Dr. Capra: Hello everyone. This is Dr. Brian Capra from Billing Precision. I am really happy to have on the phone today with us Dr. Miles Bodzin. Many of you probably already have heard about him. If not, I’m happy to say, to bring this to you because he is a great chiropractor. He has an awesome product which I used myself and I know hundreds if not thousands of chiropractors are using it across the country.
One of the things we’re going to talk about today quickly is the “going cash” thing that’s out there.Again, unique to who you are, you started wellness practice out in San Diego and I know that about you. I’ve been out to San Diego to visit that but beautiful weather you guys have out there.And I see how this wellness practice and you were mostly going cash and you realized that there was a necessity to simplify the process.
That is where, what your company called Cash Practice, if you haven’t heard of his, Dr. Bodzin’s company. It’s called Cash Practice, CashPractice.com. That’s where the necessity you felt came in for making life simple. To run a cash practice. So if you want to tell a little bit about that and then give us your top five bullet points on what you think a practice should be doing when they’re thinking about going cash.
Dr. Bodzin: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s kind of you know, an interesting story of how Cash Practice started and again, I’ll try to keep it brief for you guys. That was you know, a lot of things start by say, on accident or I started in a garage you know type of thing. Well, Cash Practice started on my sofa. Literally, I was in practice saying I need to create a simple way of implementing some of the procedures that I put in my practice. You know, putting people on plans of care which we’ll get into these top five tips in a moment. So I decided, “Hey, let me pull out my computer skills which I hadn’t touched in some time and create some tools for myself.” Which I did.
And the intention was just to create it for myself to use and practice which I did. And this is back in the mid-90’s and at that time, if you recall eBay was kind of hitting the world at that time and I was, I hate to say, I don’t want to say addicted to eBay but I was spending some time on eBay and I was buying a lot of stuff. And I said, “I should have some stuff I could sell on here.” So I asked myself the question, ”What can I sell?” And for fun, I said, “Oh I have this software stuff that I created. Let me put it on there and see what happens.” And I did.
I put it on eBay and within a couple of months, we have several hundred doctors who bought a copy of the software. And to my amazement, the feedback I got was pretty remarkable. This is a very simple tool that I created. And the feedback I was getting from doctors was that this is a really cool thing. It was helping them a lot. They’re having great success with it, of signing people up for care. It made it really easy for them.
So it dawned to me having a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit that I said, “You know, I have something here that our profession could use and I have this deep desire to help other chiropractors. So let me go ahead and run with this.” So literally sitting on my sofa, I knocked up the first version of CashPractice.com, the website in about a month. I got the first version up. And it’s been through many, many, many, many upgrades since then but the original version was powerful in itself in that you’re able to create these plans and we started enrolling people in service. We’ve continued to develop the website in the last seven or eight years to the point now where we have nearly a thousand clients and we have a headquarters. We have a whole team of staff of over ten staff back here helping our clients and it’s grown into a full-sized enterprise now.
It’s a lot of fun.Not just the doctors but I know for a fact, we had nearly 200,000 patients enrolled in care as a result of the service we provide.It’s been phenomenal so that’s again the thumbnail sketch of the creation of Cash Flow.
Dr. Capra: I think it might be a good idea if we quickly reviewed some of the main features that you guys have in your system. Obviously it’s evolved and I know you have like the email and all that. So maybe you can just tell them quickly about the features you have and then we’ll go right into the top five tips that you have.
Dr. Bodzin:The features of Cash Practice, the best way of thinking about it, there’s three modules.It’s one system as Cash Practice Systems implies.It’s a whole bunch of systems but it’s designed to all use together.And the three modules are as following:
- The first module is called the Careplan Calculator. What it provides is the ability to create customized payment plans. You know cash plans that people enroll and they have these compliant programs that basically it produces the actual agreement that you print off, the patient signs. It’s customized for your practice. It has all the services laid out, all the compliant discounts.
