The Three Components of Business – People, Processes, & Technology
We’ve talked a lot about managing a practice and creating a successful patient experience. We’ve also demonstrated how we can operate our practices in the same manner as Big Business runs their operations to be more effective, thereby increasing our bottom line, decreasing no-shows, and achieving higher patient retention. Now, we’re going to go over how this all comes together in your daily practice through the three components of business – people, processes and technology. People – The people, i.e. your staff, are the first component of any business. You have to be able to answer the questions of “Who are the people I can rely on?” and “What are their strengths and weaknesses?”. Once you have answered these questions you will be able to assign responsibilities to each staff member that will ensure the most effective operation of your practice. Processes – Your “Processes” section will be extensive. This is where you need to have every task to complete a successful day broken down into simple steps. Imagine a new patient comes into your office. What actually has to happen? What do you say to them? What paperwork do they have to fill out? What different options will you present to them? Every single step has to be documented. This is where big businesses like the Ritz-Carlton really set itself apart by creating an unrivaled experience. You can too, if you are diligent about your processes. We talked before about how just to make the bed at the Ritz-Carlton, the housekeeper has to complete over 30 steps on their checklist. The process is broken down into these tasks to make sure that every bed is perfect, every time. By simplifying your processes into each of the component steps needed to achieve perfection, you can manage your patient experience at the highest possible level. Technology – The final component of business that brings it all together is technology. Without proactive software capable of finding the tasks needed to be completed and assigning them to a staff member, companies like Amazon and Zappos would not be known as the leaders of the customer experience that they are today. Thanks to the technology they employ, the Ritz-Carlton can keep track of each and every preference of their guests, down to how they like their steak cooked. They know you are coming and know your name before you even step out of your car. Without their technology, achieving their “Gold Standards” would be much more difficult, less scalable, and harder to track for the Ritz-Carlton The technology component of business is vital to bring the people and process parts of the business together. It automates the tasks and makes it simple for the people in your business to follow the steps you have created. And, it makes following the three rules of managing a business or team effectively that we talked about last time achievable, through processes of quantifying, delegating, and verifying. People, processes, and technology…these three components of business must function together at the highest possible level for you to create the best patient experience possible. When you have the right staff members assigned to the tasks that best suit them and each part of your processes broken down into the number of tasks needed to complete them successfully, you have started on the right track. Adding in the final component, a proactive technology, brings it all together and manages the tasks of quantifying, delegating, and verifying. Now, there is no limit to the success of your practice. Don’t miss our next post where we’re going to talk about how to start the journey of creating both your dream practice and your dream life.
Revenue: Workflow Dictates the Money
How Do You Track Unpaid Insurance Claims in Your Chiropractic Practice? Chiropractic Practices rely on separate reports to keep track of Insurance Claims that are either paid, rejected or unprocessed. Are all of your claims being paid as they should be? How do you detect if the insurance companies are deliberately underpaying your claims? Imagine never using a report to find out which claims are paid and which are not. Imagine a tool that tells your billing staff exactly which claim is unpaid and for what reason. Imagine that this process was automatic. Imagine 100% follow-up with every insurance claim. Imagine the increased revenue for your Chiropractic Practice when you correct and submit every insurance claim. Well, imagine no more. The tool is called Genesis Workflow and you can learn about it in this 18 minute webinar. It will be time well spent.
Own the Phone
Man the Phone! The truth about how devastating the person who answers your phone can be to your business if they don’t know what they’re doing!
Learn the Success Principles
Learn how Dr. Stephen Franson has taken brand new practices to 500 plus patients per week in months, not in years. Learn the Success Principles.
Chiropractic Purpose and Motivation
Learn your chiropractic purpose, your motivation and how to pay off your student loans in less than two years.
How to Talk about Chiropractic Care in Your Office to Each Person
How to talk about Chiropractic care in your office to each person, so that you build value to that person in front of you.
“The Most Effective Chiropractic Close Ever”
Learn a close that chiropractors are saying, “Is the most effective chiropractic close ever!”
Fulfill Your Chiropractic Calling and Vision
Learn how to fulfill your vision and the calling in your life with this short webinar.
