166 Creating Patient Centered Chiropractic Care

Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.  

This week’s topic: Creating a Patient-Centered Chiropractic Practice. 

The KC CHIROpulse Podcast is designed for Chiropractic professionals ready to elevate their practice to new heights, and is hosted by Kats Consultants coaches Dr Michael Perusich and Dr. Kelly Fredricks, both seasoned experts in Chiropractic care and business development, this podcast provides invaluable insights and actionable strategies to help you create a flourishing and sustainable Chiropractic business.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How to develop a patient-centered practice
• The benefits of patient-centered care
• How to get your staff involved in creating patient-centered care
• Why patient-centered care practices retain more patient long-term
• …and so much more…

In each episode of KC CHIROpulse, we delve into crucial aspects of building a successful Chiropractic practice, covering topics such as establishing a strong foundation, adopting a patient-centric approach, mastering marketing techniques, achieving financial fitness, fostering effective team building and leadership, integrating technology and innovation, and navigating common challenges in the field.

Whether you're a seasoned chiropractor or just starting your practice, the KC CHIROpulse Podcast offers a wealth of knowledge and practical advice to help you navigate the intricate world of Chiropractic business. Join us on this journey as we explore proven strategies, share success stories, and connect with industry experts to empower you in your pursuit of building a thriving Chiropractic practice.

Don't miss out on the latest insights and expert guidance. Subscribe now and unlock the secrets to taking your Chiropractic practice to the next level. Your success is our priority at Kats Chiropractic Business Advisors.

DISCLAIMER:  The information presented in this broadcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to offer legal, investment, accounting, or medical advice.  Seek the consultation of a professional for advice in those areas. And remember…your results using this information may be different than described.

