How to Increase Collections for Your Chiropractic Practice
Increase Collections with Your Provider Workbench Increase Collections from insurance companies by watching this 35 minute webinar. Learn how to increase your insurance collections by getting every claim paid in full and on-time. Your provider workbench lists every claim that needs your attention and once you provide the missing information, they get re-submitted and get paid. It’s much easier than trying to determine what needs to be done from a list of claims in a report. Watch the webinar immediately right on this page by filling out your name and email address. We know it’s a lot to ask for your email address and we promise not to ever sell it to another company. Read the transcript: Jason: So, we’ll get started here in just a minute. During the holiday season, Jess, just to kinda kick off this conversation. I probably had more conversations with our providers, our actual customers than I had maybe the previous three or four months because we’re covering so much. And patient volumes were down, so you had time to actually look at collections. And I think most were just saying, “Oh, we’re doing fairly well. I’d just like to see if we can do better.” But then there was one provider who had a conversation with some other of his trusted peers. And they’re an in-house provider in Texas, and by in-house just for anyone listening in, I simply mean that our billing team isn’t doing the follow-up and the posting. They’re doing that in their own office and frankly they know what they’re doing. They’re not an office that needs a lot of direction. They got some top notch people. And they were asking me, you know, about the workbench and I said, “Well, you’ve got an issue with yours and I’ll tie this into our topic here in just a second.” Their office has been so used to following up on claims a certain way that they would print lists of claims, put them on their Excel spreadsheets and then organize them how they’re used to for years and years and years. And they’ve got 20 years of experience so they knew what they were doing. And so the results were okay. They weren’t spectacular but they were okay. And because I said to him, “Listen, I’m really worried about your collections right now because I see that your workbench claims are so high.” And he said, well, for anonymity’s sake, I’ll just call her Jessica. Jessica, you know, was on the call and said, “Oh, I just don’t do it that way.” And so today, we’re gonna talk about what way people use our system to follow-up on claims and what best practices are. Because Jessica is an expert. She’s a billing expert. She knows more than I’ll ever know about medical billing. She cared about the practice, she was engaged. Jessica was doing the right thing, it’s just that nobody knew about it. And so I wanted to help Jessica accomplish her goals but also give the practice on her some piece of mind as to how to check up on Jessica should something go wrong. Because Jessica could win the lottery, Jessica might have to quit and move somewhere else, you know, there are lots of things that can happen. And so today, we’re gonna change our focus to not necessarily billing perforJasonce, per se, but the thing that helps you achieve billing perforJasonce and that is the tool in our system that helps identify claims that need an action. That action can vary and we’re gonna talk about what type of actions, you know, can be done. But more importantly, what the methodology is to choose and identify those claims that need follow up. And so that’s how we’re gonna spend this first 15 to 20 minutes of today’s time together. And then after that, we’re gonna open it up to any questions that anybody has regarding this topic or any other topic. So to do that, we’re actually gonna jump right into this topic and talk about measuring. We’ve done that here before and we’re gonna start off the same way. I’m gonna blow this up, Jess, to make it really easy for our viewers/listeners, webinar participants to see this. And I’m gonna start by focusing really largely on our dashboard. We’ve gone over this before but we’re gonna focus on a few numbers. Our 32,000 is our total outstanding accounts receivable. Those are the insurance charges that have either just been submitted or I don’t care if they were submitted ten years ago. If they still have a balance on them they’re gonna show show up here. Then we break those numbers down into buckets, 26,000, 4,600, and zero. I’ve talked about this on this program before but we like to measure how long it takes for a practice to get paid. If that practice is getting paid in 30 days, everything is great. If that practice is getting paid in 30 days, everything is great. That practice is not getting paid in 30 days and we have our 120-day bucket, meaning those charges, you know, our date of service from over 120 days ago, we get worried. Not just a little worried, we know that the likelihood of collecting on those claims goes way, way down. So today, we’re gonna talk about how to address the total outstanding backlogs that comprises an accounts receivable of 32,419. When I was on the phone with our hypothetical, Jessica, who is a real person in Texas, I asked her the question. I wish you could have been on this phone call, it was great because her answer made a lot of sense and I’d like to move our discussion and look at those particular claims. I asked her, “Well, how do you know which claims are gonna follow up on?” She goes, “I always work the hardest ones first.” That’s surprising, right? I can see the
Genesis Chiropractic Software Releases a New Care Plan Solution for Chiropractors
Automated Care Plan Management Software Is Now Available with Genesis Chiropractic Software Genesis Chiropractic Software helps practice owners automate patient care planning and monitoring. Their Care Plan software creates an agreement between the practice owner and the patient that automatically manages all five aspects of the patient care plan, including financial, scheduling, monitoring, notification, and projections. According to Dr. Brian Capra, President of Genesis Chiropractic Software, design and tracking a comprehensive care plan is very complex. “Patient will not commit to care if they cannot easily understand their financial commitment. As importantly, chiropractic office owners must stay compliant by charging, adjusting, and writing off the correct amounts. In our experience, insurance companies leverage any opportunity to delay longer and underpay more insurance claims. We leverage the cloud, billing experts, and Artificial Intelligence to create an effective and easy to use individual patient care plan,” says Capra. About Genesis Chiropractic Software by Billing Precision, LLC: Genesis Chiropractic Software by Billing Precision was designed by chiropractic business owners with both patient experience and practice profitability in mind. Genesis chiropractic software provides a complete chiropractic practice management system that supports every role in a busy chiropractic practice, from the owner and practitioners to the front desk and back office. It automates the vast majority of standard tasks, including patient relationship management, revenue cycle management, compliance and office management. Its exclusive workflow functionality continuously improves productivity, control and predictability, fostering teamwork and time savings, which leads to greater profitability and practice growth.
