Dr. Brian’s Blog on Chiropractic Office Billing, Software, and Profitability

By Frank Gordon

One form of marketing many chiropractic offices never think about- community marketing. What is community marketing? Community marketing is marketing where your chiropractic practice get actively involved in the community from a social responsibility perspective.

A chiropractic practice wins in two ways by implementing a community marketing - it wins by making a positive contribution to the community and building good will as a result of that contribution. A chiropractic practice also wins from community marketing because of the increased visibility the organization receives.

How can one market in the community? Below are several ideas:

- Sponsor an underprivileged kids sports team. Buy game uniforms for the team.
- Become active in a holiday food drive.
- Provide free chiropractic examinations to senior citizens by visiting a senior citizen home.
- Help a well known not-for-profit organization with their fund raising activities. For example, propose that you match every dollar other contribute with a dollar from your practice
- Have a booth and/or display at a local community event
- Become active in a local religious organization
- Contribute time as a volunteer at a local veterans hospital
- Make it a requirement that all of your staff contribute three hours a month of time to a local charitable organization and pay them for that contributed time
- Open your practice to those who can’t pay for chiropractic care for one day and offer free chiropractic exams
- Hold a brainstorming session with staff members to discuss how the practice can become involved in activities that benefit the community while, at the same time, making your practice more visible in the community
- Assist a local hospital in raising money
- Buy and give away free tickets to underprivileged kids to a major sports event or entertainment event
- Design and implement a program called “the extra step” and have your practice, on a monthly basis, focus on one way you can help the community- and implement one of those ideas each month
- Volunteer time in the public school system to talk to students about the importance of taking care of themselves from a chiropractic practice
- Write and publish helpful special reports on various important health topics
- Approach local community not-for-profit organizations and ask them to suggest how you can help them in support of the community
- Host a fund raising program and marathon on a local radio and TV station
- Develop public service announcements about health and arrange for local broadcast stations to publish them

As you can see from the previous examples, there are many ways you and your practice can help the community and, at the same time, increase awareness of your chiropractic practice. All that is required is a mindset where you want to contribute to the community you serve and follow up plus implementation. If you aren’t involved in community marketing today, it is definitely an area you should seriously consider since it is one unique way you can promote your practice.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

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By Frank Gordon

Effective marketing is a numbers game. If you can’t measure the numbers behind your marketing, you can’t know if your marketing is working or not for your chiropractic practice. And if you do know the marketing metrics involved with your practice, you’ll have the opportunity to continually refine and improve your marketing results. Just imagine what a 2% monthly improvement in your marketing results can do for your practice profitability. The improvement can actually be geometric.

The key to successfully use marketing metrics to grow your practice is to take an approach explained as far back as the 1920s called “Scientific Advertising.” Advertising legend Claude Hopkins introduced this concept and explained if you take a scientific approach to your advertising the result can be dramatic.

One small example is a headline used in print advertisements you place for your chiropractic practice. Just be testing different headlines, it has been proven that you can achieve as much as a one thousand percent improvement in the results from that advertisement.

What should you be measuring when it comes to marketing? Some key metrics you should measure include:

1. Cost per new patient lead- Simply divide your total advertising costs by the number of new patients you acquire during a year.

2. New prospect conversion ratio- Divide the number of new patients you add to your practice during the year by the total number of prospective patients your marketing puts you in contact with. Conversion ratio is an important number to determine how effective your marketing is once you have attracted potential patients.

3. Monthly visitors to your web site- Your website is only as valuable as the number of people who come there. One basic number you should monitor monthly is how many people come to your site.

4. Number of website visitors who request more information from your website- If you have a contact form on your site, knowing how many visitors take action and contact you is one way to assess the effectiveness of your site.

5. Patient Attrition Rate- How long you keep a patient getting treatment from your practice has a major impact on practice profitability. A worthwhile exercise is to calculate what percent of patients leave your practice every year. Further analysis of the reason they leave can provide some great insights.

6. Missed Appointment Rate- A missed appointment is a missed revenue opportunity for your chiropractic practice- that’s why it is important to track what percent of appointments made are missed. If your missed appointment rate is excessive and you know what the rate is, you can change your appointment handling methods and reduce appointments missed.