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Transcript

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Chiropractors is your practice, patient centered. Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC ChiroPulse podcast brought to you by ChiroHealth USA and Kats Consultants. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich. I'm joined by my co host, Dr. Kelly Fredericks. Dr. Kelly, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing today? Fantastic. I love the fancy library behind you. Thank you. That's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. I appreciate you coming on today. Just so everybody knows, Dr. Kelly is one of our coaches at Kats Consultants. And so she's got this amazing practice that is incredibly patient centered. So you're the perfect person podcast today. Thank you. That makes me feel good. Yeah, we take it very seriously in this office. So I was excited to know that this is what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, it's a great topic because, my practice was very patient centered and, we really push this whole idea of being patient centered. But I want to dive into this by talking just a, from a 30, 000 foot viewpoint. What does that really mean? What does it mean to be patient centered? What's patient centered care all about? What are your thoughts? I take it all the way to the very beginning. So from the very first phone call that they make to us, I feel like they need to feel that we care about them and that we're going to take the time to listen and we're going to take the time to answer their questions and that this is going to be a good place for them to come, that they can trust to bring themselves or they're one of their family members. It may be their husband or their wife. It may be a child. And then also it needs to start on day one as well. So everything from them walking into your office to us greeting them when they walk in. Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. And it's all about the service that we create, the experience that we create for the patients. And so it's not just about patient outcomes. But it's about the impact that drives patient outcomes, which comes from the very things you said, great service, starts day one, starts the minute they talk to you, probably starts in your social media actually, before they ever even interact with you. But it's that drive to create patient satisfaction, then helps drive patient outcomes because you can't get good patient outcomes if you don't keep the patient in care. Yeah, and it's driving all the feels, right? What do they feel? Yeah. And that brings up a great point. Today's patients are way different than they were five years ago, five years ago most patients coming into our practice. And it goes further back than just five years, but most patients coming into the practice were information based. They wanted information. How does chiropractic work? That kind of thing. Today, their needs based. That means they have a need that they're coming to you So it's less about us educating them and more about fulfilling that need, and I think that's the center point of patient centered care. Yes, I agree. And this is incredibly important, I think, for the chiro, for the chiropractic practice, especially because we have a tendency to be asking the patient to come in a lot more often than other healthcare practitioners. Aside from physical therapy and occupational therapy. We're asking patients to come in on a very repetitive basis where their medical doctors are not, their dentist is not, their massage therapist probably is not, so we then have to have this higher level of communication skill to be able to affect this environment of patient centered care. Yes. Yeah. We do as doctors and our staff does as well because they're spending, they are coming more frequently and they are spending the majority of the time with our staff. So our staff needs to be taking that extra time to listen to the conversations that our patients are having and. Adding to that maybe asking them how their vacation was that they just came back from asking, oh, I heard your spouse was sick How are they feeling today, you know going that extra mile and then also as doctors, you know Kind of honing our table talk, what are we talking about when we're seeing them on a regular basis? Is it something that is continuing? to have them feel like they need to a continue their care and make sure that we're helping them feel patient centered as well. Exactly. That on the, with the table talk, are we building trust and rapport or staff building trust and rapport, and I think one of the places if we talk about how do you develop this, I think one of the places is really paying attention to customer service, whether it's reading books on customer service or watching videos on customer service as a team really bringing the true tenets of great customer service into your practice. And I could go on and on with customer service stories because I'm very acutely aware of them, no matter what setting I'm in. And I won't bore everybody with some of my stories today, but it's very important to bring this high level of service. Into the practice to be able to create this patient centered care approach because, get to my point here, because we're being judged by every other customer service experience the patient has had. Yes. And so if they've just been to. Nordstrom's department store. For example, if you've never been there, it's huge high level service from the moment you walk in the door and if you're not matching up to that, then they're grading you down on what that experience is like. So we've always got to be on our toes to be able to really drive that experience as best we can. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it's easy to forget about that. For example, we had we had a doctor coming in today that was actually coming to meet to become referral partners with us. And we're so busy in our morning shift that I just, I took a minute to stop and I said, everybody just look around the office. Let's make sure that we're doing it. So let's make sure that we're greeting her. When she walks in the door, let's make sure that we're, exactly everything that we're going to do with our patients. Let's make sure that any person walking into our office is also feeling that as well. So sometimes you have to, it's gotta be present time consciousness all the time, acutely aware. Yes. Yeah, very much I love that. So I want to dive into how we bring that more into our care plans and so forth in the practice, but we need to just pause here for just a minute to have a quick word from our sponsors. Our sponsors are Chiro Health USA and Kats Consultants. So take a listen to what they're doing and we'll be right back. So we all feel it. Rent, or dining out, gasoline, or movies. As a matter of fact, the dollar is not going as far for a whole host of reasons. And it's impacting everybody, regardless of your financial situation. Did you know that 38 percent of the overall population is having to reconsider how they're spending their money just to afford the healthcare they need? And if you break it down further, 26 percent have actually delayed the healthcare that they need. Including going to see you, the chiropractor. So here's what we need to know about the breakdown in demographics. You would think that someone who's making 120, 000 or more would be continuing their care right now. But the actual number is 18%. 