Increase Patient Retention with ZingIt Solutions

Jason: My name’s Jason, I’m the chief operations officer here at Genesis Chiropractic software and I’ve been working with the company for seven years now, and Prior to this, technology was the space that I worked in. I don’t come from a background of healthcare administration or healthcare consulting or advising. And so, from my perspective, scaling technology was always a part of how I got up and spent every day of my professional life. And to that end, I started working with a company that started supporting chiropractors and the very unique needs of the chiropractic world.

Now, I’m not suggesting that other specialties, other types of clinicians don’t have really unique needs but focusing on these it’s been fun and understanding the one specific difference that I see with chiropractic is that it needs to be followed up on so vehemently. You’ve got to work so diligently to help chiropractic patients realize that they need to commit in order to get the full benefit of the chiropractic care that’s being offered.

And to that end, we are going to talk about how, just our software solution alone, we know is inadequate to help. And today we wanna tell the story of how it is we partner with others and why we partner with others to do that.

Joining me today is Steve Weber from Zingit. Now, Steve has been one of those partners, and certainly not the only one, but one that we really have enjoyed working with. And that doesn’t just go for you, Steve, that goes for the entire organization, folks over there that have helped us take a platform that’s great in a lot of ways that we think, and we’re grateful that a lot of our clients think of it, and create something that’s better for clients and for chiropractic and for those practices that know without great technology, they can’t leverage a fantastic team and an awesome service to create an experience that can change communities.

So, today, we are focusing on how those relationships take off and how a platform like Genesis is used to actually help all of us accomplish that. So, Steve, thank you for joining us today and we’ll get underway.

Steve: Well, I, certainly, appreciate being here. It has been a pleasure as well working with the team at Genesis. And having spoken to loads of offices on a daily basis I can tell you that from a user standpoint, clients of Genesis speak very, very highly of the team and how the software works.

So, we’re happy to be associated with Genesis and more importantly, just from my standpoint, I love working with chiropractors because they’re out there to really help patients and we want to help them do that. And there are some significant challenges that chiropractic offices and their staff face every day.

So, what I wanted to do is, first of all, share a little bit about myself. Like you Jason, I’ve been here six, almost seven years now. And before that I was in the healthcare space but mainly not chiropractic, but more selling to hospitals and medical offices for many years.

So, when I joined here we really wanted to make a difference, and that’s what we’re looking to do with the offices that we work with. Partner with solutions that are industry-leading like the Genesis Chiropractic Platform, their software, but then also provide a solution that everybody faces every day which is patients just don’t answer the phone anymore. So, you can call until you’re blue in the face but they just don’t answer the phone.

So, when we first started working with Genesis, Jason that was, I wanna say almost four years ago now.

Jason: Yeah. We had the debate the last call we’re on it. I think four years is what it looked like from our first client comming on board.

Steve: Yeah. Very beginning of 2013, so in a month it will be four years. So I don’t know, do you want to flip over to my presentation or what are they seeing on the screen?

Jason: Yeah, right now they’re seeing what I’m sharing which is just a couple of questions and so I’ll finish a little bit more of the set up Steve, and then we’ll flip over to you, probably take about two minutes here.

So, for four years we’ve been working together but I wanna tell the story of prior to getting to actually how we got to that point. I wanna tell the story more of how we got to saying, “Yes,” to a Steve Webber when we got on the phone. So I’ll lead up to that Steve and then I’ll turn that part over to you if that’s all right?

Steve: Yeah. Sounds good.

Jason: So for us, we know that patients don’t answer the phone anymore. And so, we knew that we’ve got billing, we’ve got documentation, we’ve got a good scheduling platform but we knew it wasn’t enough. We knew that if we wanted to develop a solution that was, really gonna help our providers reach out to clients like Zingit, we needed to look for help because we simply couldn’t build it ourselves. But we can’t build it ourselves when it comes to lots of things.

So, Patient medication, documentation, supplements, you know, we don’t own the rights to outcome assessment tools for chiropractors Steve.

We know how to help chiropractors and physical therapists and other people that work in chiropractic offices document for their visits, but we don’t own the rights to oswestry forms, and SF-36 forms, etc. We don’t have a platform for sending emails, text messages or making phone calls.

So, we knew we’re a platform that can plug into those things but we can’t do that ourselves, so we wanted to identify those needs for our clients and most of the time Steve, it’s not us identifying it frankly it’s our clients bringing it to us and saying, “Here is something that we need.” And we’ll do some of our own research into that, but we also rely on our clients a lot to bring a solution.

