Can You Spend Your Care Plan Escrow Account?
Your Escrow Account – How Do You Track it? Learn about your care plan escrow account and about how to legally administer the account. Can you spend it? Should it be kept separate? How do you track it for every patient with a care plan? What’s your total? This account is the money that your patients have paid in advance for their care and you’re supposed to hold it until the appropriate time to pay for their treatments. See how easy it is to track your account by date range and then see a total with a few clicks in our software. See it and learn more by watching this free webinar on this page right now. Read the transcript: Jason: Well, welcome, everyone. My name’s Jason Barnes, and I’m the Chief Operations Officer here, and I just love talking to people who are looking to solve problems. And today, we received a request from a fairly number of our clients to learn how to better track and understand a single topic, which I’ll introduce here in just one second. But with me is Jessica Pancoast, who is the head of our Training and Help Desk teams, so we’re gonna be co-presenting this particular one today. To start off with, we’ll define the feature/the problem that we’re trying to solve. When a patient walks into an office and agrees to a particular care plan, there are three ways of handling this particular incident, right? They can make payments as they go, co-payments, whether or not they’ve got insurance or if they agree to an all-cash plan, they can do that. It’s not a problem. Jess, I would say we’ve got lots of practices operating successfully in this particular model, right? Jessica: Yes. Jason: Not an issue. But then the next two can help us run into a problem or two as patients prepay or have recurring payments for their treatment plans. There are three scenarios doctors can find themselves in. Now, one, they can be in a state that doesn’t even allow this as I’ve listed here as our second item. Some states require separate accounts, but any way you look at it, regardless of whether or not you can or can’t take prepayments, if you have one, you have to track it. And I’ll start with, you know, I will quote, I didn’t write this quote down, one of our doctors who said, “If I was to die tomorrow,” Jess, correct me if I’m wrong, “If I was to die tomorrow, I need to know how much I owe my patients.” And so, that is the correct quote? Jessica: Yes, or rather, this is how much the staff needs to give the patients back as he’d be dead. So… Jason: Excellent clarification. So today we’re talking about escrow accounts. Escrow accounts represent the money that a patient has paid for their services that an office has not earned yet. So today we’re gonna to talk about not only why you should do it for good accounting practices, but some of you might have real legal motivation to actually do this. I know in the State of New Jersey, prepaying for, let’s just say, any type of service can be illegal. So, you have to really watch what you’re doing. But in most areas, there are lots and lots and lots of patients who prepay or set up recurring payments to pay for their care with the doctor’s office. So today, we’re gonna talk about how to solve that problem and what is that we can do to help you keep track of it so that you can do a few things. And to cut to the chase, if you’ve got a bank account that’s separate, you’ll have to keep X number of dollars in that account. If you don’t have a separate bank account, for balancing reasons, you need to make sure you keep at least a certain amount in that bank account cover the credits. I’m not a tax expert. I’m not a compliance expert. You can always contact one, but they will share some information that you do need to keep certain number of dollars in your accounts to cover the credits that you need to for patients that you have not yet rendered services for but have money on the books. So today, we’re actually gonna get into some of that information. So, I will get over here. This is our demonstration account. There’s not much information to show right here, but we’ve got a number of reports that will help people actually look information like this up. So, in our reporting menu or drop-down that anyone would have access to, we’ve got “Practice” and we have a “Care Plans” drop-down that will allow you to access to a whole bunch of other things. In this particular case, there are lots of different ways to keep track of the finances for any individual, patient, or group of patients. Our best practice recommendation is that every single patient will have a care plan if you plan on seeing them more than once. You can look up balances, you can see what the expectations are, which will help you forecast what your revenue for the following month would look like, so it’s a great tool. But for this one, this Care Plan Escrow Report, this is the one that we utilize to help you as a practice figure out how much cash you need to have on hand should a patient do one of three things. Patient decides not to have any additional care, even though they’ve prepaid, you’ll have to have a policy on refunding dollars, most of the time you have to give it back. If a patient, you know, discontinues care, you’ll have to have a policy if they don’t contact you. You have $400 of their money, how are you going to know how long you can keep this money, whether or
What is a Monthly Health Check?
