DC’s success comes from unexpexted places

May 22, 2014 — Sitting in her spinal anatomy class at Palmer College of Chiropractic, the future Chrissy Albery, DC, couldn’t have known where her career as a chiropractor would take her. As a student, there tends to be a certain expectation of what the future might hold.

A vision of the typical student’s timeline might go something like this: mastering the study of the human body, perfecting the science of health through physical alignment, opening a wildly successful practice, helping thousands of people to feel healthy and happy and then perhaps retiring to a beach somewhere after spending an entire career having fun and helping people. It’s a common expectation of many future chiropractors, and Albery was no exception. But the funny thing about expectations is just how quickly they can change.

Flash forward to the busy post-graduation lifestyle of a chiropractor. Now out of school with some experience under her belt, Albery prepared herself for the opening of her very own clinic.

“So much effort goes into making that first chiropractic clinic a reality,” she said. “The to-do list seems a mile-long.”

Scouting locations, negotiating leases, acquiring equipment and setting up the office technology all became priorities. But with all that goes into making her dreams a reality, it was surprisingly the simple task of choosing a practice management software that would change her future forever.

“I knew that choosing the right practice management software was critical to the success of my new practice,” Albery said. “I planned to be a chiropractor for the next 30 years or more, so I wanted software that would help run my practice both today and years from now.”

Her expectations were like those of any other modern chiropractor. She wanted software that automated the complex tasks of her clinic but was simple to use and easy to understand. She wanted a program that would allow her to work from her practice during the day but also allow her to access the clinic’s information from home or outside the office when she needed it. She wanted software to run on her PC but also on the Macintosh and tablet devices she had in her patient rooms. And she wanted software she could rely on, knowing that if her computer crashed, she wouldn’t have to wait days or weeks to get her practice running again. But above all else, Albery simply wanted software that gave her a good return on her investment.

“If I was going to invest the time and money into software to manage my new practice, I wanted a program that provided as much value to me as the hard-earned money I spent on it,” she said.

Unfortunately, the more Albery searched for such a program, the more disappointed she became. She struggled to find any commercially available practice management software that met her needs. Though she thought her expectations were reasonable, she was surprised to find that none of the available programs could do the things that she knew chiropractors needed.

In fact, she often found that chiropractic software wasn’t really designed for chiropractors at all.

“Too often I found the programs that were aimed at chiropractors were designed for generic medical use and simply retrofitted for the chiropractic clinic,” she said. “After speaking with my friends and colleagues, I found an incredible number of doctors who were really unhappy with their practice management software but didn’t really see any alternative.”

In her conversations, Albery found that many doctors, even those with top-of-the-line programs, were simply settling for software that wasn’t really meeting their needs. So faced with a difficult decision, she decided to do what no one else had done — she made the practice management software that her chiropractic colleagues had been waiting for.

ChiroSpring practice management software was designed by a chiropractor, for chiropractors. Albery’s team of doctors and IT professionals set out to make ChiroSpring the intuitive, stylish and feature-rich software that met all the needs of her clinic and the clinics of her friends and colleagues.

“It’s the software I wanted every chiropractor to have,” she said. “It’s exactly what our practices need, without the compromises. I’m proud of what we’ve created, because every decision was doctor-driven. Every feature, every design choice and every bit of functionality was built into ChiroSpring specifically because it’s what a chiropractor would want in the software that runs their office.”

Today, chiropractors around the country rely on ChiroSpring to help efficiently run their practices. The success of the program only reinforces Albery’s belief that everyone can make a positive impact on the world around them.

“As doctors, we know the difference we can make in our patients’ lives,” she said. “But even beyond that, each of us can have a positive impact on our community and our industry if we gather together to recognize a problem and make a conscious effort to go out and change it. That’s been our entire focus with ChiroSpring, and I think that’s why we’ve been so successful.”

ChiroSpring wasn’t always the path that Albery envisioned for herself. But being both a successfully practicing chiropractor and a software designer has encouraged her to embrace the possibilities found in changing expectations. As it turns out, Albery’s future wasn’t just in helping patients. It was in helping doctors, as well.

Source: ChiroSpring