Take simple steps to improve your practice
By Susan Hoy

Extraordinary practices do not happen by accident. Keeping a practice moving forward takes constant monitoring, consistency, and an intense desire to improve.

Getting your practice on track may seem overwhelming. When you have too much to do, it becomes easier to do nothing. But doing nothing leads to mediocrity, which negatively affects your practice.

The best way to tackle a big job is to break it down into small action steps. Taking care of one action step leads to another and the process gains momentum.

GETTING STARTED

You might have several pressing problems to address simultaneously, such as collections, reactivations, new-patient recruitment, and daily patient visits. If you want to improve your overall practice, do one or two simple things in each category. 

Here are some suggestions to get started:

• Collections. Insufficient collections often result from the failure of insurers to reimburse or the failure of your front-desk CA to collect payment.

Action steps:

1. Contact one or two problem accounts each day. Keep a log and document the result of each contact and the amount you were able to collect. (This will fuel your desire to make more calls!)

2. Call one or two patients each day. Additionally, make sure your front-desk CA asks each patient for payment. If you make a policy that every new patient must pay the required payment on the day of service — no exceptions — your collections will go up. If you want to collect from patients, then you have to ask for it!

• Reactivations. It is human nature for people to procrastinate calling for an appointment. But if you initiate a call, they may likely say, “While we are on the phone, let me make an appointment.”

Action step: Call patients who have not been in to see you for a while.

You have many reasons to phone patients:

• You haven’t seen a patient for a while. Call to find out how he is doing;
• You are having a special event in your office;
• You have some new equipment or services you think would interest a particular patient;
• The patient has a credit balance and you want to know how she wants to handle it; or
• It is the patient’s birthday (or anniversary or other special day).

• New-patient recruitment. If you want more new patients (especially referrals), you have to ask for them.

Action step: Set a goal for each person in your office to ask for one new patient referral each day.

Train staff members to listen for the opportunity to ask for referrals. For instance: When a patient mentions he is feeling much better, it is the perfect time to say, “I’m so happy we were able to help you. The best way to thank us is to let others know about our office. Do you know anyone else who would benefit from chiropractic care?”

• Daily patient visits. You can improve your daily patient visits by having patients make their next appointment when they checkout.

Action steps:

1. Be specific about when the patient needs her next adjustment;
2. Write the date of the appointment on the daily fee slip to alert your CA; and
3. Instruct your CA to check the fee slip and schedule the appointment.

Once your practice begins to gain momentum, you will find it easy to maintain and even increase the pace of improvement. It just takes one small action step — the rest will be easy.

Susan Hoy is an award-winning team trainer and consultant. She presents training seminars for teams throughout the country and is the author of two team-training manuals. The newest is entitled Systemize, Organize, Simplify. Susan can be reached at 215-674-0130, suzzhoy@aol.com, or through her Web site at www.beefitup.net.