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 I know that when I shifted my own office from my old, outdated processes to a new proactive chiropractic software EHR system, the relief that came with it was immeasurable and created peace of mind for me in my practice.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.
Top 10 Metrics You Should Track
What Metrics Should You Track in Your Practice? Are metrics important to you? Our clients have determined that these are the most important metrics to track in your practice: Collections, Patients Visits, Charges, New Patients, No Shows, No Future Appointments, Accounts Receivable, Unbilled Visits, Unsigned Notes and Claims needing to be corrected by the Practice. They’re related to each other and they affect each other. How do you track them? Do you have a tool to monitor them with a simple glance at a chart? Do you have a radar chart or a histogram that you can understand with a quick look on the home screen? The tools to track these metrics are built into our software and your Practice Success Coach will help you to understand the numbers and their relationships to the others. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be measured to know the health of your Practice. You’ll be able to see if you’re reaching your goals instantly because two time ranges compared show your improvements. Learn more with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: This week’s webinar, the topic for this week is How to Measure the Success of Your Practice. Really what to measure? What things as a practice owner should you be looking at? What things should you have in place as weekly, monthly, yearly things that should be measured and then managed? So today is going to be which metrics you should look at, and we can talk about frequency, but that frequency is only recommended. You as a practice owner will be able to choose whatever frequency you’re looking at there. and we’ll actually get into how to find information within our system so practice owners can have this happen a little bit more easily should they be concerned about something, so the key indicators are going to be discussed today. And aside from that though, we’re going to…well, first I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Jason Barnes, I’m the Chief Operations Officer here, and I may have been sitting here for about six and a half now helping practice owners figure out what to measure, and how to measure it in their practices. So what things should be measured, first of all? And why do you need to do it? And how it is going to begin? When you talk about the success of your practice, I have differing opinions from one practice owner to another. Some practice owners want to measure it on the amount of money that we’ve brought in. Others, the number of visits. Both of those numbers are very important, I would recommend that they both be looked at. But at the end of the day, you’re going to have to figure out which one is more important to you because there can be only one top number that will drive your practice and typically that number is dollars. A lot of practice owners prefer to look at visits but visits can be viewed in a number of different ways. So looking at this moving forward, we’re gonna take it down to the ones that we talk about the most, the ones that we’re going to utilize while actually making recommendations to practice. Collections. Now, collections can be viewed in a couple of different ways. The amount of money in your bank account, the amount of money posted in your system. If they’re the same amount of money, you’re doing really well, but if they’re not the same amount of money you’ve got a problem, and we need to figure out why there could be an issue there. But where do collections come from? And if they’re low, what can be done about them? So the first thing to show you is a diagram. You have a practice here…and I’ll make this slightly larger. You have a practice here with three different numbers on it, right? The blue line is their total collected, their green line is their cash collected, and their red line is their insurance collected. As trends would go, it looks like they’re trending down as they went in from the end of the year to the beginning of this year. It’s pretty typical for the end of the year where you’re having less [ inaudible 00:03:16] visits due to the holidays than in the beginning of the year where you see deductibles kick in. However, if you were to contrast that over patient visits, this is the same exact timeframe right now, you would know that visits dictate your collections. But there’s a big trend of going down from 2,088 ending at a much, much lower number here in the 1,400 range. So for this particular example, I brought up and put together a few diagrams. If you’re looking to increase collections, if the collections are indicating that they’re going down, there are a few obvious places to look, like going to visits. You would have to increase patient visits or you would have to fight underpayments. So if your visits weren’t going down, it means that the amount of money you were getting paid was going down. So there’s really only two ways that you could look at the metric of collections, two possible things that could be bringing it down. Either my visits went down or the amount I’m getting paid per visit went down. Either way, you have to know what to do next and which metric to look at next. So visits are fairly easy. You know, if you check somebody in, that’s a visit, and underpayment is a much more challenging thing. And I’d like for you guys to see a separate webinar we did on fighting underpayments and you can find it in any of our websites to go over how we do that. But then what? What is it that you’re gonna change? How is it you’re gonna manage your practice if you have
It’s About Time For Us to Show Our Support for Chiropractic