18 percent of that group is actually putting off health care. And that's a group of people making six figures. When you take that same information all the way down to a group making 40, 000. That number is much higher. It's closer to 40%. So it's never been more important than now to make sure you've made it easy for your patients to come see you, that you have choices for them, and you understand what they're going through at home. We want to make sure your practice thrives during this time, and we encourage you to learn about what ChiroHealth USA can do for you and your practice, and making it easy for patients to see you and continue care. All right, everybody, we are back. We're talking about how to build patient centered care into the chiropractic practice. And we've talked about some great things so far. Dr Kelly, we've talked about what does it mean to be patient centered? We've talked about some of the communication techniques and things, but I want to talk a little bit about how we can personalize patient care plans to really drive that experience around what the patient's needs are. And I know in your practice, you'd do a great job of this and here's why I know this everybody, because I'm actually a patient of Dr. Kelly's and so is my daughter. So I know her practice very well, I think it starts with really being, again, I'm going to overuse this term I think today, but acutely aware of what patient needs are. So everybody comes to us with a different need and that need isn't always. Pain based. A lot of times there's this emotional connection, maybe it's, I can't play golf. I can't bowl with my buddies. Can't play with my grandkids. Like I like to, there's some emotional need that they have. That's why they come to you. And that's what they want you to solve. So we have to make sure that we're assessing the patient not just on the orthopedic level, and neurological level with all of our tests and things that we do, we need to be assessing really deep enough. So we find what that need is. Yeah. It's all about asking questions, right? So in the first phone call in the patient history, they're giving us a lot of information, but sometimes that's just surface level information. They want to talk about their neck pain. They want to talk about their back pain, but we need to go deeper. We need to find out, What are the things that you're not able to do anymore? And how is that affecting you on a daily basis? How is that affecting your relationships? How is that affecting your sleep? It, there's so many factors to what we do beyond just adjusting someone to get rid of the pain, right? It goes a lot deeper. So we need to ask more questions and we need to sit back and we need to listen and we need to let them talk so that we can start writing down what are the true goals. Is it like you said, do they want to go off with their buddy? Do they want to be able to get down on the floor and play with their grandkids? There's always something. So we just have to ask more questions, dig a little bit deeper. Exactly. And I think part of two, one of the things that we really need to pay attention to assessing, and I think a lot of us miss this is what's been their experience with treatment for their condition. In other places. Have they gone somewhere else? Have they been to the medical doctor? Have they been to another chiropractor? A lot of times patients walk into the chiropractic office as a last resort. Yes. And so what's been that chain of care and what's worked and what hasn't, because if we're just going to go in and just repeat the same things they've already had, that, that they didn't have a good experience with, we're going to degrade the patient experience. So we have to take that into consideration. And, I think the other thing that we have to do too, is really help the patient understand how they're progressing. Yes. Checking in, right? Keeping, checking on those acts of daily living, doing re exams, doing progress exams, like where were you when you started and where are we now? How are we doing? Are you able to walk another block? Are you able to start exercising, like in, in sitting down and determining where are we in regards to the goal? Are we getting closer? Are we making progress? Are we not making any progress? So what do we need to change? Do we need to change frequency? Do we need to change therapies? Do we need if we have another doctor in the office? A lot of times right now it's been super helpful for me. I have another doctor in the office, so maybe they're not responding to my technique, but they might respond to my associates technique, but if we just continue doing the same thing over and over again and not checking in, that's when we have the patients fall out. It's so true. The redundancy of care wears people out and they forget. A lot of times they forget why they're there. They forget what their goals are. They forget why you're treating them the way they are. And the minute they lose track of that, then they start making the decision that, eh, I think I'm done. It's time to go. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to shift gears here just a little bit. I think another thing that really drives patient experience is How technologically advanced is your practice? Are you not using technology or do you not have computers in your practice? I won't obviously say names, but I know of a practice that, it's not a member of ours, but of a practice that doesn't have any technology. They don't have computers, they don't have EHR, they don't have electronic scheduling, online scheduling, they have none of that. And they really have kind of a difficult time sometimes retaining patients because of it, because we're high touch society today because technology and patients want things like the patient portals, the online scheduling those kinds of things. They want to see that in your practice because that makes you look up to date. Yeah and it's also dependent on your niche and your demographic, right? If you're seeing a practice that maybe is an older practice, maybe you have geriatric base, maybe you have a practice where you're focusing on menopause, that demographic is very different than the demographic in my office, which are young families who are running a mile a minute. They have 10, 000 things on their plate. They don't have time to pick up the phone and wait for us to answer and they don't leave messages. So we have to have texting because they have to be able to reach us at all hours, so if we don't have that, you end up losing patients and then you're not patient centered because then you're not making it easy for them to become. That's true. Email is another one, something simple, something most of us don't really think about. We email. All the time, but are we allowing our patients to contact us by email, whether that's them being able to send their paperwork in before their new patient evaluation, that's a huge time saver for everybody, and patients are very time sensitive these days, little things like that. When you allow the technology to help drive the practice into the 21st century, a little bit better, really keep you present time consciousness with the patient that you're the place to be. Yeah. And it's also about efficiency for your own practice as well. If somebody can text in, that's less stuff that I have to have. That's less