Increase Collections In Your Chiropractic Office
Use Payor Allowed Amounts to Increase Collections Increase collections from insurance companies by viewing this free 30 minute webinar. See how to use Payor Allowed Amounts to check if you have been paid on-time and in full for your services by the insurance companies. This built-in feature of our Genesis Chiropractic Software shows what you’re supposed to be paid for various CPT codes that you bill out. Use this to actually see what you were paid and then you can see if it’s an underpayment or not. Insurance companies are known to underpay by “mistake” as they try to keep money that should be paid to your Chiropractic practice. If an underpayment is detected then the claim can be sent to your billing team for follow-up with that insurance company. Let them get to the bottom of it for you. Watch the webinar immediately right on this page. Read the transcript: Jason: Welcome to those who are just joining, we are going to start in just a moment here. Waiting just for a few more people to jump from the web section to the audio section and then we’ll get today’s webinar started. Thanks for joining us. You’ll notice that you’re all muted and we ask that you check your questions in so that we can answer them as the webinar goes on. We’re going to start, we’re going to spend about 10 to 15 minutes on our topic today which is Collections, very specific to Collections, the Payer Allowed feature in our system, and we’ll talk about why it’s important and then we’ll open this up to any type of question that you might have after that. So, I’m looking forward and we’ll give you…actually it’s 2:05 now, Jessica. Let’s get started. So, my name is Jason Barnes, chief operations officer here and this is starting to sound like a broken record, isn’t it? Jessica: A little bit. Jason: As always. Jessica Pancost [SP], the head of our training and help desk team here at our organization, is co-hosting. So, today we are talking about a topic near and dear to pretty much every practice owner that we have and then a whole bunch of staff who are directly impacted by collections. And so, today we’re talking about collections, so we’re going to spend a little bit of the time talking, not necessarily about why collections are important, I think that one’s self-explanatory unless you want to spend some time on that Jess? Jessica: No. Jason: You’re good? but we want to talk about how to measure collections. Want to talk about how to break it down in two separate areas where a practice owner can make sure A, all their visits are getting paid, and B, all the visits are getting paid the right amount. Today, we’re going to primarily focus on the second of the two problems we discussed. The first problem of making sure all visits are getting paid, it’s not necessarily a simple problem to solve. However, we will spend just a moment in a broad stroke on how we approach that, and it has to do with our dashboard. You can see here that I’ve blown up one of the most important parts of our home screen and it’s the dashboard, here of course, in our dummy practice where we’re going to look at collections month to date, total outstanding accounts receivable, meaning all of the charges that need to be followed up on from an insurance perspective, and then we break down those accounts receivable into three separate buckets. The accounts receivable will be on 30 days, beyond 60 days and beyond 120 days. So, in this particular case, there are $32,419 total outstanding accounts receivable, $26,000, $6,000 and then zero dollars beyond 120 Days. We break this into percentages so that folks can measure, not only compared to themselves, but to the industry, how well they’re doing at making sure all visits are getting paid. Good question, Jess. “How do I know if my accounts receivable is really low and all our visits are getting paid?” It basically translates into if you have a visit that’s not paid, that’s sitting out there past 120 days, the likelihood of collecting on it, I don’t care if it’s from a patient or an insurance company, goes down significantly. Your goal as a practice owner should be to monitor this number. This zero dollars is unheard of, but it happens, and we can start talking about ways that it happens in this webinar series, but this is a great indication that you’re getting all of your visits paid. If your accounts receivable over 120 days is very, very low, one, two percent, it means that you’re getting 98%, 99% of your visits paid. And the rest of them are either getting written off, appropriately we hope, but there’s ways of tracking that as well or they’re being moved into a paid status which is the ultimate goal. So, if you know that your visits are getting paid, and again that’s not where we’re going to be spending the bulk of our time today, the other one is, “Are your visits getting paid the right amount?” And I ask a bunch of interrogative questions today want to go over the answers to them. What is the right amount? Jess, how does, you’re talking to somebody about collections, do you have any idea, you know, to tell them if they’re getting paid the right amount for their CPT codes? Jessica: No. Jason: Why not? Jessica: I don’t know [inaudible 00:04:37], but different contracts and different states and everyone gets paid… Jason: Its complicated, it’s a complicated answer and the first thing we want to let all of our providers know is if it doesn’t seem simple for you, that’s correct, you’re not in a simple industry. What I need to establish before we start looking into this is it’s meant to be confusing, it’s meant to not
Patient Retention Automation for Chiropractors
