Michael Perusich: Hi, everybody, Mike Perusich and Patrick Hammond with Kats Consultants. Patrick, I want to talk about the law of buy-in today. As doctors, we wear multiple hats. We're a doctor, we're a business owner, we're a leader in our community, we're a leader to our staff, we're a leader to our patient, but how do people and why do people follow leaders? It's because they buy in to the leader's vision. This is really what we do when we build doctor authority is we create a sense of a vision for people that they want to buy in to and they want to follow it.

A great example is with our patients, we teach them that their pain is going to be manageable by our treatment plan, and we impose upon them the idea that we're there to help them and we have the tools to help them, so we get them to buy in through that process. That whole law of buy-in works with our staff as well. If you want staff to stay with you for a long time, you have to teach them how to buy in to your vision.

Dr....

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...

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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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Dr. Kats: Hi, this is Dr. Dave Kats and Dr. Michael Perusich with Kats Consultants and we have a tip for you. There are certain segment of doctors who have trouble with getting patients to accept their schedule care or to pay for the care that they get. I'll tell you one thing that we have found that makes a difference. Normally, a patient will come in for the second day and they'll get a report of findings, then they'll get through adjustment, then they'll get therapy rehab, then they'll go to the advance mobile scheduling and the financial consultation.

I have found and we have found that when somebody is having trouble with people accepting the scheduled care or wanting to pay, if you do the financial consultation right after the report of findings that that's when the patient most likely to accept your care and be willing to pay the bill. I know you do that because I've been at your clinic and you have Marisa come in and do the financial consultation and you do that.

...

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Michael Perusich: Hi everybody, Michael Perusich and David Kats with Kats Consultants. We've got a video tip for you. David, I think this week we need to really talk about and focus in on scheduling. We hear this a lot of times from doctors, "I can't see more patients. I've reached capacity." I tell doctors all the time the same thing, "You've got to look at your scheduling."

Your scheduling should be so orchestrated that you have slots, you have positions for every type of patient coming in, whether it's a rehab patient, or a new patient, or a re-evaluation patient, or just a maintenance patient. They should have specific slots in your schedule so that you make the schedule flow as efficiently and effectively as you can.

David Kats: If you think that you're busy, a lot of times it's just in your mind that you're busy. I remember so well when I was seeing three people every 15 minutes and we still used an old manual appointment book in those days and the staff said,...

Speaker 1: Welcome to your weekly video tip with Kats Consultants.

Speaker 2: Good morning, Michael, welcome to the clinic.

Michael Perusich: Hi everybody, Michael Perusich here with Kats Consultants and I've got a video tip for you. Oftentimes our clinics get very, very busy and we have people waiting in the reception area far too long. There is a little rule that we like to talk to our clients about. That's the 10 minute rule with patient care. Patients should not sit in any one place waiting on care for more than 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes of waiting time feels like 30 minutes of waiting time to them, so we want to make sure that we have staging areas in the clinic where we can move them to. The first area is the reception area, which is an obvious area in most of our clinics.

Second would be the hot seats, and then finally would be the treatment area where you're going to actually see the patient for care. At this point, in my waiting period, waiting for care,...