Freshly graduated chiropractors – think of them as rookies suddenly thrust into the big leagues – are soon overwhelmed with the complexity of running a clinic. Marketing, sales, office management, billing processes, and insurance companies all collide with delivering healthcare and meeting patient needs. Practice owners are powerless against huge insurance companies armed with sophisticated infrastructure and technology focused on minimizing provider payouts. To survive in this challenging environment, the new chiropractic practice needs the seasoned insight of a chiropractic coach, a trusted consultant who has “been there, done that” and acts as a mentor as the practice grows. But as challenging as opening a new practice can be, the obstacles faced by a coach seeking to grow his or her own business are just as formidable.
The inherent challenge is that coaching doesn’t always stick. And when it doesn’t, the result is not only sub-par practice performance, but also coaches who walk away shaking their heads. Coaches are frustrated by a small minority of “problem” students, which compromise their ability to focus on students who are getting it. Problem students lack discipline in terms of how they approach their patients, which care plans they prescribe, the selection and timing of the retail products they sell, how they document cases, how much they charge, and how much they manage to collect. In general, for whatever reason, they aren’t listening to the “best practices” advice of the coach, thus defeating the purpose of the entire relationship, sucking the time and energy of the coach dry, before he or she even realizes there is a problem.
Coaches are hard-pressed to track the actual practice-effectiveness of their students, and because of this they are at arms-length from understanding just how well the trainee is doing. Current trainee monitoring solutions are error-prone, expensive, and slow. The process of aggregating and analyzing practice information is tedious and expensive, and the resulting data is outdated. The coach must rely on the student for both individual and aggregate patient information about office workflow, SOAP notes, charges, collections, marketing process, and retail product sales. But the student may provide delayed or inaccurate information due to a lack of understanding, or sometimes even intentionally if they feel the coach isn’t aligned with their own vision of how to run their business.
With the new chiropractor unequipped to expedite her learning curve in the playing field, it is incumbent upon the coach to call the plays. With an automated data collection system on their team, they can play to win. There is an obvious need for the chiropractic coach’s equivalent of a playbook, an automated CoachMate, to be able to see how every trainee is doing without wasting the time of all involved. Additionally, and more importantly, the coach must be able to see how all of the trainees in the program are doing collectively, so that adjustments can be implemented while facilitating an increase in trainee membership and revenues. Such a system would be centralized and scalable, monitoring every aspect of chiropractic office and patient management while storing information in a central repository, thus providing a single point of contact access via the Internet for both aggregate and individual patient information. CoachMate tracks and monitors all practice activities, aggregates them by product and by patient across the coach’s entire trainee population. It permits the coach to flag deviations and isolate the trainee who is most in need of coaching advice promptly, meaningfully, and efficiently.
Technology becomes a decisive weapon in the hands of the coach, allowing identification of those “problem students” while defining what aspects of the coaching experience aren’t working or where extra attention is required. With this information in hand, the enlightened coaches can manage their time more efficiently, and grow their business around students who are able to benefit from coaching.