Patient Retention Automation View this free 30 minute webinar to see how to automate retaining your patients. To retain patients you need to educate, sell, communicate, track, measure, follow-up and solicit referrals. Our chiropractic software incorporates built-in patient education and patient communication via email, text and phone calls that can be automated to fit your needs. Our software also allows you to track your metrics, measure them and follow-up too. If you can use all of these features, or at least several of them, then retaining your patients will increase.
Chiropractic Patient Retention Tips
Retain your Patience and your Patients! Patient Retention: View this free 30 minute webinar to see how to retain your patients and keep your patience. For patient retention you need to educate, sell, communicate, track, measure, follow-up and solicit referrals. Genesis Chiropractic Software incorporates built-in patient education and patient communication via email, text and phone calls that can be automated to fit your needs. Our software also allows you to track your metrics, measure them and follow-up too. If you can use all of these features, or at least several of them, then your patient retention will increase. Read the transcript: Jason: Welcome everybody. Let’s get started. It’s always good to be here every week. I love the feedback we get after the webinars. Even some of the constructive criticism that we’ve gotten last couple of weeks has led to some great internal discussions and even some good client-facing discussions about how we can make certain aspects of our interface better. So I would like to open today with soliciting anybody who does see this, let us know. There’s something you like, we’d love to hear that. But more importantly, if there’s something we can make better, we would love to hear that as well. One more introduction, I’ve got Jessica Pancoast through the head of our help desk and our training team here. My name’s Jason Barnes. I’m the chief operating officer. And today our subject matter is near and dear to my heart because it’s the one thing every provider tells us that their primary focus is, and that is retaining patients. So, we wanna make sure we talk about retaining patients in two different ways: reports, and the actual work of retaining patients. Whenever somebody new comes on board, they often ask me, “Jas, what reports do you have?” It’s always a question that somebody asks us. I mean, you’ve been in a lot of those conversations as well and you’re smirking and smiling for those people who are just listening. Why are you smirking and smiling? Jessica: Because if you go to our report list, you’ll see we have a lot of reports. Jason: And the reason behind having a lot of reports is a lot of them are very useful. And for years, that’s how people managed their practice, they managed reports. And I can’t stress to you enough how valuable reports can be when you’re diagnosing a problem. You can’t do it. I’m on the phone with a provider today talking about low collections and we had all the right reports to get there and refute some of the claims for low collections, you know, for Blue Cross Blue Shield, and acknowledge some of them as being totally valid for their personal injuries. The reports were the only tool that allow us to actually diagnose whether or not these collections were low. But with patient retention, that’s a different ballgame. We’ve got reports. We got a No Show Report. We’ve got a report for your patients who leave your office without future appointments. Those are the two biggies. You have other reports that you could look at and talk about compliance. Say, “Hey, I’ve got a 60-visit care plan. You know, how many visits out of that care plan were missed or made?” You know, those are other ways of looking at it and there are even different reports which we could focus on. You know, how many new patients show up for the third visit? There’s a big one we get. You know, they come for their evaluation, they came for the report or findings, but they didn’t make it to the actual treatment portion. It happens. You get them talking about what the cost is, what the investment is going to be for patients, and that can really change things. Without those numbers, without those statistics, I know practices are basically paralyzed with what part of their process to actually fix. I definitely love reports. And there are some aspects of reports that I loathe, I hate. Because they look at a process that might be broken. And I’ll just talk about no shows because it’s going to be one of the focuses of today’s presentation. No shows are a big problem for practices. We see practices with up to 50, even 60% no show rates and those are caused by one of two things. One, do they have a scheduling policy that’s really loose? “Hey, we’re going to put you down on an appointment for next week. You know, show up, don’t show up, just call us. Let us know.” We have lots of practices to do that. Do I want to tell that doctor how to practice? To everyone listening to this, no. I have no intention. And Jess, let me check with you, you want to tell that doctor how to practice? Jessica: No. Not at all. Jason: No. Not our intention whatsoever. But we can’t measure how well that practice is doing at retaining those patients if we don’t have some sort of standard that we can rely on in the practice as far as scheduling. And the other reason is, and the more dreaded one is, they just didn’t show up. Why didn’t they show up? Oh, the spectrum of reasons is too big to actually speak out but there are only two reasons. They physically couldn’t, because of a legitimate excuse or they’re just not coming back. Which is which? I don’t think any provider I’ve ever spoken to actually cares. The action needed in that situation is for that patient to be contacted and confirmation that the patient’s coming back to be garnered by a staff member or the doctor themselves. That’s the desired result of any time a patient no shows. When a patient leaves your office without a future appointment, our statistics show that that patient is twice as likely as the patient who leaves the office with an appointment, literally, twice