7. Missed Appointment Reschedule Rate- Of appointments missed, what percent of those are successfully rescheduled.

Tracking key marketing metrics for your practice is one way to ensure you are maximizing the return on your marketing dollars. Why not identity key marketing metrics you should be tracking and start tracking these number today?

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

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 Jeff Randolph, general counsel for the ANJC joins Dr. Brian Capra, President of Billing Precision to discuss the BCBS DOBI Decision and what they are doing together to level the playing field for chiropractors against insurance companies.  Below are links to the presentation (4 Parts) and documentation provided by Jeff Randolph.

DOBI/BCBS Decision - Part 1

DOBI/BCBS Decision - Part 2

DOBI/BCBS Decision - Part 3

DOBI/BCBS Decision - Part 4

Below are example forms provided by Jeff Randolph as well as a plan matrix which will help you determine if a plan is “self funded”, “state employee”, etc as described by Jeff during the presentation.

BCBS Appeal Process - Click Here

BCBS Prefix Matrix PDF - Click Here

Sample BCBS Global Appeal Letter - Click Here

BCBS Appeal Cover Letter - Click Here

By Frank Gordon

Have you ever wondered why you or whoever shops for your family buys well known names of food products instead of the less expensive store brands? The answer is branding. Successful branding of a product or service has generated hundreds of thousands and often millions of dollars of added sales and profits for those companies that develop an effective brand. Branding can have a huge impact on your practice for many reasons including the fact that most chiropractors don’t understand what branding is or how to brand their practice.

Part of branding involves using a name, symbol, or words that make separate your chiropractic practice from others in the marketplace. A brand can also be defined as a set of characteristics communicated through a name, symbol, or phrase that influences how potential patients will think about your chiropractic practice.

One example of branding effectiveness is the branding of an orange. When you think of an orange and a brand you would normally think of Sunkist. Another example of branding in terms of a phrase is “We try harder.” Everyone knows that brand is Avis rent-a-cars.

Some of the benefits of branding are that branding can:

- Differentiate your practice from other chiropractic practices in your area

- Pull together your staff efforts so your employees are all working together in a highly effective manner

- Maximize your return on marketing

- Assist you in obtaining more patients

- Help retain patients longer because, using your brand, you give them a reason to continue treatment they may need with you

- Maximize the revenue from existing patients. A powerful brand can result in more patients recommending you and your practice to others.

The first step in developing a brand for your chiropractic practice is to determine what is unique about your practice compared to others in your area. What are you doing better than your competition? Is there anything you may be doing that no other practice is informing the market about? If you’re the first practice in your market to communicate this, you will gain a preemptive advantage over other chiropractic practices.

Here are some other tips to help you with branding your chiropractic practice:

1. Develop a mission statement for your business. A mission statement is a description of the values important to your business and what the goals of your business are.

2. Develop a phrase or tagline for your practice that is memorable and separates you from the competition.

3. To support and reinforce your branding message, periodically send out press releases on topics tying in with your brand.

4. Consider creating a newsletter to send to your patients. Tie your brand into the newsletter.

5. Include your branding in everything you do such as printed literature, a sign in your office, print advertisements, and the appearance of your web site.

Branding can add a whole new dimension to how you market your practice. You should seriously consider working on a “brand” for your practice if you don’t have one.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

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By Frank Gordon

Spending money on marketing your chiropractic practice without having a marketing plan is like getting on a plane at the airport and not having an idea of what your destination is. For starters, a marketing plan should contain:

· Objectives of your marketing plan
· How you plan to measure results
· Planned activities by media such as Internet, direct mail, yellow pages advertising, newspaper advertising
· Print ad placement schedule including size of ad, date ad is to run, publication ad is planned for, and overall cost
· Money, if any, devoted to pay per click advertising (PPC). PPC is advertising which appears in the search engine results such as in Google on the right hand side of the search page. With pay per click, you pay a certain dollar amount for each time a person clicks on your advertisement.
· Schedule of events that will be supported by marketing
· Press release schedule by topic and date

Following is an example table of contents for a written marketing plan:

I. Cover Letter
II. Objective of marketing plan outlining what you are planning to accomplish and what measurable results you plan on achieving
III. Competitive Analysis listing your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses
IV. SWOT analysis outlining your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Examples of each are:
- Strength- lowest price in the marketplace
- Weakness- limited channels of distribution
- Opportunities- Indian market because we have a product that is in high demand there.
- Threats- A new low cost competitor is entering the market that has the ability to produce a product similar to ours at a retail price of thirty percent less.
V. Target Markets- This section would list each market, the size of the market, the geographic locations of the market, the demographics of the market, and other relevant information
VI. Planned Marketing Activities- This section cover such areas as:
1. What is the activity?
2. What is the deliverable or end result of the activity?
3. When will the activity begin and end
4. Who is responsibility for the activity?
5. How much time will be required to complete the activity?
6. Will outside resources be used? What entity is the resource?

