Three Step Management

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Everyone, Dr. Brian Capra here from Genesis Chiropractic Software. Tonight we’re going to talk about the three steps to management and this is where your software, your practice management software, ironically fails you. It’s about management at the end of the day. Practice management, air quotes, software that’s on the market these days really, I don’t consider management software because it doesn’t help you manage. It does some really cool stuff. When I started my practice, I used other software to be frank, I used Platinum System. It was cool. It did a lot of great things. It did a lot of automation. It did somethings for me that really helped. If you know my personal story, I encourage you to go listen to that. It really didn’t actually help me manage my business. It made things easier in certain circumstances, there was good reports, but it didn’t help me actually manage my business.

As a chiropractor, I think I said this in my last video, it’s really important that we start to really shift from a doctor a business owner, pulling ourselves more and more and more out of the day to day life or being in practice, being an employee in our own practice. As a business owner, as a chiropractor, you have to understand that you really are two things at the same time, which really puts you in a very unique situation. You’re not only a business owner, but you’re an employee in the business. 

To be an effective manager of business, there are three things that you must do, and this is not chiropractic, this is any business. Give you a little perspective, you probably know by now, I own Genesis Chiropractic Software and Billing Network. We are a chiropractic software, we serve thousands of clients in the cloud, but we also do insurance billing and collections for thousands of providers and users in the cloud. 

You’ve got to understand that I have learned, I wish I knew what I know now, by building this business over the past 15 years, I wish I knew this when I was in practice because it would have saved me a lot of frustration, number one. It would have freed my time up so I could have been focused on things other than my practice while I was outside of the practice, I wouldn’t have had to be always thinking about all of the processes and procedures my team was supposed to be doing and whether or not they did it and thinking about which patients I haven’t seen in a while. I wish I would have known this 15 years ago plus, because that’s when I was in practice. I had a great practice, 400 plus visits a week. I wasn’t super high buying, but I did corrective care so we had a great practice, huge collections and it was awesome. We did some insurance, some cash.

Here’s the thing, there’s three steps. This comes from the experience of building my company over the past 15 years, reading every business book I can get my hands on possibly and now I just want to just give this to you. It’s just three steps. Ultimately at the end of the day there’s only three things you have to do. It’s simple to understand, I’m not saying it’s simple to do. Okay.

Number one, quantify. We talked people, process technology. We talked about process specifically. We talked about revenue, retention and compliance and the three types of processes in any business. So, this is quantifying means developing your processes. Step by step by step, clarifying your processes. If you have a new patient, it’s not that you just have a new patient, you have the phone call, you have the script. You have to schedule them. You have every step of what needs to happen in your technology. When they check in, after they’ve checked in, there’s a whole bunch of steps that have to happen after that. 

The doctor has to do their exam for it, the doctor has to do the recommendations for care. Somebody has to create their financials. Somebody might have to call insurance and verify benefits or maybe there’s no coverage. Then that has to be coordinated, create a financial and that has to be presented to the patient. After the first visit, a lot of times in practices that I know, I know I did this, I would call the patient after the first visit, the phone call. That’s just the new patient. There’s several steps right.

Every single daily visit, there’s several steps that have to happen and they have to happen perfectly because like we talked about in people, processes and technology, like we talked about in process where we have revenue and patient retention/patient experience, everything has to happen perfectly. If it doesn’t happen perfectly, you’re affecting the patient relationship. If the relationship doesn’t happen perfectly, you’re affecting the ability of that patient to really understand chiropractics, stay longer, get great results and refer other people. This is, when you think about this stuff, it should be thought about with a sense of urgency. Managing should be in your life blood. It should be part of your core of who you are. It’s not like you want to manage a business. It’s just that you want to manage the patient experience the best you possibly can. 

Quantify the work, again management three steps. We’re going to talk about quantify. Sorry if this is, I don’t know if this video is kind of backwards, but it’s just the technology, the way it’s working right now. Quantify the work.  That means your processes, and not just your processes, but every single step in a process has to be documented perfectly in detail. 

It has to be, like I said in the last video, it has to be revisited on a regular basis. I’m not saying every week, or even every month, but maybe every quarter, every six months, go back with you and your team. Make sure your processes are documented, easy to understand, I promise you the more you go back and look at it, you’ll think you have the best process in the world documented, your manual, whatever it may be. You go back in six months, you’re like, man how did we miss that step?  Man, we know that doesn’t work. We missed a step completely. Once you go back, it’s always going to improve. Especially when you’re allowing your team to engage in that process. That’s step number, quantify the work.

Number two, is delegate that work. Pretty simple. You have new patient process, may have several steps in it and you’re going to tell, maybe if you have a big enough staff, you’re going to tell let’s say your insurance CA, you have to verify benefits. That same person, maybe your financial person, you’re going to verify benefits, I’m going to give you my recommendations for care, my care plan, you’re going to put the financial together. I’m going to do the new patient. There’s several steps different people have to do. You’re going to delegate those things out. Some of those steps, since you’re an employee in your own business, are going to fall on you. 

You’re going to quantify the work. You’re going to delegate. Let’s talk about delegate. Let’s write down. We delegated the work. Now, what’s the third most important step, and this, from experience, telling you, and also having seen this hundreds, if not thousands of times in practices all over the country, and this is actually not just chiropractic, this is business 101, this is the most frequently missed step in management, the most vital step in management, this is number one most frequently missed step, and not only that, but this is where your software actually falls short for you. This is the problem I had for years, first of all without technology, then with technology, I still had the same frustration, whatever happened to Mary? Where did they go? What happened, where did the process break down?

