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
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.