- The second system, the feature that it provides is the ability to do payment processing. One time payments, recurring payments, auto-debits are really the primary purpose of that as you’ll hear me talk about my top five tips about using auto debits,
- The third feature that it has the Drip Ed System which what it brings, that’s the name of the feature it gives you is the ability to do emails and marketing and education through email campaigns. So it’s that combination together that the three modules put together. So literally in one step, you’re able to enroll a patient in care, produce their agreements, schedule all their payments, assign a campaign of emails. And literally in one step, you’re able to accomplish all that.
Now I just want to mention that this time right now, we’re just about to release a new version of that software, of that system, Version 4 because we got a complete update to include integration with uhm…I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the company, Chirohealth USA with Dr. Ray Foxworth. We’ve actually integrated his program into the software so that you’re able to apply his network discounts. And you can learn more about that. We have some other sources for that but that increases your compliance. It’s really a remarkable combination. So that’s the first system. It’s the Cashplan Calculator Module.
And you know, the main benefit it’s providing to an office besides, I mentioned the features, is it’s streamlining things for you. It’s automating your collections. And it’s saving you a ton of money. I mean in the average practice, we did a survey and we found, we’re actually finding that on average, we’re saving an office about 40 hours of payroll per month when they use our system.
Dr. Capra: Wow.
Dr. Bodzin: When we are asked what are the costs to use a system? Well it doesn’t cost you anything. It actually saves you. As my good friend, Gareth Gunderson, the author of the New York Times bestselling selling author of Killings sacred Cows, recently sharing with me. He goes, “It’s a total investment. It totally makes sense to spend money on this because it’s actually saving you money and yada, yada, yada.” So yeah.
So from a standpoint of the features and benefits, I think that’s primarily it. There’s are probably others we can dig into but I think those are the key ones.
Dr. Capra: Yeah. If you’re really go into the system, there are a lot of little nooks and crannies even with the email capture system and all that. But let’s roll into your top five. What are the, if I’m a…
Dr. Bodzin: Okay so…
Dr. Capra: …chiro looking to collect cash only or even just going majority cash or just trying new care plans. You can do insurance as well but what’s your top five?
Dr. Bodzin: Right now, the first I’m going to mention is you got to do long-term care plans for your patients. You got to put people on programs or you at least recommend programs of six, eight, twelve months of care. You can’t be doing a practice that’s “Oh let me see you for a couple of weeks to see how you do. If your practice model is a relief care model, you’re going to have a real challenge of doing cash.
Tip # 1
So the first thing I’m going to say is you go to be doing long term care plans which implies you’re doing corrective work and you’re doing wellness care. That’s what it implies by saying long term. So that’s top tip number one.
Tip #2
Top tip number two is you got to go ahead and put people on these plans and give them a payment choice. So the second tip is don’t just say I’m putting people on plans and they got to pre-pay. Because what’s common in our profession is that when people say they’re doing cash programs, what they’re actually saying is I have people pre-pay for care.
The top tip number two is give people a choice. Let them either pre-pay but more commonly what they’ll choose is to do some form of monthly payments. They’ll either do it monthly or they’ll do a downpayment followed by monthly.
Tip #3
So the third tip I want to give you is that you want to make sure that you’re giving these payment options when they’re doing monthly payments, they automate the process. That you’re not asking them to pull up their wallet once a month or give you their credit card once a month, or write you a check. Or God forbid, your mailing them a statement in the mail, or a bill in the mail. We want to stop reminding you in that they’re paying you, sort of like the gyms do. Same concept is you want to automate the process.
We have definitely seen as a direct correlation with, the often you have someone touch the money in your practice or think about the money, the lower your retention. If you want a high retention, you got to eliminate people from thinking people about the money and the only way to really do that is to automate it. You want to make it so that the decisions to continue with care are not difficult.
That’s the challenge with pre-pays. I’ll just mention it real quick. It’s that when people pre-pay, when it comes time to renew, it’s a big decision and we want to eliminate that. That’s the challenge of pre-pays.
Tip# 4
The fourth tip I’m going to give you is you want to go ahead and educate patients consistently. You want to consistently educate them so that it’s not just I educate them during a Report of Findings and try to convince them to get it under care. In my practice, I don’t really even start the education process until after they’ve enrolled in care. But you have to consistently do it. It has to be a sustained consistent message.