time that they're spending on the telephone. That's more time that they can be out in my practice. It's interacting with the families and interacting with and being more patient centered. So they're not stuck behind the desk all the time because we've got that technology to help us, be faster, be more efficient and just be more present time, with our patients. Yeah, absolutely. So another thing that, I like to talk about when we talk about patient centered care is, it's not just the service that we offer, it's our physical plant as well. What does your practice look like when you open the doors, the patient and walk in? I know when I walk into your clinic, it's just an immediate, ah, I'm just in the right place. I'm just in a quiet. Cool place. Yeah, we hope so. We go for the energy. It's all about the energy of your clinic and who are you trying to attract? We love the holidays, any holiday, every holiday. So already we have everything is. St. Patrick's day. We just took valentine's day down the other day and had a patient came in today and said, I'm so happy to come in here because now I know exactly what holiday is coming up. What time of year it is, I go by what's going on in your office. You want it to be clean. And fresh and you want it to be a everyone's happy place. That's what we say in this office. We want to be their happy place because we do want them to come frequently. So we want them to be comfortable and we want it to feel like home as well. So they can go tell all their friends and family to come. And you want it to be soothing. Does it smell good? Is it junky or, is, does everything have a neat spot to it? Is it well decorated? I love the fact that everybody comes to your clinic to find out what's on the calendar this month, what holidays are coming. It's all the senses, right? It's sight, it's smell. It's so many things. I love that. So I think it's important to. Look from the patient's point of view at your office, what does it truly look like and look at everything, your big dust bunnies behind the chairs, do you have areas where the chairs have rubbed up against the wall and rub the paint off a little bit, just, it may be time to freshen up, rearrange some of your artwork and things like that. Just little things. Yeah, and get your staff involved with that, right? Like we don't have time to be running around the office all day long. So takes whoever on your staff loves to decorate, who loves to organize, who loves to clean and just let them go to town, let them do it for you, and we have it on, on, we have a, we use a sauna in the office for our tasks. It is in our taskmaster for once a week. For that particular individual to do a walk around the office, what needs freshened up? What do we need new? What needs cleaned? Put it on the task. Yeah, exactly. Doctors, you don't have to put all this on your shoulders. Yeah. 90 percent of this can be affected by the staff too. Something else that I want to talk a little bit about is creating an environment where patients understand the value and benefit of longterm care. So maintenance care, wellness care whatever you want to call it, you understand what I'm talking about, but so oftentimes I see us trip ourselves up a little bit because we make these great recommendations for the acute aspect of care patients out of pain. They're doing great. We've met those goals and then boom, we drop a new treatment plan on, Oh, Hey, by the way. I would recommend that you stay in care once a month for wellness care. That, that kind of makes a patient kind of take a step back for just a second. What is this wellness care? What are we going to be doing in wellness care where we're going to be adjusting you? How's that different from what you've been doing? Cause you've been adjusting me. I don't understand the difference. So I think there's a better approach to that when we talk about being patient centered, we need to think about how do we make that stick? How do we help the patient understand that? And I think that happens by introducing the concept up front, waiting until the backside and saying, Oh, by the way, I have a different recommendation for care. Now, and Dennis figured this out a long time ago, okay. Yeah. Dennis figured out that if patients came in pain, they didn't want to, they didn't get good retention by then telling them after they're out of pain, after their tooth is fixed or whatever, by then telling them, Oh, by the way, at home, I want you to brush your teeth. And that sounds illogical because we all brush our teeth. At least I hope we do. I hope you do too. Yeah. But when we flip that around just a little bit. And introduce that concept up front and make it a goal. What then when we get to it, wow, they're excited about going into it and it's not new. It's just the continuation of care. Yeah. And you almost have to make it part of your brand. That conversation can start on social media. So we highlight our, long term patients. We highlight people that are coming for wellness. It's, on day one phone call, they're going to get a lot of questions, Oh, how long does this take? And what is our care plan? And my staff trained to explain that we are a wellness office and a lot of our patients. Come once a week. Some of them come, every other week, but they're here for long term care. And then also for sure in that report of findings, that's the time to really lay the foundation of this is our office. This is what we're about. And this is the path that we're going to take you on. And when they know that up front, like you said, then they're not going to get slapped in the face with oh my gosh, I just came here for 12 visits or however, 18 visits. And now you want me to keep coming. They already know that from the beginning. So it makes conversations so much easier. It takes so much pressure off of the tape, off the table to perform, I guess to say, because they know that this is a long term thing. But it's all in, it's all in regular communication and setting that up. And sometimes even we do some little things in the office of just introducing our patients. So this might be a new patient and across the hallway, I might have a patient that's been with us for 10 years. And as we're meeting in the hallway, I introduce. Hey Jerry, this is Sam. She's been a long time patient and she's on our membership plan. She comes every week and they're like, Oh, I didn't know that somebody could come every week. So we're always introducing that to everybody because everyone wants to be part of something, right? And we want them to be part of our clinic. Yeah. So well said. You mentioned some, something in there about social media and building your brand and, I think it's really important via social media, via being involved in your town or your area. There's something important about building a community around your practice. And to create a strong practice, it needs to be highly referral based. Yes. And so how do we gain referrals today? We gain referrals by networking. You just mentioned one thing, introducing a long time patient to a new patient in the practice. Just remember to only use first names and no conditions. Little side word from HIPAA there. How are you engaging with the local community? What is that brand image that you're building out there with people? How are you involved? Do you look like you're giving back by doing workshops or sponsorships or volunteering or whatever it might