From a budget perspective, the following types of costs should be recorded:

- Print advertisement preparation cost
- Broadcast media preparation costs
- Print ad placement cost
- Broadcast ad placement cost
- Search engine marketing firm monthly cost
- Web site maintenance cost
- Yellow page advertising cost
- Telemarketing costs, if relevant
- Article writing and syndication costs
- Video production and syndication costs
- Social media development and maintenance costs
- Staff costs such as in-house telemarketing
- Advertising agency costs other than media placement costs where the agency is paid by the media a percent of placement

A marketing plan is a necessary component of marketing a practice. If you haven’t developed a marketing plan for your practice, the time to develop the plan is now rather than waiting until the end of the year.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frank_Gordon

By Frank Gordon

How you position your chiropractic practice with potential patients can make a huge difference in your acquisition of new customers. If your chiropractic practice appears to be like any other, it will be more difficult to give potential patients a reason to seek treatment from you.

One powerful way to position your chiropractic practice is to develop a core story for your practice. What is a core story? A core story includes the following components:

· Research about problems or issues your patients face. Ideally these problems or issues should be something new a potential patient might not know about;

· Discussion of various alternatives for addressing these problems or issues;

· Explanation of how to go about evaluating these alternatives to pick the best solution to address the problems or issues; and,

· Demonstration/explanation about why your chiropractic practice is best suited to address these problems or issues.

There are many marketing advantages from developing and communicating your core story. Some of these include:

· Positioning yourself and your practice as the ultimate expert in the problem or issue being addressed;

· Enhance the image you will have with your existing patients so they will remain a loyal patient and will refer you to others;

· Creating a strategy and approach that your competition cannot counter;

· Attract patients from other chiropractors in the area to you;

· Provide a consistent and never ending stream of new patients to your chiropractic practice; and,

· Assist in compelling potential patients to sign up with your practice more quickly.

Basic steps in developing your own core story include:

1. Research critical problems or issues potential patients may face. Sources of information for this research could include the Internet, chiropractic journals, and other related medical journals.

2. Develop a prioritized list of problems based on your research.

3. Obtain credible facts and research to support the list.

4. Research what can be done to address the problems identified.

5. Develop a list of sections for a presentation of the problem and potential solutions. Development of a PowerPoint presentation is a good first step in developing your material.

6. Obtain supporting photos for each of your points. Using visual images to support your points makes them more effective.

7. Develop a strategy for presenting the previous points and your solution so your chiropractic practice is the only logical solution for your patients.

8. Build a PowerPoint presentation to communicate your core story.

9. Decide how to use the PowerPoint as a way to communicate your core story. Some examples of how it can be used include:

- Self-running presentation in your patient waiting room

- As part of a speech you deliver such as at local chamber of commerce meeting

10. Create information to tell your core story in other forms such as white papers and articles.

Why not start today developing an attention-getting compelling core story about your practice that will motivate potential patients to seek treatment from you.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frank_Gordon

By Frank Gordon

When it comes to staffing your chiropractic practice, there are many advantages but also disadvantages. The advantages of hiring part time help includes:

· Ability to handle peaks in workload so the work for your practice proceeds at a consistent pace
· Often avoidance of having to pay fringe benefits such as health care coverage, vacation time, seek leave etc.
· Flexibility in hiring people who have specialized skills that your current staff does not currently have
· Cheaper cost per hour than full-time employees in many cases

Some disadvantages in hiring part-time help includes:

· Lower return on the investment required in training part-time help
· More time for the part-time employee to get oriented to working in your practice because they are spending less time during the day working within the practice
· Often less loyalty to your practice than full time employees

The decision of whether to hire a part-time employee is often based on a number of factors including:

· Availability of current staff to handle additional work
· Cost
· Specific skill requirements

When interviewing a part-time candidate, some of the questions you should ask include:

· Can you provide references I can call about you?
· Have you had any experience working for a medical practice?
· What strengths can you bring to this job and why should I hire you?

