How Chiropractic Membership Plans Can Make a Difference

Unlocking Potential in Subscription-Based Patient Care

Chiropractic memberships fit right into today’s subscription-obsessed society. Now, everything is conveniently available to consumers with a monthly or annual subscription fee. From groceries and clothing to streaming services and car washes, membership plans offer easy access to goods and services. And for those who know what they need and are looking for ways to save money, these plans are meaningful.

In the chiropractic industry, memberships unlock areas of vast potential for practices and patients alike. Currently, offering subscriptions is a logical step towards providing chiropractic care, meeting patients’ needs, and growing your practice.

If offering chiropractic membership plans seems like a big ask, here’s how subscription-based care will make your life easier.

Faster and More Predictable Payments

Dealing with insurance is an arduous process that takes a tremendous amount of time, presenting many challenges — sometimes with little to no payoff. Manually creating claims, submitting them, waiting for months, and reconciling payments virtually freezes your revenue.

With chiropractic memberships, however, your practice can eliminate one of its most irksome pain points. By offering subscriptions to patients, you can offer discounted services that patients will take you up on. They may have their own misgivings about dealing with insurance companies. It may even be just as cost-effective, incentivizing them to choose memberships and cut out the middleman altogether. This way, nothing is standing in the way of your practice and its profits.

Further, while removing insurance companies from the equation pays you faster, it also pays you more consistently. With membership plans, you don’t have to wait for claims to be processed. You automatically receive monthly or annual payments, filling in gaps in your revenue. And with predictable revenue, you can plan your finances more accurately.

The Patient Perspective

Providing patients with cost-effective memberships for their chiropractic needs has many benefits. For one, you’re not forcing them to either pay sticker price for your services or go down the insurance rabbit hole. They’ll view your discounted offerings favorably, and they’re going to trust you more.

Plus, by automatically locking patients in with a financial commitment, you’re more likely to see them again. This could be due to a sunk cost fallacy, which makes them less likely to abandon your practice because they’ve already invested their time, money, and effort on creating the subscription.

And because they’re paying for it, they’re keeping your practice in mind. This could explain why many people hold onto their gym memberships for a reason, especially if they’re paying a monthly fee. Further, one study revealed that spreading out payments — like in a monthly subscription plan — ensures you stick with it.

But most importantly, you’ll provide better care. With cash subscription plans, your office isn’t busy filing insurance claims, and you don’t have to meet a set quota of patients to appease these companies’ rates. You’ll have more time to spend with patients, and they’ll be motivated to return based on how well you treated them.

Moreover, it also eases the stress of answering to insurance companies’ concerns. By accepting cash memberships, you don’t have to see a set volume of patients each day to meet insurance estimates and get balanced reimbursement rates. With cash memberships, patient visits are far less stressful.

Memberships as a Marketing Tool

Today, the market is saturated with practices just like yours. Your $15 billion mainstream industry has generated a sizeable number of nearly 40,000 practices in the United States alone. While investing time and money in marketing tactics like sponsorships and advertising are effective strategies for getting new patients, there are other ways to attract those landing on your website.

Displaying transparent membership pricing establishes trust and makes you stand out to prospects looking for a deal. Your patients’ perceptions of your pricing directly influence their purchasing decisions. If they view your pricing as fair, they’ll commit.

In fact, making these costs available and highlighting their benefits is more likely to get patients to take action. Research indicates that a business’s apparent pricing — especially next to individualized or non-discounted services — conveys value to patients and drives purchases. If patients make it to your practice and see a good deal, you stand a better chance of capturing them. In an already-flooded market, showcasing your deals can differentiate your practice and set it apart from the rest.

Improving Chiropractic Memberships

If you run a smaller chiropractic office, it’s possible that you haven’t given memberships a second thought. Before modern software, offering memberships required entering data into Excel spreadsheets and billing patients manually. There’s also the added burden of drawing attention to your memberships and convincing patients to sign up. Until this point, subscription-based care was something only larger chiropractic practices could offer.

Now, there are solutions available to manage the difficult administrative burden of subscription care plans. ChiroSpring360 offers solutions to combat membership challenges:

• Patients can enroll in a membership of their choice in-office or on your website.
• Patients’ subscription information is easily accessible within the platform.
• Credit cards are automatically captured through ChiroSpring Pay, setting your practice up to receive automated, reoccurring payments each month.
• Customizable memberships allow you to design membership packages that suit your practice best.

ChiroSpring360 helps reduce the administrative burden of managing patient subscription plans. Removing manual entry and taking insurance out of the picture effectively eliminates blockages in your revenue.

It’s also beneficial to practice growth. Patients will appreciate a stress-free care process, as well as the extra savings with subscription packages. With the many improvements memberships can make in your chiropractic practice, it’s worth giving them a shot — then, you’re armed with one more tool to compete in your growing and competitive industry.

References

Davidson, M. (2013, March 28). How the Sunk Cost Fallacy Makes You Act Stupid. Lifehack. https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-the-sunk-cost-fallacy-makes-you-act-stupid.html

Gourville, J., & Soman, D. (2002, September). Pricing and the psychology of consumption. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2002/09/pricing-and-the-psychology-of-consumption

How to Become a Membership-Based Chiropractic Practice. (2023, January 4). ChiroSpring. https://www.chirospring.com/articles/becoming-a-membership-based-chiropractic-practice

Mohan, B., Buell, R. W., & John, L. K. (2014). Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost Transparency. Harvard Business School. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2498174

Why Chiropractors Need Membership-Based Care Plans. (2023, January 4). ChiroSpring. https://www.chirospring.com/articles/3-reasons-for-chiropractic-membership-based-care-plans