So, as much as I know, Steve would probably like to take credit for the Genesis, Zingit relationship. We can really thank our clients for putting us together. Because I’m not 100% certain, I’ll bet we would have have found each other eventually Steve, but it was a client that brought us together. And it wasn’t just good for that one client, I’m really excited because it’s been good for lots of clients and we get to why in just a second.

But we’re also not good at doing the measurements or the manipulation of X-rays that PostureRay, PostureScreen can do. We’re also not experts in the patient education field like 3DRX or web exercises company who specializes this in.

And so we want to figure out what the need is, figure out what the best option is in the marketplace, and then figure how to bring that to you guys in a single sign on, meaning you login to Genesis and you gain access to these other things. And I’ve kinda put a few areas in play here, payment integration, this reminder services that we’re talking about with Steve on the phone, education, collection, statements, all of these things we can’t be all things to every single one of our clients and it’s hubris to think that we could.

So, what we do is we, actually, figure out an area, and that’s why I wanted to tell this story of success here today. And that’s why Steve is on here because a client brought a need to our attention. We get on a phone call with Zingit and the rest is not just history, because we’re still writing that story as we speak. Because we can talk about, and Steve will talk about, how we started, what was offered in the beginning, how the marketplace has changed and then, ultimately, how we keep evolving to make sure that the things that you, as our clients, need or our prospective clients are looking for. We can stay up to date so that you don’t have to look elsewhere and use two systems in order to accomplish one goal of growing and maintaining your practice.

So, Steve, I wanted to just set this up a little bit because we’re not the same relationship that we were four years ago, right? That’s fair to say.

Steve: Absolutely.

Jason: And so now we wanna talk about that evolution and I’ll kick it over to you if that’s all right. So I stop sharing and you can start sharing at this point.

Steve: Let’s hope I can do this correctly?

Jason: Yeah, you got it down.

Steve: All right. Are you seeing my screen there?

Jason: We are seeing it.

Steve: Perfect.

Jason: You got it, we are seeing it.

Steve: Okay. So, you know, when we started out, we were doing appointment reminders. The key difference that we brought to the table was the ability to have conversations. And so when it comes to texting and appointment rescheduling and things like that, you just can’t do that without conversation. So, that’s where clients were like, they came to the team and Genesis and said, “You know, we really want Zingit.” We built that first client and then the second client, and then we said, “Hey, there’s something here.”

And then we started adding to it. We said, “All right, can we be smarter with the data integration with Genesis?” So, in other words, can we not just force the front desk to have to put the cell phone number in a special field, but can we just look at the patient’s main phone, phone one, phone two, and have our system automatically figure out if it’s a mobile number and then if it is, send a text and so on and so forth.

So, smarter logic was developed and then we added on the birthday clubs. So, we continued to evolve this services that we offer, that we say is appointment reminders, but it’s really evolved into something we refer more to now as patient communication.

So as we started out in those things, people came back and they said, “Well, you know, I’d really like to get appointments going out same day.” So, we came to the folks at Genesis and we said, “Can we make that happen?” And so that was the next big move.

So at that point, we added that integration, and Genesis was super helpful in providing that because all of the programming to make that happen needed to be on the Genesis side, right?

Jason: Happy to do it.

Steve: Now, as we started working together, the clients figured out that this interface, this workstation that they could keep open in a browser window right next to the Genesis platform in Chrome was a big game changer. This allowed folks to have this real-time conversation in the inbox. And so, as they looked at other solutions and we talked to other offices, you know, the way conversations would happen were very clunky. A reply would go to an email or the front desk wouldn’t get that email or the doctor would get it, you couldn’t have a conversation. Well, that wasn’t really fixing the problem that patients didn’t answer the phone because I need to have a conversation over text.

So, this workstation gave the staff the ability to do that. So, now not only were you doing appointment reminders but now we’re rescheduling missed appointments. We’re reminding patients to book their next appointments.

So, we’re moving beyond. So just like Genesis is striving to be the most advanced in workflow and helping you to maximize that interaction with the patient in the office, we’re helping you to communicate better.

So then we added on phone reminders. We had a client and I remember the conversation. She said to me, “I have a 22% no show rate and where I live people are flaky. And so if they don’t get a text message, I want them to get a phone call.” So then, we added that in but the key here is the way that we created the logic, it would default and analyze all the data that that existed in Genesis and if there wasn’t a mobile number, it would send a phone call reminder or if the patient was opted out. Or if we sent a text message and it failed to be delivered, because that does happen on cell phone networks.

So that gave us 100% appointment reminder coverage with as many going out as text as possible and the back up being phone calls. And then you might say, “Well, my system does emails.” The challenge is, with emails, only about 20% or so those are actually read but that doesn’t address, maybe the older population within your patient base that really doesn’t respond to email or text, they still need a phone call.