Should you decide to hire one or more part-time employee for your practice, some of the basic steps in hiring a part-timer include:

· Defining the job to be performed by the part-time employee
· Determining what hours you want the part-time help to work
· Deciding if you will search for part-time employees using employment advertising. If you decide to place your own advertisements, you will need to develop the content for the ad.
· Deciding if you should engage an employment agency to assist you in your search for part-time help. Identify and interview 2-3 employment agencies. Select 1-2 agencies to assist you with your search.
· Develop a basic set of questions for interviewing potential part time candidates
· Set up a schedule to interview part-time employee candidates
· Interview and evaluate potential candidates
· Select the best candidate and provide them with a start date to begin work
· For the next 1-2 weeks, keep interviewing candidates so you will have other candidates identified in case the candidate you hired does not work out
· Introduce the part-time employee to your permanent staff
· Assign someone in your organization responsibility for orienting the part timer
· Identify a person within your organization to whom the part time employee will report
· Provide the part-time employee with feedback on a weekly basis

Hiring part-time employees makes sense for most chiropractic practices. Should you decide to hire a part-time employee, make sure you invest enough time to make sure that employee will fit well in your organization.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frank_Gordon

By Frank Gordon

Email marketing is one highly effective way to communicate with your current customers is through email. There are many advantages to email marketing including the fact that it:

· Costs little to nothing to send out
· Is immediate
· Is measurable because you can track when someone opens the email and what links they click on from within the email
· Can include links to multi-media content such as audio, video, graphics, and texts
· Allows the ability to measure your return on investment from email marketing programs
· Provide any easy way to target specific markets using different email lists

In your chiropractic practice, email marketing can be used in a variety of ways such as to:

· Communicate regularly with your patients. For example, you could distribute by email a newsletter with health tips
· Follow up after an event such as an open house
· Follow up with attendees who heard you speak
· Remind patients of upcoming appointments
· Follow up with patients who missed appointments

Here are the steps to take to begin an email campaign:

1. Decide on an email provider if you don’t have one. I suggest you pick a provider known for a high delivery rate such as Aweber.

2. Gather all of the email addresses you currently have and load them into your email account. You can find email addresses from such locations as:

- Your practice billing system
- Business cards left by vendors and other companies you work with
- Email addresses completed on paperwork. For example, if your patient registration form included a place for email addresses, upload those addresses to your email provider

3. Segregate your email addresses into logic groups. For example, put your patient email addresses into a patient group. By segregating your addresses you can send targeted messages to each group.

4. If you are considering a monthly newsletter consider a service like Constant Contact. The service provides some easy ways to design your newsletter and to manage email addresses.

5. Develop the content for a series of email campaigns. Campaigns focus around a theme and are usually sent to specific target audiences. Here are some possible campaigns:

- New patient communications series beginning with an email welcoming the new patient to the practice
- Monthly newsletter campaign. For your newsletter (called an ezine in Internet terms), decide on a basis format and what each newsletter will contain. Some possible topics would include:

· Health tips
· Meet the staff- a new staff member is featured each month
· Diet corner providing advice about types of food to eat

6. Develop a master schedule of when emails will be sent for each campaign. To make the process of managing campaigns easier, most email providers provide a system that enables you to schedule emails in advance.

If you haven’t begun to use email marketing as part of the overall marketing for your practice, you should seriously consider it.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frank_Gordon

By Frank Gordon

When it comes to marketing your practice, one key area is to be able to measure all aspects of your marketing. If you don’t closely measure your marketing, you’ll never know what is working. You will also lose out on an opportunity to improve your marketing.

With measurement of your marketing, imagine the impact even a 2% monthly increase in the effectiveness of your marketing can have. And if you think a 2% improvement isn’t realistic, think again!

One easy way to improve your marketing is to test the headline for any of your advertisements. The headline is basically the ad for the ad. It has been shown that simply by changing the headline in marketing copy, the response and effectiveness of an advertisement can improve by as much as 1000%.

