138: MORE Chiropractic

 

Are you the MORE Chiropractor?

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the KC ChiroPulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants, helping doctors keep their pulse on success. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich and I'm joined by Dr. Troy Fox here in the studio today.

Troy, how can doctors be more? And what I mean by that is how can you, how can you generate more?

How can you do more? How can you be more? How can you.

Is this where I insert the joke about Dr. Seymour Backs?

I don't know. This is a PG show.

Yeah, Dr. Seymour Backs. I like it. Yeah, so, you know, you've got a lot involved there when you talk about doing more in your practice and how you get there. Um, I think everything has to start with a game plan first.

Yep. So... If you're just willy nilly going, okay, I'm going to see more new patients. How do I do that? But you don't really have a focus on your, how you're going to actually integrate those, integrate those patients into your practice. It doesn't make any sense to go out and ascertain new patients. What.

What makes sense is to create a program to bring new patients into your practice and to integrate them into your practice. So from my standpoint, I don't think you can start with a small goal in mind. You have to start with the big goal and then refine the small goals surrounding that, which means you actually have to goal set.

I think that's probably number one. Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree with that at all. And you know, this, this whole topic idea came from, I've been hearing a lot of doctors lately, and I think it's just the time of year, but hearing a lot of doctors lately say, I want to do more of this. I want to see more X, Y, Z.

I want to have more revenue. I want more patient visits. And I keep telling them, you got to drill down on what that means. What, what does that mean? I want more. We'll use yours. You want more new patients. Okay. Why? What? First, you got to know why you've got to study it. Why do I want more new patients? Well, maybe it's because I want to increase my patient visits.

Okay. Does that really require new patients or let's unpack more patient visits because there's more again. If you want more new patients because you want more patient visits. Why don't we just look at more patient visits? How can we get more patient visits? And then if we're breaking that down, is it really, we want more collections?

Okay. If we want more collections, do we have to have more patient visits to get more collections because that could just be more work, you know? So every time I hear somebody say, I want more. Gotta really step back and unpack what you're talking about when you say more. Yeah. Or are you doing a horrid job at retention because you're not educating your patients properly.

Right. And the reason you need more new patients is not because you don't have plenty. You have 60 coming in the door every month if 59 or going out the back door. Yeah. As fast as they come in front 80 new patient. Yeah. Going to 80 new patients is not gonna fix that problem. It's just gonna make burps.

Yeah. All that does is creates a bigger train wreck than you already have. So that's where analysis of numbers comes into play as well. And that's something that we do. We do very deeply and we do it deeply for a reason because it's important to understand the health of your practice. It's like sticking a temperature in your, uh, you know, a thermometer in your mouth and taking your temperature and finding out exactly what the temperature is rather than just going, Oh, you feel a little bit warm.

You know, and so I think you have to look at those numbers to begin with. So to, so to be more as a chiropractor, you have to know what you need to be correct. Right. You have to know what you want to be. And you have to understand the analysis of your practice. What's happening in your practice. Why do I want more of this?

You know, and another thing I hear a lot lately is I want to connect more in the community. And yet I see nobody taking action on it. Oh, well, you know, I know one of the ways to get connected in the community is to go to the civics groups. Well, I don't have time over lunch to go to the civics groups.

Okay. Then how bad do you really want to be connected to the community? Or I know that doing health talks, a lot of doctors connect in the community by doing health talks, but Oh, I don't want to do health talks. Great. Then do you really want to connect more in the community? So you got to think about what is your more, it's kind of like, what is your why, you know, and maybe in some ways they're kind of connected together.

We have to understand what we're asking for. And then I'm going to piggyback on what you said a minute ago. We've got to create. We've got a goal set. So how do we goal set? Well, we got to create action. We got to create steps. We got to have strategy. We got to have tactics in place. How are we going to do this?

And so we got to know what the big more is, the big goal to be able to back up on that and create the process to get there. And so when you say, I want more, I think everybody who's in practice right now, I know everybody wants more. I know everybody wants more revenue. Everybody wants to go home with more of a paycheck.