We’ve been talking about a theme, “It’s about time…”. There are so many things that we can say about that when it comes to our profession, but today, I want to talk about one of the most important ones. It’s about time that we as Chiropractors show our support for Chiropractic and the place to start is with our pocketbooks. We have to begin giving our money only to companies that support Chiros and stop funding companies that support anti-Chiro legislation. Chiropractors and the Chiropractic profession itself have been under fire for a quite a while now and make no mistake, it is not over. In order to preserve our livelihoods, our profession, the message of Chiropractic we bring to our patients, and the good we bring to their health and their lives, we are going to have to take a stand for what we believe in. Too many of the companies that Chiropractors give their money to every day are not pro-Chiro. Instead, they not only support legislation that is damaging to Chiropractic, but many of them want to turn us into medical doctors, forcing us to give vaccines in our office and ignore the basic principles of health that Chiropractic was founded upon. When we choose to do business with these companies, whether they handle our phone service, our billing, or our electronic health records, we are helping them in their fight to mold Chiropractic into the medical model, make us subservient to the MDs and the insurance companies, and even put us out of business completely. We need to choose where we spend our money more wisely and use our dollars to show companies that we as Chiros will stand together. We can and should do business only with companies who support Chiropractic and by extension support who we are and what we believe. There are so many good pro-Chiro companies out there that it is not hard to find them. We must be diligent in researching and choosing with whom we do business. By choosing to spend our money only with businesses who support our profession, we can send a message that we will no longer tolerate these companies attacking Chiropractic and by extension ourselves and our practices. Let’s start putting our money where our mouths are and start spending our hard earned dollars where they can do some good, with companies who are clearly pro-Chiro, who work to advance our profession and who believe in the power of Chiropractic to change the lives of our patients. It’s about time that we support Chiropractic by supporting the companies that work so hard to advance the profession every day.
It’s About Time for Chiropractic to Become the Profession to Choose
In my last post, we talked about getting back to the beginning and starting with why…why we became Chiropractors in the first place, why Chiropractic works, why we do what we do every day. Now, I want to take a look at the next generation of Chiropractors and whether or not we are doing enough as a profession to make Chiropractic an attractive choice for those students that are trying to decide what to do with the rest of their lives. Don’t you think that it’s about time we made Chiropractic a great career choice? Yes, it should be about the satisfaction of helping others but we also need to make Chiropractic an economically viable choice as well. Let’s face it…getting an education today is expensive and most students who come out of college are carrying student loan debts, probably in the tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, according to an analysis of government data, the average amount of student loan debt for a graduating college senior is a little over $35,000 and 71% of these graduates have loans to pay back. Add to that the statistics from a 2014 study published in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association estimating that 88% of Chiropractic students graduate with between $100,000 and $175,000 in student loans, a massive burden to any Doctor first out of school. In order for students graduating from college to decide to go to Chiropractic school, spending more time, and taking on more debt, they have to be able to see a future where Chiropractic not only allows them to pay off their student loans but also provides them and their families with a nice life. The problem the Chiropractic profession has experienced for many years is that so many of us struggle just to make a living, much less the nice income that we should be able to expect in return for the number of years we spend becoming Chiropractors, the risk we take opening and running our own business, and the hours we devote every week toward improving the lives of others. In fact, in 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median wage for Chiropractors at just over $67,000, not much in comparison the $140,000 to $300,000 incomes reported by Osteopathic Physicians. I think that it’s about time we made Chiropractic an economically viable profession choice for future students. This means that not only do we need to see more patients, we need to price our services to reflect their importance to the health of our patients. We also have to put systems in place to manage and improve the patient experience so that more people continue Chiropractic care not just through corrective care but also to maintain their health. We must also scrutinize our processes to ensure that every step we take each day is done in the most effective and efficient way. Our offices should function smoothly and at the end of the day when we go home, we should know with 100% certainty that everything has been done and done to the highest possible standards. Making the choice to become a Chiropractor has never been and never will be solely about money. I firmly believe that myself and my fellow Chiropractors have a calling to help others and improve the health and lives of our patients. Still, we can no longer ignore the economic realities and disparities of income experienced by Chiropractors in comparison to other healthcare professionals. We have a duty to future Chiropractors to increase the income of our profession as a whole and make Chiropractic an economically viable choice. It’s about time.
