in the billing statistics report. Not every single column or piece of information will be something you wanna look at each time. But I’ve selected two metrics to marry together for this particular report. You’ll notice that I’ve sorted this into a month over month range, as I’m doing month of service. So what this means is, all of the dates of service that happened in that particular month. So I don’t care if you billed it out late, you could have billed a January date of service in April, but it would still be counted here for the month of service of January. And then I chose CPT codes, because…any of you providers that are in network with an insurance company, your contractual agreements will be either paid by visit or paid by CPT code. Here we’re focusing on paid by CPT code. And we can see here that you’re going to have a total number of claims of 567, you know, $50,960 billed out. But more importantly, you can see how much is, on average, paid by charge for each one of those months, for the CPT code of 9711O. And you can see here that it’s not a consistent number, month over month. All right? So what courses this fluctuation? Obviously there are balances left
Fortis Payment Systems is Integrated with Genesis.
Use Fortis Payment Systems to process credit card payments in real time online, not with a slow telephone terminal. Fortis Payment Systems is Integrated within Genesis Chiropractic Software. You can charge a patient’s card from within their account and you can charge their card easily from the Point of Sale screen as well. The payments can be tagged separately and they’re automatically posted to the patient’s account. Fortis will handle all of your card charging needs securely and they will handle your PCI Compliance as well. That’s very important. Be sure that you absolutely do not store any patient credit card numbers in your office or you could have a PCI compliance violation. View this webinar to see other features and to see how it works. Learn more with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: Jessica: All right. Well, let’s get started. Again, my name is Jessica Pancoast and I run our training desk and help desk. Today, we are concentrating on third party companies, and today it is Fortis and we have Jonathan McAlees from Fortis to help us out with that. Welcome, Jonathan. Jonathan: Thanks so much for having me. So, we’ll talk a little bit about the integration that we have and I’m not sure, do we have control yet, Jessica? Jessica: I did promote you to a presenter. You should be able to download the… Jonathan: Okay, perfect. Yeah, okay. Here we go. I’ll start sharing my screen. All right, can you see my screen now? Jessica: Yes. Jonathan: Perfect, okay. So, I’ll give you guys a little bit of background into Fortis real quick. So, Fortis is a merchant services company, so we do credit card processing. We specialize in that. We specialize in high-end niche verticals. So, what that means is we aren’t a processing company that is built for everyone. We go into very niche verticals and we specialize in that. And so, one of those verticals that we’re in is obviously the EHR kind of chiropractic, PT, medical background. And so, what we did was we built a specific gateway geared for specifically what you guys are doing. So, what we found was a lot of the stuff that was out there was built for everyone, and it’s built for these web developers and it’s not really built for an office to take payments for their patients. And so, when we met up with Vericle we were able to integrate, and they have this great integration that allows you to take one-time or, you know, store credit cards or bank accounts on file, as well as set up reoccurring payments if you need that. And so, you know, as the market changes and you guys deal with EMV, we wanna make sure that you’re compliant because one of the things that happens is offices don’t realize all the compliance that they’re under. So, lucky you, as an office, not only are you under HIPAA compliance but you are also under PCI compliance by the fact that you take credit card payments. And so, we wanna make sure that you’re compliant and make sure that you’re following the regulations, and we want that to happen on our side, not your side. So, we allow the software to handle all of your PCI compliance for you. One of the things that we see within offices is they do things like they write down credit card numbers. And that’s a big, big no-no in our space. Most offices don’t realize that you can get fined up to $5,000 per credit card that you have written down. So, this is not something you wanna do. It could bankrupt an office if you have a hundred or a couple hundred cards written down and you are breached like that. So, we wanna make sure that you’re compliant, that you’re not doing that, and the other thing is there’s easier ways to do that. So, we’re gonna show you a little bit of that today, how the integration works with Vericle, and how it seamlessly integrates and allows your payments to auto-post back. So, as you can see here, I am right in the Vericle system. I’ve got John Smith, my patient, selected. To access Fortis, all you have to do is click more and