I get that. And that's great. And I think that's a good, um, driving force to push you down the road to get to that. But you've got to really unpack what is more and really what am I looking for and how am I going to get there? Yeah, you may tell us that you want more patient visits because you want more revenue at the end of the month.

And we find out that, quite frankly, you have a massive poverty complex and you're not charging enough for what you do already. Or you're completely eliminating charges for services that should be charged. So, let's say, and there's an alarming trend in chiropractic that really bothers me. It's the no exam trend.

I don't I don't like that one very much. Not at all. It's a poverty complex trend. It's also a very dangerous trend from a malpractice carrier standpoint, not to mention, you know, I mean, you take an oath as a chiropractor in whatever state that you're practicing in. And I think, you know, I think within that oath, um, and and within most of us in health care, you know, the, the, the.

The first reel of order is to do no harm. Do no harm. So, you know, I think finding out what's going on is important. And I think as chiropractors we've gotten real comfortable at times saying, well, you know, what I do is pretty, uh, pretty low on the totem pole so far as malpractice anyway. And you know, this patient, I've known him for increase it.

Yeah. I've known them for a long time. And as a result of knowing them for a long time, I feel like. They're a friend and I don't really need to do an exam on them. I already know what's going on with them. And so then we give the service away. And quite frankly, the patient was expecting to pay for the service when they came in.

Um, they were shocked that you didn't. And if I were your patient, I'd probably question then at that point, what kind of doctor are you? So that kind of poverty complex leading you into that is not good. So if you want more, it may just be that you need to look at what you're already providing and are you really charging what you're worth?

I'm going to give you a great example that I was talking to a doctor the other day. And he said he had this patient in the office the other day and he realized that the patient has a condition that really needs to be re X rayed about every year just to keep track of it. And it'd been a couple of years since he re X rayed him and he turned to the patient and said, you know, I think it's probably time, bad verbiage.

I think it's probably time you either know or you don't, but I think it's probably time we updated our X rays. You know what the patient's response was? I wondered when we were going to do that. That's not the response you want. You want the response of, you know doc, I'm really glad you're on top of these things.

Thank you for taking good care of me. Not, I wondered when we were going to do that. That means the patient's thinking ahead of you. And you know, I'm going to go back to something you said a minute ago about saying you want more patient visits. And you brought in poverty complex and there's another factor that happens there too.

As patient visits go up, Based on your current systems in place, you have a capacity ceiling. And when you start hitting that capacity ceiling, here's what happens. Your patient visits can go up, but your services go down per patient visit. And what happens then? So do your collections. So all you did was work harder and got paid less money.

So this is where we've got to really understand when we talk about more, we've got to understand the statistical side of our practice and how we're going to make those breakthroughs to be able to do more. Absolutely. So I think once we nail this all the way down, you have to look at your stats first.

You have to decide what more really means, and then you have to put a plan together to get there. So why don't you tell them how do they get a hold of us to schedule a schedule that breakthrough, uh, that breakthrough call. Pretty simple. Go to Kats Consultants. com in the top right corner. Click on, uh, the calendar to schedule with us and you can jump on our schedule and we'd be happy to talk to you and talk about your practice.

We'd love doing that. Um, that's what we do. So we do those for free. So just let's talk about your practice. What do you want to do? What more are you looking to accomplish and how can we help you get there? Cause we do consulting for chiropractors. We're not a one size fits all. We Actually dive into your practice and really look at it and help you monitor it and help you make those breakthroughs along the way.

So you have the practice of your dreams, the freedom of your dreams and the income of your dreams. So cats, consultants. com just check us out. We got some free stuff on there too for you guys. So make sure you download those as well. All right, Troy, anything else? Like we've covered it for today. Let's uh, let's catch up next time and talk about another exciting topic.

And I can't wait. I can't wait. So no MORE for today. So. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning into the KC CHRIOPulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants. We will see you next time. See ya.