Proactive Technology for a Proactive Profession
Chiropractors are by our nature proactive. For our patients, Chiropractic is a new way to look at health. We educate our patients about the necessity of caring for their spine and nervous system in the prevention of health problems. It is therefore ironic that the one area where this has not been true has been in the technology and software we have used to operate our practices. This one area that is vital to the health and success of our business has instead been relegated to old methodologies, old ways of building technology, and ineffective, reactive approaches. So, what does it mean to have a proactive technology? How can changing from a reactive to a proactive approach improve the management of the patient experiences and result in 62% higher collections per visit, 26% better patient retention, and 32% higher documentation compliance? Let’s look at it from the same perspective as a patient being introduced to Chiropractic for the first time. Do they think it’s possible, when they come in for their lower back pain, that what they are about to learn could totally revolutionize their health? No. Do they know that it could improve the function of their body and therefore alleviate the headaches they’ve had all their lives, improve their child’s asthma, and lower their husband’s high blood pressure? Of course not. They don’t even think it’s possible to get those kind of results because they have an outdated health paradigm, or an outdated technology. They are looking at it from a reactive paradigm. Yet, when these same patients are educated and begin to learn about the spine, the control the nervous system has over the functioning of their bodies, and the way Chiropractic benefits their overall health, then it all starts to make sense. From their new proactive paradigm, they are able to understand and achieve improvements in their health that they would never have thought possible before. It is the same when you look at the technology used to manage your Chiropractic office. With the out-dated, reactive system used in so many practices, you have to go find what work needs to be done before you can do it. If you want to follow up on an insurance claim, you have to go to some aging report, find the claim, and then work through the steps. This means you have to probe and actively go find the work before you do it. No one knows, including the owner, how much work was supposed to happen that day versus how much actually did happen. You have cash flow reports, no-show reports, no future appointment reports, expired care plans, compliance reports, billing reports. The list of reports to check the work of a single day is exhausting. Even worse, this type of system leaves you always reactive. You are never preventing problems and encouraging growth. You are just putting out fires. But, with a proactive technology, your office operates from a whole new paradigm. In my next post, I will walk you through and demonstrate how this new proactive paradigm leads to the proven results I mentioned earlier – higher profits per visit, retention, and compliance.
How to Create a Patient Experience Like The Biggest Business in the World
We talked about how Big Business is using Big Data to measure, track, and manage the customer experience. Amazon, Apple, Zappos and many others are making sure that every customer interaction is analyzed and quantified to continuously improve. In the process they are building a huge base of loyal customers and grabbing more and more market share. So, why in a profession like Chiropractic that is so rooted in taking care of our patients, has the patient experience been an afterthought? To answer that question, you have to look at the basis big firms use to manage the customer experience…Big Data. Big Data uses technology and software that tracks every interaction and critical task, analyzes it, and breaks it into easily actionable information. This process is what has made it possible for Big Business to not only understand and react to their customer’s current preferences but also to anticipate the customer’s future needs, innovate, and adapt quickly to market changes. This enterprise level methodology focuses on three key things – People, Processes, and Technology. It is a secret that Big Business has known for years. The technology they use does not come cheap. In fact, each company continually invests tens of millions in their software to achieve that perfect customer experience. Knowing this, it’s easy to see why individual chiropractors and other small businesses have not been able to keep up and also why the management of the patient care experience in most chiropractic offices has not achieved the attention it deserves up to this point. The Chiropractic software on the market now is 20 years behind, an eternity in the technology race. And, current practice management technologies are built on antiquated software platforms, written in old software languages, and not in the cloud. This makes them impossible to update. Most chiropractic software today is built to sell licenses to doctors rather than to help chiropractors create an enterprise level patient experience. Without this “enterprise level” technology, Chiropractors have unknowingly been stuck in a time warp. We have been left to rely on lists of things that need to be done each day, laying the burden on our staff and our own memories for follow-up and follow through on important patient experience tasks. At best, some Chiropractors may have been using outdated Chiropractic software to print endless reports to go through and check task completion. Insurance billing, unpaid claims, missed patient visits, expired care plans…To read every report necessary to ensure that all tasks effecting the patient experience have been completed is impossible. Adding even more difficulty, Chiropractors must act as both the business owner and an active employee. This is like being the conductor of the orchestra and the violin player. There is not enough time for the Doctor to do their own work and manage the staff. Effective management consists of three steps: quantify, delegate, verify. With a reliance on an endless number of reports that there is never enough time to even look at, there is no possible way to complete all three management steps for every task that is critical to the patient experience. Without completing these three steps of quantify, delegate, and verify, Chiropractors cannot complete the most important step – analysis of the results and improvement of their process. When the patient care experience is not improved and modified over time, Chiropractors are unable to take their business to the next level. They are stuck guessing about what does and doesn’t work without any real data to back up their decisions. They manage their business like treating symptoms, putting out fires but never getting to the cause of the problem. Their process never becomes systematic and scalable. Instead, it depends wholly on their own energy to drive its growth and sustainability. If that approach isn’t good enough for Big Business, why should it be good enough for us as Chiropractors. We have a duty not only to ourselves, to make our practice successful, but also to our patients, to give them the best patient experience possible. To do this, Chiropractors must use the same technology and software methodologies employed by companies like Amazon and Zappos. We have to start leveling the playing field and apply the principles of Big Data in our own practices. Patient experience has to become the call to action in Chiropractic that customer experience is in Big Business. And, it has to happen now. When we add in Chiropractic software and billing at the enterprise level of technology used by Big Business, the results are a predictable patient experience, increased patient loyalty, scalable operations, increased patient retention, improved patient compliance, more revenue per visit, , more patient referrals, decreased management time, and increased staff efficiency. Isn’t that what we all want for our business and our patients?