So whatever the message is in your practice is what you want to pick but in my practice as an example, the message is you get adjusted to stay healthy. That’s my message that I teach over and over and over and as many different ways as possible. It’s not about the nervous system. It’s not about all the things that we typically talk about in chiropractic. Although I do talk about them but the primary underlying theme of everything I teach is you get adjusted to stay healthy and that becomes the ongoing. So whether it’s emails we’re sending out to our Group Ed System, whether it’s newsletters, whether it’s handouts we’re giving, whether it’s the TV programs that are running in the practice doing education, all of that in combination, it’s all with that simple theme as we get adjusted to stay healthy. But it’s the consistent message over and over and over and over and over. Just like Coca Cola has their message. Just like Nike has their message. Just like every program or every brand out there has their message. What is your message that you’re giving?
I have one more and that is you want to eliminate the points in the practice where people make a decision.What I mean by that is that every time a, I’m going to go deeper here for a second.We’ve all heard this saying in practice that you got to plug the leaky holes in the bucket.You know it’s a common saying, “Oh I got to plug the leaky holes.”I’m going to give you a new saying.This is Dr. Bodzin’s new saying and that is, “Let’s have a bucket that doesn’t have holes to begin with.”
What the holes represent in that analogy, what do the holes mean? What the holes are is where people are falling away. Why are they leaving the practice? And quite frankly, we’ve identified the places where people leave a practice. Oh it’s simply this. It’s when people have to think of a decision whether they continue with care or not. Every time they have to decide whether it’s a conscious decision or a subconscious decision that becomes an exit to your practice.
Tip #5
Tip number five is you need to have a meeting with your staff or by yourself and just sit down and figure out where the points in my process?Where are the points in my relationships with my patients that they have a decision to make and I’ll just answer the top three for you right now.
- The pain went away
- The insurance stopped
- It’s time to pay again.
Those are the three categories of scenarios where people make a decision.
The first two, the pain went way and the insurance stopped, pretty much get neutralized when you put people on long term care plans. If you’re doing long term programs, you typically not have those two scenarios play out. The third one being it’s time to pay again, well that’s where we just talked about the whole idea of having people being on plans or you’re automating the payments. You’re not reminding them to pay. Those are the three. But you could go to your practice and start thinking of other areas. Where are the places where you think stimulate the people deciding whether they’re going to continue with care or not? Or even starting care to begin with.
So I guess the fifth tip I’m going to give you is you need to identify in your practice where it is people are having internal conversations with their own self talk as to whether they can start care or continue care. You need to address that scenario by either coming with a way of not having the conversation to come up at all in their own mind or see that the conversation they have in their own mind does not lead them to say I don’t want to do this.
Dr.Capra: Dr. Bodzin, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for all the information you gave us today. Thank you so much for what you’ve done for our profession in developing Cash Practice. If you want to tell everybody where they can go and find more information about Cash Practice, go ahead right now.
Dr. Bodzin: Absolutely. I’d be happy to. You can go to
- CashPractice.com.You can go there and check it out and read some information.We even have a free mini-course.You can put in your name and email and you’ll get a series of emails of educational material.But you can just read and apply to your practice right away.
- If you like to get a demonstration of how Cash Practice works, certainly go ahead and contact us either by calling the phone number that’s on the website, 877-343-8950.
- Or you could email us at support@CashPractice.com.That will go to our support ticket system and just simply say you’re interested in getting more information.You can certainly visit us on Facebook.We’d love for you to become a fan of us on Facebook.
- Go to Facebook.com/CashPractice and we have some great information on there. We’re always posting stuff. And in fact, Dr. Brian, I think we have some photos of you on there from Parker Seminar. That’s posted on there as well.
Dr. Capra: Well great. Again, thank you so much Dr. Bodzin. Again, this is Dr. Brian Capra with Billing Precision and we’re happy to bring you this great information. Again you can see more about this video on our blog, on our Facebook, and our YouTube accounts and hopefully share it with others.