then Fortis. You can see we haven’t left Vericle, so we’re still in Vericle but we go right from the patient’s profile in Vericle to their profile within Fortis. Now, from within here, you can do anything you need to on the payment side. So, if you wanna run a one-time transaction, a one-time swipe, you can just click the charge contact button, swipe a card with the little $14 USB swiper from amazon and then your transaction is done. It’s just as if you were running a terminal, except this terminal is now online. Well, we kind of like to say, and we do have terminals and some offices like them, but we don’t often recommend them. Because think of it as a flip phone. A terminal is like a flip phone and this system is like an iPhone. So, you’d really, really be wasting out if the only thing you used on your iPhone feature was making phone calls and text messages. There’s a lot of other things that you can do. Well, that’s kind of similar here. So, we don’t want you just stuck only being able to do one or two things on a terminal. We have a full terminal online. So, you can come in here and swipe payments just like I showed you there. The other thing you can do, and this is really where we start to help save you time and money, is you can store credit cards or bank accounts in our system. We do this all securely, through a system or process called tokenization. If you’re not familiar with tokenization, essentially, what we are
Can Chiropractic Software Create Peace of Mind?
Over our last posts, we’ve been talking about a theme….It’s About Time. Today, I would like to continue on that path but in a way that is a little more personal for each of us as Chiropractors. I want to talk about how we feel each night when we get home from our office, when taking care of patients is over for the day because I think that it’s about time that we all have peace of mind. It’s about time that when our day is over, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything that could have been done to make our day successful and our patient experience the best it could possibly be has been done. It’s about time that we don’t have to lay in bed at night and try to remember if every chart was updated and wonder if every no-show was rescheduled. Most of the Chiropractic systems that we put to work in our offices are reactive in nature. If a patient doesn’t show up for an appointment, someone has to remember to call them and then actually do it. We have to look through report after report to see if all of the insurance claims have been filed, followed-up on, and paid. There is another report to look at to see if re-exams have been scheduled and another one to go over for follow-up calls. These reports may give us insight into our businesses if we have time to read them but they also create a paperwork nightmare. As a Chiropractor, we already have to wear so many hats as a business owner, manager of employees, and doctor and educator to our patients. Adding on the necessity to read multiple reports every single day just to make sure the necessary actions for the day have been taken is overwhelming. Even worse, systems like these mean that your mind can never really leave your office because you have to memory manage every little detail. I believe that it is time for a change, a complete shift from these reactive chiropractic systems that leave us overwhelmed and stressed out to a proactive system that gives us the peace of mind we’ve been searching for. I know that when I shifted my own office from my old, outdated processes to a new proactive chiropractic software EHR system, the relief that came with it was immeasurable and created peace of mind for me in my practice. With a proactive chiropractic practice management software system in place, each and every day can be distilled down to one number. That number tells you how many tasks that should have been completed were left undone so your goal for this number is always zero. That zero at the end of the day tells you in one number that every task that needed to be completed for your day to be successful was done. That is peace of mind. Even more, if the number isn’t zero, it tells you specifically which task was not completed and whose responsibility that task was. This lets you better manage both your own time and that of your staff and assign the people to the tasks that best suit their abilities. There is no better way to make sure your practice is running smoothly each and every day. As Chiropractors, we face many challenges both as a profession and in our day-to-day practices. This is one area that we can control. We don’t have to live with the worry and stress that those old, reactive systems cause. We don’t have to search report after report, memory manage the details, and still wonder at the end of the day if everything has been done. We can choose to eliminate the worry, manage our offices better and easier than ever before, and improve the care and experience of our patients simply by changing our system. Proactive chiropractic EHR software that distills our days down to one report, one number is the answer because isn’t it about time for peace of mind.
How Do You Assess Your Practice?