be? And how are you leveraging that social media aspect to really drive your brand into the community? So it becomes part of the community and the community surrounds itself around you. We have that experience in our town with our practice and, we would get. Patients coming in who were referred by people who had never been patients before they just knew us from our involvement in the community. That's great. That's what we're all striving for. But now you're building your tribe. You're building your tribe around you and that's the tribe that's going to bring the people that you want. Because, we want our, we have our ideal patient, right? So how do I find that ideal patient that's going to fit into our mold? Because, there's some people that don't fit into our practice because they're looking for something else. And we know that's okay. That's okay. We'll send them to the chiropractor right down the street who also needs a great patient, so building that tribe, so that way you're. Getting the patients that you want, but then also you're interacting with those referral partners that you want and you're also being a resource to the patient, which goes back to what we're talking about today, the patient centered practice, right? Is you have to be that trusted resource, and that means you have to know all the people in the community that are going to be the best of the best that you want to send your patients to. Yeah, I want to go back to, you just mentioned referral partners. That's such a great point. point. We need to develop referral partners. So make sure you're networking, not just with the community in general, but networking with other health care providers out there. Don't be afraid to go talk to medical doctors and orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists. I know everybody thinks us that we in physical therapy kind of compete against each other. We don't at all go out and talk to the physical therapist, how you can restore the kinetic chain after they get done rehabilitating a knee, a hip, a shoulder, they're very condition focused where we're whole body focused. We can pick up where they left off and you can build some great relationships like that. Yeah, we actually just went to a physical therapy office last week and they bought us lunch. I was so happy. I couldn't believe it. We had a physical therapy office that would bring us treats probably every week. Whether it was some new ballpoint pens or a box of bagels, they were always coming and visiting with us and we shared patients back and forth all the time. And there's all different kinds of physical therapists too, so that goes down to also again being a hundred percent confident in who you're treating because there's so many different styles of physical therapy that sometimes diving deeper and finding the ones that are more niched with what you're doing are really the way to make the really good relationships. So whether that's someone that focuses on concussions or someone that focuses on rehab after surgery or someone that focuses on pelvic floor PT or or children someone that just does extremities, so what is it that you love to do in your practice and find those people? That you can work with. Yeah, exactly. We connected with a pediatric physical therapist and actually two of them and my gosh, did they send us a ton of patients? And then they were patients to, and they were always coming in and asking me questions about. Oh my gosh, you treat colic. I see so many kids with colic, they can't treat colic. So they would refer those kids over to us. So it's those little connections that really make a difference. And I know it may sound like we're getting away from patient centered care, but we're not we're talking about driving the right people into your practice because one of the best ways to be patient centered is to be treating the right people. Yeah, definitely. And also, they to be patient centered, too, is to always know what our patient needs. Because we're seeing them so frequently and they're coming in all the time with different things. So at some point, they're going to have something that you can't help, that you can't treat. And you have to be that person that can send them where they need to go. So that way they're not on the phone asking or trying to call all these people within their network and figuring out which doctor is good. Are they going to treat me well? Because you're going to hold such high standards in your office that you're going to want to send them to somebody that's going to treat them the same. When you can have more of those relationships, then that's also just helping your patients that much more. So true. So true. And when it comes to patients connect your patients to your practice, and one of the best ways I think of keeping them connected is asking for feedback from time to time, give them a survey, bring in your top 20 star patients and buy them lunch and just. Ask them questions about your practice. What would you like to see different? What do you love? What do you not love about the practice? How can we meet your needs on a deeper level? That them feeling like they're helping your practice out in that way really ingratiates them to the practice. Yeah. We just did a survey on the schedule. Cause we were having after the first of the year we were having some really weird lulls in the schedule and we were like, okay maybe we need to change our hours. We just asked everybody, when do you want us open? And unfortunately we didn't get clear answers and it just seemed like whenever we're open, they're going to be here, which was but it was helpful to us too, but they said, oh, this is really great. You care about us enough. To ask us what helps them, right? We just did that was easy for us to do, dr Kelly, I appreciate you being on here today. We talked a lot about a whole bunch of different things about patient centered care if If you feel like you're needing some help with this Here's the first thing I would do if you enjoyed this podcast listen to it again with your staff And get them in that mindset of how can we really pump up our patient centered aspect of care in our clinic. This is also something through Kats consultants that we help doctors with a lot and we do a lot of team development around becoming much more patient centered. So go to Kats consultants. com check out what we're doing for doctors. We've got all kinds of free resources on their blog, subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't already share it, our podcast is growing like crazy. So we appreciate y'all listening out there, but check out what we're doing with some of the practices that we work with. And check out our new subscription program as well. Talk to make, talk about making practice coaching simplified. Wow, it's super easy. It gives you so many tools to build your practice and so forth. So make sure you go check out Kats consultants dot com. Also make sure you check out Chiro Health USA as well. They do some amazing things for practices, so we appreciate them being one of our sponsor. Sponsors. Dr. Kelly, as always, thank you for being on here. Thanks for being one of our coaches. We appreciate it's always a pleasure. I love doing this so much. I could talk chiropractic for hours. I know we can, and we do. All right, everybody. On behalf of kats consultants, thanks for tuning into the KC chiropods podcast. We will see you next time.