So, that was a big enhancement and that came completely from the shared relationship that we have with clients using Genesis and using Zingit. So, we’re really pleased about that forward kind of development.

In addition, we’ve started to see lots of clients really leveraging what are called mobile webpages. So, this allows us to send out a link. That’s the way you send content via text. So, let’s go back, so you can see here, that whether you’re doing community outreach, dinners, workshops, you send a text, you include a link in the bottom and they click on that and they can view the content right on their phone.

So now, I’ve got the ability to push out via text content that maybe I’ve been sending out via email in the past and take that 20% open rate and move it to 95. Now I’ve got a solution that’s four times more effective in delivering information to my patients.

What’s really neat about this is just this year, we’ve started using this with our offices to deliver holiday hours. So, the appointment reminders that go out directly for their appointments, the weeks in advance of Christmas are now including a link. The link contains all the hours for the rest of the month around Christmas so patients can plan and make their appointments accordingly, and that’s all done through the integration with Genesis because as they get their appointment reminder, right at the bottom of their text messages are their hours for the holidays.

So, Jason, I think that’s something, I don’t think you even know about, right?

Jason: Correct. That’s news, and further evidence of, we can’t keep working on this stuff. We are developing a platform with billing, scheduling, documentation, all of this. We wouldn’t be able to keep up with this but Zingit, much like any of our other partners who focuses on one thing, hears the need, changes it and just simply needs the data from us to make it happen.

Steve: I know you and I have spoken, and I spend a lot of my time kind of explaining that all texting is not the same. And the reason for that is most people don’t realize there’s actually three different ways to send a text message.

You can send it as email to text which is what a lot of other systems do and you always know that because you have to ask them their phone number or, excuse me, you have to ask them their phone number and their carrier which is sometimes a little invasive, and then if they’re able to respond at all, sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t, it comes to an email. So, that’s very unreliable from a delivery standpoint and not really easy to use.

The other way is with what’s called a long code or regular telephone number. Now, most people if you ask them, they’d say, “Well, I wanna do it through a long code.” Well, the reality is regular telephone numbers are great, but if you need it to be delivered, if you need to verify that it’s delivered which is what most offices wanna do. They want to know what’s working, and they wanna know the patient got the message. Unfortunately, delivery confirmations are not available on a regular telephone number.

So, if you’re using a service that has a regular telephone number, not only can you not confirm that it was delivered but you also run into the risk that carriers, individual companies like TMobile, Sprint, and AT&T, eventually, may block that number because they may think that number is being used for business purposes and they’re going to classify it as spam.

So what ends up happening is next thing you know, I have doctors that I talk to and they said, “Well, it worked okay until everybody on Verizon stoped getting our messages.” So, that becomes challenging because now you’ve got a solution that you can’t depend on.

So, with Zingit, we’re built on an industry-leading, mobile marketing platform. So, we don’t do EHR, we don’t do scheduling, we do mobile communication. And because we’re built on that industry leading mobile platform, we use what are called short codes.

If you wanna use a regular telephone number on a platform, you can, but we explain to offices why you really don’t and why short codes are the best solution.

Now, short codes are a five or six digit number, they’re difficult to get, they’re expensive, they have to connect to a software platform, so it’s a very different class of service. But with short codes, you get delivery confirmation, we work directly with the carriers and have agreements with the carriers to deliver and provide the notification and so you get a much more robust kind of business class solution.

And so that is what I spend a lot of time doing, is helping people to understand we’re experts in mobile. We’re not experts in any EHR. We look to Genesis to be the folks that are gonna help you in that area.

We don’t expect you to be experts here, because we want you to be experts at changing patients lives through your interactions every single day.

So, that’s where we focus on education and as people start to look at texting, they figure out that, there’s different types of way or different ways to send a text message, and not only that, but when I look at other companies that we talk about every day, that clients come to us and say, well, how do you compare to X, Y, Z company? And what we encourage them to look at is that a lot of those companies are really email based platforms that have added on a little texting appointment reminder functionality.But at the heart of everything they do, it’s email. So, when you stack email up against text, almost everybody agrees that it’s four times more effective.

So with Zingit, not only are we providing the integration with Genesis but we’re delivering the industry leading technology that is mobile based, that helps everything you do be so much more effective.

So that’s the kind of apples and oranges comparison I drew up here at the end. So, Jason, I know you kinda wanted me to go through and talk about how we started, and how things have evolved and I hope this has been helpful.

Jason: Yeah, what we’re trying to convey is that, we get requests all the time, Steve. And then reminder services are only one of those things and it’s been great because this is something that is used to what, how often? all the time, right.