You go back in retrospect, and you say oh. We missed this. We missed that. Care plan, re-examine, you left her without a future visit. Their financial was all messed up. What happened? When you go back in retrospect you can see it. The problem is that’s reactive. It’s after the fact. We’re chiropractors, we’re proactive about everything in our life and that’s a reactive way to manage your business. It doesn’t work for the most part. If you don’t have any software and then you get some kind of software, it’s better than no software. But now, you’re traditional type, and this is every software. Even the new softwares that are, the newer softwares that are starting to become in the cloud, where we started in the cloud 15 years ago, the newer ones are starting to be built in the cloud, thank god, but that doesn’t mean they’re built any differently. They’re fundamentally flawed because we have a principle, we’re proactive about things.

We need a system that controls and coordinates like the brain controls and coordinates the body. We need a technology that controls and coordinates the people, the organs of the business. That’s the people in the business. As a chiropractor, I’m a person that is also in the business. I serve a function in the business. The technologies to control and coordinate us. So we have our people, we have our process, we have our technology in our management level. Our technologies should help us manage.  We talked about that in the last video. Management means quantify the work, delegate the work, the last step is verify. 

How do we verify that every single step in the patient life cycle, the patient experience, happened perfectly every single time? In traditional software we don’t. Well, they tell you, you can. There’s dozens and dozens and dozens of reports for aging reports, for claims that need followup, for patients without future visits, for no shows, care plans that are expired, credit cards that are declined, inventory that’s low. You go on and on and on and on, dozens of reports. Now ask yourself honestly, as a business manager and an employee at the same time. The analogy is use is, you’re a business owner and you’re an employee, that’s like being the conductor of an orchestra and the violin player at the same time. How are you supposed to do both things at the same time and have synergy and have harmony? It’s almost impossible to do with old school technology. You have to go to dozens of reports in order to verify that everything happened perfectly every single day, for the patient experience to happen perfectly every single time, you’d actually have to go to dozens of reports. 

Your team doesn’t even have time to go to the reports they have to go to, to find the work that they have to do. Number one, your team has to go to reports to find work they have to do to manage the patient experience. They don’t have time to do that. It’s a waste of time actually. It’s a complete waste of time. Secondly, you don’t have the time to go to those reports. How many times have you looked at your no show report and your care expired care plan, everything every single day? It just doesn’t happen. If you don’t verify that everything happened every single day, here’s what happens, you’re driving in the car, you’re at the gym, you’re at the supermarket and you see a patient that you haven’t seen in six months, or you think of a patient you haven’t seen in nine months, that’s when you verify that something has fallen through the cracks.

Quantify, delegate verify that the work has happened. Now, this is where Genesis takes it to a whole new level. This has never been done before in chiropractic, we’ve been doing it for 15 years. I started doing this with a very rudimentary system almost 15 years ago, a little bit less than that, we started using this just for the billing service and then we started using it for the practice management side of things. When I started using this new methodology in my practice, I literally would sit in my practice and everything was happening, meaning my team was just doing everything and they never missed a step ever. I found myself with a lot of free time seeing 400 plus patients a week. I was like, what’s going on? I feel like something’s wrong, but it wasn’t wrong. It’s just that everything was actually happening and I could actually see all the things that were happening perfectly. 

Here’s the key, technologies today with artificial intelligence should allow you to customize your processes into that system. Everybody wants to manage no shows and no future appointments, care plans. There’s certain things that are compulsory to every business, and every chiropractic business for sure. Then you have your custom new patient process, re-exam process, re-assign process. Everything’s custom. Your practice management technology, Genesis is an enterprise level business management technology. I’m going to shift from practice management to business management. This is business management. 

Your technology should help you shift. It should help you actually take all those processes, all those steps and instead of reports, drive tasks to your team so that every single day, by the end of the day, at any given moment in your practice, you should be able to actually see how many tasks are outstanding. Including tasks that you’re responsible for. You should be able to see everything that you’re responsible for. Everything your team is responsible. Every single team member, how many things they’re responsible for. If the total number is not zero by the end of the day, something didn’t happen that’s affecting a patient or patients experience, that means they’re going to leave at some point. It’s mission critical that that number be zero by the end of every single day. We learned this with the billing service that we have to start with. We also now apply this to the patient experience. Genesis, the only technology on the market that does that today.

When you do this, first of all it completely frees you up. Something that you couldn’t do before, go to every single report, you can actually do now and you can actually see with one number in almost no time every single day. It literally just takes you to look at a number. If there is not, if it’s not zero by the end of the day, you can actually drill in and find that subluxation in real time, address the person that might have that, we’ll call it backlog, could you be you. Address the person that might have that backlog, figure out what’s the problem. Why that thing wasn’t done. I’m going to go into a little bit more about why things don’t happen that should happen in your practice. When something doesn’t happen perfectly by the end of every single day, what do you do about it? How do you use the technology to verify that everything was done. What if it wasn’t done? What do you do about it? I’m going to look into that next video.

This is the first time in history in chiropractic that real enterprise level business management technology is available. We started this 15 years ago. Before that, this type of technology just wasn’t realistic to have in a chiropractic business. It would be way too expensive to have in any chiropractic business. Well, chiropractic software companies are selling $10000 software. If we had to sell this like a license and a server based system not in the cloud, it would be 40, 50, $60000.  That’s why we started in the cloud to give real enterprise level chiropractic business management technology to the small practice. I needed it, I know you needed it. So we started this. To verify that’s the number one step that, not only is it missed, I just don’t want you to take that as a negative thing as being a business manager, it’s almost impossible to do with any other technology. It just doesn’t work. 

I hope you enjoyed this video. We’re going to go a little bit more into, okay we verified that things didn’t happen what do we do about it? Okay. Thank you so much for taking the time tonight and paying attention and tuning in to these videos. I will bring more to you for sure soon.