How to Use Patient Care Plans
Do you set-up care plans for your patients? Care Plans for your patients is a critical tool that you need to use in your Chiropractic Practice. How do you track the financial commitments of your patients on plans as well as their scheduled visits throughout the time period of their plan? One patient visit is never enough to completely solve their problem so how do you track it all? View this free webinar to see how to create your patient plans of care and then apply automation to them. Automatic care plans will save you a lot of time and you won’t have to memory manage any of it. You can even setup a notification when visits are running out. Plus, projecting staffing and cash flow levels will be easier and more accurate. Learn how with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: Jason: All right, well, we’re gonna get started. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. And one of our hotter topics, I would say, in just the sense that it comes up quite a bit because one of the features that we’re going to review today is one that is used quite often. And today, we’re actually gonna get into the nuts and bolts almost immediately. Lots of people use care plans, and let me be very clear what I’m talking about when I say care plan is this is not something…we’re not reviewing anything clinical today, we’re not talking about how to diagnose somebody, or how to treat them or even speak to them about that treatment. Today, we’re talking about how are you gonna track the financial commitments that you put in place for the patient, as well as their scheduled visits throughout a prescribed either time frame or set number of visits. So that’s the topic for today. And care plans are something that people ask about in a lot of different ways because not everybody uses them the same. Jess, you’ve gotta come across lots of folks who use care plans different from one another. Is that pretty common? Jessica: Yes. Jason: So today, we’re going to review the nuts and bolts of that care plan, how you can use it with your patient, how it’s beneficial. And we’d love to field any questions that people have regarding ways that they would like to apply it. Before we get into that, just the why, is something I always like to start with. Patient walks through your door and you want to help that person achieve and realize their health goals, maybe their fitness goals or both. And that patient at some point has to commit to more than one visit to make that happen. With almost every single clinician that we have in our system, one visit is never going to solve the problem. They’ve gotta commit to changing lifestyles, and changing habits. And our doctors are going to have to work with that patient and specifically coach them through, and treat them multiple times to get them there. That being the case, that commitment for that type of lifestyle change can span weeks, months, and sometimes even I’ve seen care plans last for entire calendar years. So today, as we’re going over those, we wanna to make sure that we understand how they’re going to be charged, how they’ll make payments, and then finally, how they’re going to schedule those visits, coupled with how are you gonna know when a care plan is off track? So we’re actually gonna go over all of those things today while talking about care plans and, Jess, this is where I’ll ask you to start jumping in and helping us here. Care plans, when somebody asks how to do it, I’d like to go through basically top to bottom creating one, setting up notifications, and then showing everybody who’s on today, how we would go about the workflow of where we would see those notifications and running reports. So can you start with the nuts and bolts on how to create one? Jessica: Sure, and I’m actually going to go ahead and create a new patient who will not have a care plan already created. So I’m just making up some information here, and create an account real quick. Jason: I looked at our webinar from last week, one Ctrl+ might do you some good just for the way that people are seeing it. And then if anybody ever has any questions, if they could chat them in, we’d be happy to answer them. Jessica: So I’m going to go into the Patient Care Plan tab, the CP tab. So this Care Plan tab is absolutely blank. It’s a new patient, never had a care plan set up a before. So what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna come down to the bottom because the top part would lift all…any care plans that are on this patient’s account. And I’m going to hit the New button. Hitting this button will give me an asterisk next to each of the required fields. So the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna name your care plan. What I see many practices do is they come up with a naming convention such as how many insurance visits over how many total visits, or wellness spring 2016, that type of thing. Most practices come up with a way to name things so that by seeing the care plan name, they have a general idea of how many visits it should have and how long it should last. So that’s different per practice but that is, in general, what I do see. So I’m just going to go ahead and name this one 12/36 2016. So, we’re going to select the start date. Please be aware that the start date will… You can set it to go back. So right now it’s the 12th of April. I can set it so that it starts on
Can Chiropractic Software Create Peace of Mind?