A Monthly Health Check will help you. Have you set your practice goals with your Practice Success Coach? A Monthly Health Check for your practice and how it can help you is what’s covered in this free webinar. Your Practice Success Coach will help you set goals and KPIs for your practice and then follow-up with you about them each month. You will know immediately if you’re on-track to reach your goals and if not, then your Practice Success Coach will suggest ways to make improvements. You will learn a lot about your no shows, no future appointments, your collections for cash and insurance, your accounts receivable over 120 days and other important metrics. If you don’t track them, then how can you improve? Learn more by watching this free webinar on this page right now. Read the transcript: Jason: Let’s start over. Welcome, everybody. I hope everyone dug out of the storm and has able to remain warm at least here on the East Coast from Kentucky up to Massachusetts. I know buried is just the right word to use as far as snow is concerned, buried. I know we dug out from nearly two and a half feet of snow here. And so I hope for those people who are only able to make this webinar today because they weren’t able to open their business doors, I hope that you find it useful and I hope we’re able to give you some information that you can act on here in the future. So just to give you an idea of who I am, Jason Barnes, I’m the Chief Operating Officer, and I’ve got Jessica Pancoast with me, who is the head of our Help Desk and Training teams. And we usually tag team these weekly webinars, bringing useful information to everyone today. We’re gonna spend 15 to 20 minutes on monthly health checks, answering questions like, “Why should I have a monthly health check? What is a monthly health check? How can a monthly health check help me with a member of our coaching staff?” And then we like to open it up for any other questions that you might have at the end of it, so while we stick around to see how we can answer any other questions. So first answering a question of, “When somebody looks for a new software package, what are they looking for?” Well, that ranges from one office to the next with what types of problems that they’re going to solve and what kind of solution they’re looking for. Yes, it would be hard for me to say, “I know where the right solution for every single office out there.” But I know we do have something for everybody. And just like people use personal trainers to get the most out of a gym experience or workout experience, I know that we have people who can personally train and apply the tools in our gym, meaning the software system, to help practice owners, office staff really get the most out of what they want to accomplish. So today we’re gonna be talking about teamwork and how we can use our coaching staff to help identify what the issues are in your practice and then at least supercharge it, make it as efficient as possible. And so I want to fast forward all the way to the end of what you’re supposed to be getting out of working with our coaching staff. When most practices come on board, we take a snap shot, take a snap shot of what their practice performance was. How many visits they have, how many patients they were seeing actively at any given time, and what their per visit reimbursement rate was, and then what their overall office collections. And then we compare that after six months for a random subset of those clients, and we found that in each and every situation where those offices were having monthly health checks with our team, we were able to see pretty stark improvements after a six-month time frame. So, if you’re wondering, “Well, you know, how would working with somebody help me achieve those types of results?” That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So, to answer that next is, what is a monthly health check? The first thing a monthly health check is is a prioritization. Your office can be working on 20 different projects at once. I can start listing off things that you could be working on. You could be working on implementing new no-show, no future appointments. You could be trying to get a business within the business off the ground, trying to put together e-commerce or selling more point of sale items. You could have a problem with hiring associates, training staff members. All of these things are important. Everything I listed is super important. But while that’s happening, you don’t have some of these credentials. While that’s happening, you don’t have the ability to realize that temptations, you know, didn’t show up this week and they’re never coming back again. So what we like to do during monthly health checks is, first of all, create a table in which we know what is urgent, what’s a necessity, and how on earth we should approach triaging, the things that need to be done in your practice. Are we able to do this for everything? No, but most things that are under the umbrella of good, solid best practices of practice management, we’re gonna be able to provide solid insight. We put together this graph and this decision making tree to help really coach providers in a situation with what should I be focusing on first, right? So the urgent, not urgent, managing and focusing. Patients are the lifeblood of your office. They’re always the first thing that we have to make sure… If we’re not paying attention to them, we know that every other metric in your practice is going to
Care Plan Compliance built into Genesis Chiropractic Software