How can you get your finger on the pulse of your practice? Assess your practice regularly because this week’s webinar is about your Collections. How do you assess both Insurance and Cash Collections. How do you track your collections? Do you have a tool to monitor the ups and downs with a simple glance at a chart? The tools to assess and track collections metrics are built into our software and your Practice Success Coach will help you to understand these metrics and their relationships to other metrics. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be measured to know the health of your Practice. The KPIs can be seen at a glance with our radar chart and histograms, right on your home page. Learn more with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: Jason: I thank all of you for spending some time with us on Tuesday afternoon, except for us here in California where it’s still the morning. Just got off the phone with [inaudible 00:00:08] in California. They were surfing earlier today. And now they’re gonna go in for their shift. Jessica: That would be nice. [inaudible 00:00:20] and cold here. Jason: Yeah. To start different, I asked them to stop describing their day to me. I just wasn’t interested in hearing anymore. But that’s okay. They were nice about it. They were really nice about it. But I’ve got Jessica Pancoast, the head of our training helpdesk team. And I am Jason Barnes, and I’m a chief operations officer here. And we’re continuing with our theme of assessing your practice on a regular basis. We wanna make sure that all the practices that work with us or if you don’t work with us and you’re thinking about working with us, how do you get your finger on the pulse of the practice so that you can tell what’s happening with your practice and whether or not there’s a moment during the month or week where you can tell, “Hey, things are not going well. Things are off the rails. How do I recover?” So we went over last time what are the metrics we should be looking at. And the first one was your collections. We then broke those down into two subcategories, your insurance and your cash collections. And so, today, we’re actually gonna spend some time going over that. And so, as always, our format is we mute everyone. There’s just too many people that come to have an open conversation. So should you have any questions, please chat them in, and we’d be happy to answer them as they come. So what I’m gonna do here is that…and I actually brought up data for one of our practices here. It’s anonymous at this point. But I do wanna focus on it for a moment. This practice is one of our more proficient and highly influential practices. And I know I’m thrilled that they’re with us, because they teach us a lot about how to run a practice as well. The art of practice management is always evolving. Nobody has all of the answers. But, together, we come pretty close with this particular practice. So we’re actually going to review this briefly. This is what we call our radar chart. And what this is is it allows you to look at practice performance across a lot of different metrics all in one view with two snapshots, and this particular snapshot goes over a long time period. That’s time period of October of 2014 to February of 2016. And so were able to take a look… Jessica: It’s okay if you don’t have it filled in. Jason: Oh, well, that’s not the way I wanted that to happen. I’m just looking if there’s any other profile that I can use. So what we’re gonna do is…unfortunately, this doesn’t allow me to drill into the historical data. Right now, you can see that the total collected is $93,000 for the month of October of 2014. And for the month of February, they’re projected to hit $96,505. It might be hard to see. That’s why I’m reading it out. No one knows if that’s good or bad. How do you know where or not collections are where they’re supposed to be or whether or not you’re going to perform well this month or underperform? Why? Why is it so challenging, because you might have a lot of visits this month? And if you look, they have 1,174 visits and $96,000 collected. We can tell because this is what their visit count is up here in the top. But a year and a half ago, Jess, they had 2,169 visits and almost the same amount in collection, $93,000. Today, we wanna talk about how these numbers don’t exactly add up. You wanna look at collections, but a lot of things can cause collections. One of the things that practices often do is try and correlate the high visits to high collections. You typically think, “If my visits go up, my collections should go up.” Most practices, that ends up being true. But in this particular case, collections went up, and the reason I choose this particular month is visits are way, way down. The reason for this is the month in which you’re collecting money typically isn’t the month that you saw the patient that those collections are attributed to a distribution of payments that come from the previous month, the previous six months. They can come from as far away for a personal injury account that reached a settlement on some sort of litigation from two years ago. So that’s one way of looking at it is you’re gonna have the bank account, fill up this month with payments for dates of service that range for the last two years. But their target and when they hit it is this month. So how on earth is a practice owner supposed to know whether