Over our last posts, we’ve been talking about a theme….It’s About Time. Today, I would like to continue on that path but in a way that is a little more personal for each of us as Chiropractors. I want to talk about how we feel each night when we get home from our office, when taking care of patients is over for the day because I think that it’s about time that we all have peace of mind. It’s about time that when our day is over, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything that could have been done to make our day successful and our patient experience the best it could possibly be has been done. It’s about time that we don’t have to lay in bed at night and try to remember if every chart was updated and wonder if every no-show was rescheduled. Most of the Chiropractic systems that we put to work in our offices are reactive in nature. If a patient doesn’t show up for an appointment, someone has to remember to call them and then actually do it. We have to look through report after report to see if all of the insurance claims have been filed, followed-up on, and paid. There is another report to look at to see if re-exams have been scheduled and another one to go over for follow-up calls. These reports may give us insight into our businesses if we have time to read them but they also create a paperwork nightmare. As a Chiropractor, we already have to wear so many hats as a business owner, manager of employees, and doctor and educator to our patients. Adding on the necessity to read multiple reports every single day just to make sure the necessary actions for the day have been taken is overwhelming. Even worse, systems like these mean that your mind can never really leave your office because you have to memory manage every little detail. I believe that it is time for a change, a complete shift from these reactive chiropractic systems that leave us overwhelmed and stressed out to a proactive system that gives us the peace of mind we’ve been searching for. I know that when I shifted my own office from my old, outdated processes to a new proactive chiropractic software EHR system, the relief that came with it was immeasurable and created peace of mind for me in my practice. With a proactive chiropractic practice management software system in place, each and every day can be distilled down to one number. That number tells you how many tasks that should have been completed were left undone so your goal for this number is always zero. That zero at the end of the day tells you in one number that every task that needed to be completed for your day to be successful was done. That is peace of mind. Even more, if the number isn’t zero, it tells you specifically which task was not completed and whose responsibility that task was. This lets you better manage both your own time and that of your staff and assign the people to the tasks that best suit their abilities. There is no better way to make sure your practice is running smoothly each and every day. As Chiropractors, we face many challenges both as a profession and in our day-to-day practices. This is one area that we can control. We don’t have to live with the worry and stress that those old, reactive systems cause. We don’t have to search report after report, memory manage the details, and still wonder at the end of the day if everything has been done. We can choose to eliminate the worry, manage our offices better and easier than ever before, and improve the care and experience of our patients simply by changing our system. Proactive chiropractic EHR software that distills our days down to one report, one number is the answer because isn’t it about time for peace of mind.
Top 10 Metrics You Should Track
What Metrics Should You Track in Your Practice? Are metrics important to you? Our clients have determined that these are the most important metrics to track in your practice: Collections, Patients Visits, Charges, New Patients, No Shows, No Future Appointments, Accounts Receivable, Unbilled Visits, Unsigned Notes and Claims needing to be corrected by the Practice. They’re related to each other and they affect each other. How do you track them? Do you have a tool to monitor them with a simple glance at a chart? Do you have a radar chart or a histogram that you can understand with a quick look on the home screen? The tools to track these metrics are built into our software and your Practice Success Coach will help you to understand the numbers and their relationships to the others. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be measured to know the health of your Practice. You’ll be able to see if you’re reaching your goals instantly because two time ranges compared show your improvements. Learn more with the free webinar that can be viewed right on this page. Read the transcript: This week’s webinar, the topic for this week is How to Measure the Success of Your Practice. Really what to measure? What things as a practice owner should you be looking at? What things should you have in place as weekly, monthly, yearly things that should be measured and then managed? So today is going to be which metrics you should look at, and we can talk about frequency, but that frequency is only recommended. You as a practice owner will be able to choose whatever frequency you’re looking at there. and we’ll actually get into how to find information within our system so practice owners can have this happen a little bit more easily should they be concerned about something, so the key indicators are going to be discussed today. And aside from that though, we’re going to…well, first I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Jason Barnes, I’m the Chief Operations Officer here, and I may have been sitting here for about six and a half now helping practice owners figure out what to measure, and how to measure it in their practices. So what things should be measured, first