Every single day, almost 90% of our practices, there are very few practices that do not use an integrated reminder service that we’ve got and I’m pretty happy to say many of those are using Zingit and with good reason.

But anybody out there who’s listening, who sees that there’s a place in their practice where they’re using another technology that’s not integrated but they could see how an integration like this could, actually, really help, we would love to hear about it.

We can’t guarantee that we will be able to entertain all of this, and for a number of reasons. And last thing I’ll say is, when we went to Steven and to Zingit, it was a simple conversation and the relationship is great because they’re willing to invest time and money to make it better. And I can guarantee you when somebody comes up with another great idea, Steve doesn’t look at it and say, “Oh great, this is just simple for us to do.”but you know, everything costs money , it’s hard to do, and so we have to put together the business case as to why. And usually, it’s time, energy, and effort that has to be spent on both sides and that’s okay.

What I like about Zingit, and a lot of our other partners is they’re willing to do that, they don’t just say, “Well no, it is what it is and we’re not gonna keep investing in this particular solution.” The marketplace that you are involved in changes so we have to help keep up with it.

So, I know it was super helpful for a lot of people that we talked to, to have individual conversations like this in the past so they can understand why we do what we do. I’m hoping that this webinar’s gonna help a lot of our users and prospective users understand what we’re going through to help them stay as up to date as possible with what the technology world can help their practices with.

So, Steve, thank you so much for taking some time out to help us out with that. Are there any questions? You guys can feel free to chat them in. If there’s anything that you guys wanna know, especially with how to get in touch with Zingit, you can open up a task for us.

We also have an app in our app store that when you click on it, we know who you are, the user you are, and opens up a task to us automatically to get in touch with you guys to talk about setting up Zingit or Steve, they can go to your website, correct?

Steve: Yeah, if I can jump to it, and you know, in the vein of fruit, I kinda have a little bit of a cherry on top, kind of what’s coming next. I know that you and I have spoken about this and Dr.Brian Capron and I have spoken, and we’re pretty excited that we’ve got some enhanced services that we’re rolling out starting next month that’s in Beta right now for things like automated recalls, mobile reviews, satisfaction survey. Email system integration with things like Constant Contact, AWeber and MailChimp to support you doing email.

And even events or your workshops or your dinners, your community outreach. So all of those are things that a lot of practices have come to us and said, “You know, we really want those, we can do those things.” So email we wanna do, and through text and so we’re delivering on those.

So, I just wanted to kind of put that out there as the cherry on top and I’ll put my contact information up here as well which is I think what we’re talking about.

Jason: For sure. So thank you again Steve. Anybody who’s out there who has a question, feel free to chat them in and we’ll answer them. And I’ll hang out for a few more minutes if anyone else has another question about pretty much anything to do with Genesis, I’m here to help with that we can answer.

I know we’ve had some pretty funny conversations at the end of the things where you know someone says, “Hey Jason, since I’ve got you, can I ask your question about something completely unrelated?” That’s okay.

I know that Steve and I actually talk pretty, think we can call it pretty frequently, Steve? Definitely in comparison to our other technology vendors that we work with. I know I talk to you a lot more than the rest of them. And we are constantly bringing people on board but Steve I worry a little bit about… I’ve got a comment here in a second. I worry a little bit about us talking because you almost got a lion’s share of the market, I don’t know. Getting new business will be about in, probably a year from now, all we’ll talk about?

Steve: You know, we do. We’re not talking about tens of clients, we’re talking about hundreds of clients and I think that’s important because when you look at partners, you have to look at a track record and I think what we’ve built here is a record of working together to really provide that high level of satisfaction from the client standpoint.

And so that’s probably the thing I’m most proud of, is that we can go from one or two offices to hundreds upon hundreds and we’re not talking about issues, we’re talking about technology advancements and how do we further improve things and that’s pretty cool.

Jason: Yeah it’s, you know it’s a good time to mention this. Hopefully, she doesn’t mind me mentioning her name. One of our people that work with us, her name is Danielle Willard. Danielle has great customer service and is always very good with getting right back and they are very helpful. There are a number of words in that are emphasized with all caps, so big thumbs up and a smiley face.

So thank you, we appreciate that, and again another reason why we chose them, we have started other relationships. Steve, I think we’ve told you this, we’ve started other relationships with vendors who had great technology but we’ve dropped them because they would not get back to our clients. And so it’s not just the fact that the technology is good. It’s gotta be something that evolves and there has to be a willingness to grow it and then there has to be good customer service that supports it on the backend.

All right Steve there are no other questions. Brother, I thank you so much, have a wonderful day and thank you all for attending, appreciate it.

Steve: Absolutely my pleasure, thank you.

Jason: All right. Bye now.