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Mike: Hi, everybody. I'm Mike Perusich, Patrick Hammond, David Kats with Kats Consultants. Thanks for listening today. David, you had a topic you wanted to talk about today.

David: Yes. One of the things that I have found in consulting, I found it quite by accident, was that if your no-show rate is high enough, your practice will plateau regardless of what size practice you have. Before the age of computers, I hate to say this, maybe when the computers were just starting, we took our client stats and we laid them out in a long row and we looked at their no-show rate. Some people had a no-show rate of nearly 50% and some people had a no-show rate of about 7%. What we found is if you went to about 13%, anybody that has a no-show rate of less than 13% was growing, and anybody that had a no-show rate of more than 13% was plateaued or possibly even going downhill.

The way you figure that out, you see how many patients were supposed to be here today, and then how many patients...

Mike: Okay. Hi, everybody. I'm Mike Perusich. Patrick Hammond and David Kats with Kats Consultants, thanks for joining us today.
David, patient communication.

David: Yes, I had a doctor I went to. He was kind of country doctor and I was in his office. In fact, I was a preceptor in his office before I graduated and somebody came in and they said "Our child has Legg-Calve-Perthes disease." and he said "Gosh, I never heard of that."
[laughter]
David: He got down--

Mike: Things not to say.

David: He got down on his knees by his file cabinet, he pulled it out, he said, "Here it is." You have to have a little bit better rapport and communication with your patients than to say "Gosh, I never heard of that before."
Mike: [chuckles]

David: It was like boy it really surprised him. "It sounded like a foreign name, Dave." I think what you have to do is when you have patient communication, you have to take everything in strides and it's basically, "I expected that." Patrick why don't you give some...

Mike Perusich: Hi, everybody. I'm Mike Perusich, Dave Kats and Patrick Hammond with Kats Consultants, what do you guys want to talk about today?

Patrick Hammond: How about we talk about multiple appointment scheduling because they may do that in their practice.

Mike: That's a really good one. You know, we do that not only with our active treatment patients but our maintenance patients as well. David, how about you?

David Kats: We don't do the maintenance patients. We don't put them on a yearly schedule, but we schedule every single person for the advanced multiple schedule. There will be people that you talk to doctors and staff that say it won't work in this area. They'll give you the reason why. They'll say, "Well, we have too many blue-collar workers and they were swing shifter. We have too many white-collar people and they fly out of the country or we have coal miners and they don't know when they're going to get out of the mine." The truth of the matter is if you own the...

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Mike: Hi everybody. I'm Mike Perusich and Patrick Hammond with Kats Consultants. Patrick, I think something we ought to talk about today is this idea of preemptive communication. Telling patients things before they think of it or before they act on it. I do that a lot and I know you do it and most experienced doctors do it. It is very important because if you feel a patient might have a disc issue. I think that's a perfect example, say, "Hey, we're going to do some treatments here, if things don't come around the way we feel they should, we may be talking about referring you out for an MRI." You are being ahead of the game but also you're assisting that patient to take the next step that's necessary.

Patrick: That's absolutely right. Referrals to other doctors. Having a good referral network and being able to confidently refer patients out, because sometimes what happens is, if you don't mention a referral possibility and a patient's not getting their pain for example under...

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Mike: Hi everybody I'm Mike Perusich, Dave Kats and Patrick Hammond with Kats Cnsultants. Thanks for joining us today. I thought something we ought to really talk about is maintenance care, and the fact that maintenance care is typically not covered by insurance especially Medicare. They don't cover it at all. Most of these companies have very specific rules. Let's throw that out on the table.

Dave: One thing with maintenance is doctors think if I quit charging insurance and have the patient pay for maintenance, all my patients, all my maintenance patients are going to quit but I've seen this for 30 years and that is absolutely not true. When you convert somebody from insurance paying to once a month maintenance, they're going to stay with you in 95% of the case.

Mike: I can give you a great example of that and that's my practice. I converted my entire practice from an insurance-based practice to a cash maintenance practice, and now my patients are begging me to come in...

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Speaker: Hi, I'm Mike Perusich with Kats Consultants, and I've got a video tip for you this week. We think it's really important to understand your stats, your statistics of your business when you're trying to run your chiropractic practice. Why? Because stats never lie. I came out of the investment banking world, and we use statistical measures for absolutely everything because they told you the black and white story of how good or bad your business was doing, and you should be doing the same thing.

In fact, you should know your statistics inside and out, and that's one of the things that Kats Consultants, that we are constantly coaching our members on. Learn how to do stats. If you need help with them, give us a call at Kats Consultants. Check us out at katsconsultants.com. I'm Mike Perusich with this week's video tip. Thanks for listening.