of all? And why do you need to do it? And how it is going to begin? When you talk about the success of your practice, I have differing opinions from one practice owner to another. Some practice owners want to measure it on the amount of money that we’ve brought in. Others, the number of visits. Both of those numbers are very important, I would recommend that they both be looked at. But at the end of the day, you’re going to have to figure out which one is more important to you because there can be only one top number that will drive your practice and typically that number is dollars. A lot of practice owners prefer to look at visits but visits can be viewed in a number of different ways. So looking at this moving forward, we’re gonna take it down to the ones that we talk about the most, the ones that we’re going to utilize while actually making recommendations to practice. Collections. Now, collections can be viewed in a couple of different ways. The amount of money in your bank account, the amount of money posted in your system. If they’re the same amount of money, you’re doing really well, but if they’re not the same amount of money you’ve got a problem, and we need to figure out why there could be an issue there. But where do collections come from? And if they’re low, what can be done about them? So the first thing to show you is a diagram. You have a practice here…and I’ll make this slightly larger. You have a practice here with three different numbers on it, right? The blue line is their total collected, their green line is their cash collected, and their red line is their insurance collected. As trends would go, it looks like they’re trending down as they went in from the end of the year to the beginning of this year. It’s pretty typical for the end of the year where you’re having less [ inaudible 00:03:16] visits due to the holidays than in the beginning of the year where you see deductibles kick in. However, if you were to contrast that over patient visits, this is the same exact timeframe right now, you would know that visits dictate your collections. But there’s a big trend of going down from 2,088 ending at a much, much lower number here in the 1,400 range. So for this particular example, I brought up and put together a few diagrams. If you’re looking to increase collections, if the collections are indicating that they’re going down, there are a few obvious places to look, like going to visits. You would have to increase patient visits or you would have to fight underpayments. So if your visits weren’t going down, it means that the amount of money you were getting paid was going down. So there’s really only two ways that you could look at the metric of collections, two possible things that could be bringing it down. Either my visits went down or the amount I’m getting paid per visit went down. Either way, you have to know what to do next and which metric to look at next. So visits are fairly easy. You know, if you check somebody in, that’s a visit, and underpayment is a much more challenging thing. And I’d like for you guys to see a separate webinar we did on fighting underpayments and you can find it in any of our websites to go over how we do that. But then what? What is it that you’re gonna change? How is it you’re gonna manage your practice if you have
It’s About Time For Us to Show Our Support for Chiropractic
We’ve been talking about a theme, “It’s about time…”. There are so many things that we can say about that when it comes to our profession, but today, I want to talk about one of the most important ones. It’s about time that we as Chiropractors show our support for Chiropractic and the place to start is with our pocketbooks. We have to begin giving our money only to companies that support Chiros and stop funding companies that support anti-Chiro legislation. Chiropractors and the Chiropractic profession itself have been under fire for a quite a while now and make no mistake, it is not over. In order to preserve our livelihoods, our profession, the message of Chiropractic we bring to our patients, and the good we bring to their health and their lives, we are going to have to take a stand for what we believe in. Too many of the companies that Chiropractors give their money to every day are not pro-Chiro. Instead, they not only support legislation that is damaging to Chiropractic, but many of them want to turn us into medical doctors, forcing us to give vaccines in our office and ignore the basic principles of health that Chiropractic was founded upon. When we choose to do business with these companies, whether they handle our phone service, our billing, or our electronic health records, we are helping them in their fight to mold Chiropractic into the medical model, make us subservient to the MDs and the insurance companies, and even put us out of business completely. We need to choose where we spend our money more wisely and use our dollars to show companies that we as Chiros will stand together. We can and should do business only with companies who support Chiropractic and by extension support who we are and what we believe. There are so many good pro-Chiro companies out there that it is not hard to find them. We must be diligent in researching and choosing with whom we do business. By choosing to spend our money only with businesses who support our profession, we can send a message that we will no longer tolerate these companies attacking Chiropractic and by extension ourselves and our practices. Let’s start putting our money where our mouths are and start spending our hard earned dollars where they can do some good, with companies who are clearly pro-Chiro, who work to advance our profession and who believe in the power of Chiropractic to change the lives of our patients. It’s about time that we support Chiropractic by supporting the companies that work so hard to advance the profession every day.