In conjunction with being able to measure the marketing metrics for your practice, you need to develop a scientific advertising mindset. Scientific advertising is something introduced by Claude Hopkins as far back as the 1920s. In fact, Hopkins wrote a book called Scientific Advertising. In the book, he explained how taking a scientific approach to your marketing, constantly testing, constantly refining can have a huge impact on your marketing results.

What marketing components of your chiropractic marketing should you be measuring. You should be measuring such information as:

1. Cost per new patient acquired- You need to understand your acquisition cost for a new patient. To determine your acquisition cost, simply divide your total advertising cost by the number of new patients you acquire.

2. Patient conversion rate- Conversion rate is determined by dividing the number of new patients you acquire by the number of prospective patients who consider your practice. By monitoring conversion rate, you can determine how well you are promoting/explaining your practice when someone is considering becoming a patient of yours.

3. Patient retention rate- What is the average length of time a patient remains with your practice? To determine this simply add up the number of months all of your patients have been with you divided by the total number of patients. In conjunction with this, to calculate you patient retention rate for the past year, simply divide the number of patients you have at the beginning of the year divided by the number of patients at the end of the year.

4. Website Traffic- If you have a website, the website is useless unless people come to it. One basic web statistic you should track on a monthly basis is the number of visitors who view your web site each month. This basic metric is one of about twenty website metric components you should review.

5. Average Time Visiting Your Site- Another web metric you should examine is how long the average visitor remains at your website. If the length of time is less than thirty seconds, for example, you can conclude that either you aren’t bringing qualified visitors to your site or the content visitors see when visiting your site is not of interest to them.

Knowing marketing metrics for your chiropractic practice is important. Why not start today recording key marketing metrics for your practice and reviewing these numbers on a monthly basis?

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frank_Gordon

By Frank Gordon

The quality of your chiropractic staff can have a huge positive or negative impact on patient retention, profitability, and many other factors too numerous to name. When it comes to recruiting personnel for your practice, there are some proven techniques you should consider to make sure you recruit the very best people for your business.

Here are some tips for effectively recruiting and hiring the best people for your chiropractic practice:

1. Clearly understand and define the position you are recruiting for. Develop a job description for the position including what objectives the person in the job is expected to reach and specifically what responsibilities and tasks are related to that job.

2. Develop a list of key questions you want to ask any potential candidate so that you can best determine who you wish to hire.

3. Make certain you advertise in the right publications. For example, you wouldn’t want to advertise the position in a home remodeling magazine or a national magazine since these publications would not be best for recruiting.

4. Spend the same time developing advertisements for a position as you would spend on promoting your practice. Most recruiting ads appear the same, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Start out by developing a compelling and attention getting headline that would cause a job candidate to read the recruitment add and contact you.

5. Consider involving others in your office. Ask for their help in defining the job if it is a new position. Also involve your staff in interviewing potential candidates and don’t just rely on your own assessment of a potential candidate. Involving your staff in the interviewing process also has other benefits such as building rapport with the person who is eventually hired.

6. When interviewing, ask the person being interviewed why they want the job and why they feel they are best qualified for the job.

7. Check with at least three references supplied to get feedback on the previous work experience of the candidate.

8. Invest in running a background check on any candidate you are seriously interested in. The background check would confirm that a person’s work history and educational background is correct and would also check for any criminal prosecutions.

9. Consider reading a good book on recruiting.

10.Consult your local or national chiropractic organization for tips on how to effectively recruit employees.

11.Observe how a candidate acts after an interview. Few candidates send you a thank you note. If one does follow up with a thank you note, this is some indication of organization and caring on the part of the candidate.

12.When you finally make a hiring decision, schedule regular review sessions with the new employee to make sure they understand their job and are receiving the proper orientation to succeed in their new position.

Recruiting the right person for your practice is important because of the long term impact such a decision can have. Make sure you devote adequate time and effort to the recruiting process.

Billing Precision, LLC, is a leading-edge chiropractic office profitability management solution. Its all-in-one Internet-based system includes accountable and transparent billing service, state-of-art touch-screen SOAP notes, advanced patient scheduling, and real-time monitoring for compliance and audit exposure. Billing Precision’s unique value stems from its ability to level the playing field with payers and get chiropractors paid in full and on time by capitalizing on modern Internet technology and billing network effect. More at http://www.chiropracticbillingprecision.com

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