Create Checklists for your Patients
Checklists for Chiropractic Patients mean a consistent Patient Experience View this free webinar to see how to create checklists for your patients. Why do you need a checklist? Because there are too many steps involved for your staff to deliver the best Patient Experience possible. How many patients come through your door each day? How many steps are involved for Day 1? How many steps are involved for Day 2? If a step is missed, how will your patient feel? If everything possible is done for your patient, then how will they feel about your practice? They will love you and they will refer their friends and their family. Create a checklist of every step involved and then you can assign each step to a staff member for each Day 1 patient intake. Then that checklist can be launched with one click when the patient checks-in. Each step is automatically assigned to the appropriate staff member and then they must complete the task. The practice owner can see at a glance if every staff member has completed their tasks for the day, so the owner can go home with the peace-of-mind that everything has been done that had to be done, for every patient. Then your staff shares in that peace-of-mind that their work is done. [sc name=”schedule-a-demo”][/sc] [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Read the transcript: Jason: All right. Welcome. We’re gonna kick off. For those of you just joined us, my name’s Jason Barnes. And I’m here joined by the head of our…both our training team as well as our Help Desk, Jessica Pancoast. And today we’re gonna talk about…so I’ll talk about the feature but we’re gonna get mostly into why this feature involves great practice management and making sure that your patients get the same health care delivered to them day in and day out. So healthcare delivery is not just, you know, treating a patient but it’s also making sure that the right things happen to the patient, gains an understanding of why they’re there, what is their experience is gonna be like, and then duplicating it over and over and over again. So that’s what today’s topic is, and our webinar for this week. So to kick that off, I’m gonna bring up the term “checklist”. I’ve been to many practices across this great land have seen lots of checklists. I know you have as well. What form did you see them in? Jessica: Paper. Jason: Paper? Jessica: Post-it note. Jason: Post-it notes are my favorite. Post-it notes. And where are those post-it notes located? Jessica: Usually around the monitor. Jason: The monitor has been the place. But I actually see them on paper charts as well. I see them on doors. I’ve actually seen one stuck to a kid. All right. Where these are the things that need to get done with this kid, and that was only one time. It was in Texas and the kid didn’t mind. But there’s a better way. What kinds of things need to happen for a patient? Well, we’re gonna explore that for just a moment or two here. And Jess, while we’re doing that, you mind finding that day one? Check those so we can look at it. And what kind of things have to happen to your patients? Verifications. Patient comes in. You want to make sure that if they have insurance to, you know, “Can they use it? What’s their deductible?” You know, so the doctor knows when they go to have a financial discussion with that patient. You know, what’s happening? I’m not gonna put a comprehensive list together today as an example, but we are going to start talking about the things that need to happen. Scheduling, treatment plans needed to be given, do they need to sign waivers or ABNs. Whatever has to happen for that patient, it’s usually not a list of two or three things, but a list of 10 plus things. How many times does it have to happen? It has to happen with every patient. There’s no time that you want a patient to miss that process. Even if a step doesn’t apply to them, like an ABM because they’re not a Medicare patient, it’s not the worst thing in the world to make sure that we have a task list listed for that patient. So most of the clients that come and talk to us are ones who have those checklists via paper or we didn’t talk about the most dreaded way, Jess, just committed to memory. I knew you’d get it. Committed to memory, right? How did the practice owner, how does an office manager, how does a staff member remember all those steps that need to happen? They’re on the mission. They’re there for the right reasons, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen every single time. There’s too many things that happen in a busy practice for someone to competently and very systematically remember every step that needs to happen. So, we wanna show you today how you’ll address missed steps in your patient health care delivery process. Is it foolproof? No. But is this provided a much, much better automated framework for you and your staff to do two things, remember the steps and then measure which steps are or are not being completed for those patients. So that’s gonna be the rest of the focus today. So we wanna make sure that every single patient gets their insurance verified. Every single patient has a recorded finding schedule. Every single patient has a care plan put in there. Every single patient signs all the things that they need to sign. Every single patient has a tour of the office, if that’s something that you wanna have happen. It can be customized for the patient process that you would like to have happen. Now today, I’m only talking about…patients are accusing me right now while I’m talking about patients. These checklists can apply to a