Care Plan Compliance can be Increased for Your Patients Automatically Care plan compliance – Do your patients comply with their care plan? What happens when your patients start to miss their visits? Are you notified? Do your care plans automate patient reminders? Discover how to automate your patient’s care plan with this 30 minute webinar. Learn more about our care plans and how you can more effectively utilize them and all of their features. Please fill out the form below and the video will begin to play right on this page. We know it’s a lot to ask for your email address, but we promise to never sell your email to another company. Read the transcript: Jason: All right, so welcome everybody. It’s about four minutes past the hour and we’re talking Care Plan Compliance today. Jessica Pancoast, head of our training team and our help desk, is with us, here to keep me on the straight and narrow path, which she can no longer do this week anyway with an odd glance or two because we’re in separate locations which happens infrequently. So she’ll have to figure out some other way of doing it. That being said, we’ve got quite a few people today that are joining us. We’re going to start sharing screens right now and we’re going to get kicked off. So because so Jasony people are with us today and almost as always, please…what do we have here? You’re going to have to chat in questions and please, you’re welcome to do so. We still have a discrepancy of about six people, Jess, that are in the web portion of it but not in the audio portion. Jessica: All right. I’ll send another message while you start sharing your screen. Jason: Awesome. Thank you so much. A patient walks through your door. Maybe they’ve never heard of the type of treatment that you’re going to propose and they’re not necessarily up on, you know, what they can do to help themselves get better. They’ve been on medications forever. They want to make better choices. They’ve never thought about health care costs being what they’re proposed. When you see them, they’ve only paid some copays throughout the year and the drugs always seem like they were so worth it, but they don’t feel right and they’ve never felt right and what you’re telling them to do is a complete and total deviation of what they’ve been told their entire lives constitutes health care. Today we’re talking about that big change that needs to take place, how patients perceive it, how often they need to be talked about to…how often they need the reminder, I should say, of how important the commitment they made is, and if they don’t do it all, that they’re not going to see the results. You might be asking yourself, “Well, I really just want to see a care plan that helps me with the finances.” We’ve actually gone over the financial aspect of care plans in this forum before. We’ve created those webinar links and they’re available. We can send them to you, you know, send us some feedback at the end of them if you’re struggling to find them. We will make sure we email out those links to the webinars we’ve done in the past about the financial portion of it. But today we’re talking about those patients that, they were committed at the time they walked through the door, they went in for a report of findings, they signed up for our care plan, and they knew it. Intellectually it made sense to them, academically it made sense to them. They committed to a care plan of x number of visits, but it’s a complete and total lifestyle change. Everyone here knows that they need to be sold again. They need reminders. What types of reminders are we talking about today? Today we’re talking about those reminders both in and out of the office. We’re talking about automating those reminders, we’re talking about reminding them of the commitment that they made, we’re talking today about how you can use a system to prompt you and your staff to make those connections. We know that not every single patient will stay a patient for life, but we can do whatever possible to make that number as large as it can possibly be. And without these reminders, we found that practices have…not all of them, but a lot of them have struggled to get the results that they’re looking for. So I want to make sure that everyone viewing today knows it’s available to them. A patient comes through the door…let me move this over here and we’ll start back from the beginning…for their first appointment. Their first appointment, you can set up all sorts of reminders. Let’s make sure they get calls, text messages, emails about the appointment. That’s the first set of reminders that we can talk about here. And I’ll just bring up one example of a third party carrier…and we talked about this last time…that we’re really pleased with and we’ve got a lot of good feedback on and that’s Zingit. Zingit reminder call, we have a lot of other options, but this is one of the premier ways that you can use to keep in touch with a patient, reminding them of a visit. However, is it just reminding them of a visit that we want to do or is there more? So today there’s also now SMS marketing that they’re offering. So if you’re using us right now or you’re considering using us as a platform to meet your practice’s needs, we want to talk about reminders that not only are targeted at letting them know, “Hey, you committed to a visit,” but why they’ve committed to a visit. We don’t offer this ourselves as a technology platform, Vericle, but what we do offer is the access to get information. How is it
3rd Party Software Apps are Integrated into Genesis
Find useful Apps in the Genesis App Store Watch this 20 minute webinar to see how Genesis Chiropractic Software has added many other company’s products to our software in the form of Apps and they’re integrated to make their implementation easy for you. We’ve added them to a page that we call the “Genesis App Store.” You sign-up with the company that has the App you want, right inside the Genesis Software on a separate tab. View this short webinar to see them all and then learn more. You can also view the integrations individually in our App Store. There are well known names you may recognize… Infusionsoft, ZingIt, ReminderCall, NotifyMD, MDReferralPro, etc. Our clients especially like the Reminders to their patients because it will reduce patient no shows, which then increases revenue. Other clients like the companies that handle your merchant account for charging credit cards, and others that handle patient financing of a care plan. Or perhaps you would rather dictate your typing with Dragon Medical. Any of the Apps will definitely increase the productivity of you and your office staff. Read the transcript: Jason: Probably just give it a minute or another two minutes and I’m here with Jessica Pancoast, my name is Jason Barnes and we will get going. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining us today and we’ve got Jessica Pancoast here who is the head of our training and help desk teams. And my name is Jason Barnes and we’re excited to be talking to you today about one of our next topics and one topic that I know will become more of a hot topic I should say in 2016. Because today we’re actually gonna talk about a migration from the traditional way of doing things around here in Vericle to a brand new way of doing things. So to first start with an admission, something fairly obvious is we’re not good at everything over here. We know that there are areas where other companies have not only beat us to the punch, but they have special insight that we would just never have because they were only trying to solve one problem. We as a software platform offer a great place for doctors to bill, to schedule, to manage their practice workflow and outstanding tasks and automate those things. However some of those tasks, if you asked us to design it, code it, implement it, we would not be as good as the best-in-breed solutions that are already offered out there in the marketplace when it comes to online scheduling or really specific documentation having to do with a small narrow niche that only applies to a certain group. But this actually gets even wider because we’re talking about third party integrations today. Those software companies that offer protective content where there’s intellectual property that we simply don’t own that you would like to access, reminder services to additional patient education tools, something that you would like that even if we tried our best we wouldn’t be able to offer for one of two reasons. Jess, one, we don’t know how to do it. Two, we don’t have access to it because it’s not ours. That does not mean we’re in a lurch, it does not mean we do not have options. We have some fairly large groups that have worked with us. And up on your screen, we’re gonna start going over those particular technology solutions as well as the ways that you can access third party materials that are uniquely owned and copyrighted by those organizations. So that’s what today’s topic is, and Jess, I would imagine as we keep migrating from a traditional way of implementing these things to our app store that we’re about to go over, I would imagine you and your team are getting a little bit happier about this? Jessica: Yeah, it’s a lot easier for the practices to get themselves integrated with one of these third parties with the app store. Jason: What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna introduce that, and Jess, I’ll ask you to help talk about some of the older ways that somebody would have to go about it. Because for some of those, those are still the only way of doing it until we get everything migrated over. So I would like to use an example case. One of the easiest ones and one of the technology outlets that we have available to our current set of clients is reminder services. There are reminder calls, text messages, and emails that are currently available. We have a couple of solutions that we’re integrated with that offer all three services. There are ones that have great packages for really high volume practices. There are ones that have counsels available to connect text message conversations with your clients. We are not a texting service. If we were to try and get into a new niche or new business, I’m not necessarily sure how successful it would be because this has been done already and people are really good at it. And they do it on a large scale so they are abe to offer it in a cost effective way. So reminder, caller, Zingit, there are other ones that are available. But reminder services are a huge value to you as a practice owner. They are a huge value to your patient, who needs that reminder to make sure they don’t forget the priority that their health is in their lives. So when they are sitting there at home and it’s noon and they’ve got an appointment at your office at one, when that text message comes through that says it’s time to get up and start heading towards the office, we know that we can retain that patient. There’s a question, what is that worth to you? I know that there are a lot of platforms that offer variances of this but here at Vericle, we offer the best