Care Plans for Chiropractic Patients
Learn how to create Care Plans for Chiropractic Patients View this free webinar to see how to create care plans for your patients and then you can 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. These care plans are a financial commitment plan for your patients and not a treatment plan of care. Read the transcript: Jason: Welcome and good afternoon everyone. We’re excited to have everyone here today, and as always, it’s Jessica Pancoast here with me, Jason Barnes, and today, we’re excited to be talking to you about care plans. And we’re going to spend about 20 minutes or so on a review of care plans, how they work, what their purpose is, and basically how they can help you foster better relationships with your parents, or with your patients. Little Freudian slip there never hurt. I would like your relationships with your parents to be good as well. But we’re gonna give this a couple of minutes before we get started. In the meantime, we see people, you know, logging in, dialing in. Make sure that if you have any questions, you type them in. Well, it’s a few minutes past the hour, so we’re actually gonna get started today. So to begin with, we’ve got a mission here to help two things, practices accomplish two things. You usually set financial goals which we end up focusing a lot on, but another thing that we do is trying to help them set goals for the amount of time it takes to manage their practice and the amount of effort that they have to put into helping their practice grow and hitting those financial goals. The same thing can be said for care plans. You want a patient to do two things. You want them to get better and you want them to tell other people about it. Well, one of the things that care plans can do is remove some of the doubt and some of the mystery about what a patient is gonna have to do to not only make a financial commitment but also a time commitment to get better. So this…understanding care plans helps with growing your practice, helping patients feel better with regards to their care plans, and helping them understand how their treatment plan is going to work. So to get started, what is a care plan in our system? I want to separate that from anything clinical. It is not how you’re going to treat the patient. I’m sorry, I got something in my throat here. This particular care plan is all about how on earth your patient is going to perceive their commitment, both financially as well as from a time standpoint. So the first thing a care plan is a financial commitment with the patient. Now, a financial commitment can be done in a number of different ways and one of the things that we’re gonna go over is how you can actually configure that financial agreement today. The second thing is that patient is going to typically come in for x number of visits. We see care plans range from 12 visits to 80 visits. But most of them incorporate some sort of step down program. We’re gonna get into that in a little bit more detail where the patient comes in on a weekly basis, maybe three to four times a week in the beginning and at the end of a traditional care plan they end up coming in once every two weeks or maybe even once a month. So these care plans can not only span a number of visits but longer periods of times ranging, you know, for six months, even a year in certain cases. Helping a patient make that one-time commitment, both financially as well as from a time standpoint, helps the doctor to gauge how progress is being made as well as the compliance with that care plan as the patient journeys through his practice and that care plan, to better health. So today, we’re gonna view how the Verical [SP] system can help a practice owner and staff, everyone understands how to help that patient make those agreements and commitments and track them. Jess, anything to add about what a care plan does? Jessica: No, I think that covered it. Jason: Awesome. So to get started we’re actually going to jump right into the system, many of you will notice that we’re looking at a schedule right now. The patient walks through the door, Jess, they’ve never been seen before. You usually don’t put a care plan together, you know, before a patient starts. They’re gonna come in. Some doctors do it at the end of a first visit. Some of them do it the second visit. Some of them make this at the third or in the fourth visits to do it. It really doesn’t matter how the doctor goes about planning to implement the care plan. However, dates are really important and when you start that care plan we want to make sure that everybody who is listening to this and watching this, understands that timeframe that you put the care plan in place for does not retroactively go back and look at previously billed visits. So this is something that I see very often, that people forget, so I’m just mentioning that here in the beginning of this broadcast so that everyone, as they’re listening, will hear us as we start to actually create a care plan. So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna create a care plan right now. We’re gonna review a care plan. We’re actually gonna talk about transitions from insurance over to cash, from cash to insurance, you know, from acute care
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.
