Kats Chiropractic Consultants CHIROpulse

185 Coordinated Communication

• Marisa Mateja

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This week’s topic: Chiropractic Coordinated Communication


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 Troy Fox.  Both docs are 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:

  • What your staff needs to know to help effectively coordinate patient care
  • How coordinated communication can help build long-term patient loyalty
  • Why the entire office communicating on the same platform helps patients be more compliant with their care plans
  • How coordinated communication creates a more engaged team
  • …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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KC CHIROpulse Podcast. Helping Chiropractors keep their pulse on success. Thanks for listening.



Dr. Michael Perusich:

Chiropractors, how coordinated is your in office communication? Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC ChiroPulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants and ChiroHealth USA. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich, one of your hosts, and I'm joined with my co host, Dr. Troy Fox, Troy, coordinated communication. This is one of the areas where practices either really bleem or they just completely fall apart.

Dr. Troy Fox:

And it's so obvious right when we walk through the door, it's almost immediate. And just watching if you shadow around for a little while, it doesn't really take too long to see whether the whole staff is on the same page or not. And when they're not. Guess what? Your patients know immediately, too. There's an almost, there's an almost immediate sense. And I've had staff members that weren't on the same page. They weren't with us very long, but they weren't on the same page. They didn't have the same goals. And so our coordinated communication was off and patients could sense it. When I bought this practice, The coordinated communication between the staff and the doctor was off. And the first thing that patients told me when I came in is, Oh my gosh, you guys communicate so well, everything runs like a smooth, oiled machine. The last doctor that was in here, a lot of times her and her front desk, they didn't agree with each other. And I'm like, Oh, interesting.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

That's, it's so important. And you mentioned that patients notice it, they're hypersensitive to it. So let's just define as we dive into this, let's define what we mean by coordinated communication. And it's really very simple. It's everybody in the office. Being on the same page. So what does that mean? What are we on the same page about? We're on the same page about chiropractic care. We're on the same page about everybody knows what a treatment, what the treatment plan is for the patients coming in today, everybody knows when they're supposed to be scheduled back. Everybody knows the simple little things that need to happen at the front desk. Oh, for example Oh, don't forget tonight when you go home, Dr. Fox always recommends that you use some ice packs. Stay away from heat. Or whatever you guys do, right? Stay away from heat and make sure if you're a little sore, 20 minutes on 20 minutes off, that's what he tells every patient. So make sure you do that. That's coordinated communication. When a patient checks out on the day after your report of findings, the staff needs to have coordinated communication about what the treatment plan is and things like you're in the right place. Dr. Fox does great things for your kind of condition and be supportive. When you don't have that communication, here's what happens. Patient gets up to the front desk and the front desk person says, so when did Dr. Fox want to see you back again? Oh, he didn't really say, okay, great. Then call us. That's nails on a chalkboard, you guys. That's not how you build a practice. It's also not how you build trust and doctor authority with your patients.

Dr. Troy Fox:

It's also not how you take care of a person from a supportive standpoint, even if you're not going to treat an acute care patient and you're going to say no, they're more supportive. Okay. What are you doing to support that patient? A follow up visit would be supportive or follow up visits. In other words, a short treatment schedule. If you're not on that and you're looking at a wellness program, that's a whole different thing, but your staff needs to understand that. So verbiage. Is important and having verbiage that is coordinated is important. Now you notice I didn't say canned and written out line by line, and you must repeat it verbatim. We're not looking for scripting here. What we're looking for is coordinated. Verbiage between staff members. So we all come to the same point. I may say it slightly differently, but the patient understands it exactly the same way every time. So when we start talking about the importance of care, our staff needs to know as well how if we're having a little communication issue, myself and my staff, and I'm not. Telling that patient. I didn't write anything down. I didn't tell the patient, what does the staff do at that point? Do they say, just call us? No, you're not authorized to do that. And that's what my, my, my staff will say that we're not authorized to do that. What do they do? They come back to me and go, you did a bad job. They don't say that, but they go, you didn't tell us when to see that patient or what their treatment schedule was. What is it? Because guess what? It goes back to myself and the patient. So my staff even knows if there is a breakdown in communication, where do they go to rectify that situation? So it's important that we understand coordinated communication is really probably the epicenter. Of what you're going to do in your practice with your coordination.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah. And I want to back up on a couple of things that you said, even when a patient is in maintenance care or lifetime care, whatever you call it, when they're in that mode, there's still a treatment plan. It's not as you want, or it shouldn't be, we have to lead the patient, but the staff has to know what's that cadence of care. And a lot of times the staff can schedule those people out for the, even the rest of the year. I know where I saw we scheduled my maintenance patients out for the entire year. And do all of them do it? No, but about 85 percent of them. At least that was the experience we had in our practice, but your staff has to know what that cadence is to be able to do those kinds of things. Otherwise, The tendency is we'll just call us when you need us. The doctor didn't write anything down, so just call us when you need us. And for all of you out there, that should be nails on a chalkboard in your practice, unless you're putting patients on PRN. And if you are, I want you to come over here right now and put your PISA form up because I'm going to whack it with a ruler like a nun in church because you shouldn't be doing PRN patients come to you for guidance on care. The

Dr. Troy Fox:

other thing that your staff needs to know with this as you're scheduling them out and maybe you're scheduling them out for the year. Let's say that we have a week that I'm gonna be gone. I'm gonna be gone on vacation or I'm gonna be gone teaching at that point. So the question is, while I'm gone on vacation or teaching, what is the preference of the doctor? In other words, what is the doctor's recommendation for the patient? Is it that the patient just skips that appointment altogether and goes out two months? If they're a month, let's say they're a monthly patient. Let's say they're every four weeks and it falls on my vacation. Or do we want to see that patient before I go on vacation? And there may be a chance that I may see him after, or we go, there's really no perfect plan with that, but you need to know what the doctor recommends in advance. And I don't mean just for that specific patient, but across the board. What do we do when we have a conflict or the patient has a conflict? Hey, I'm going on vacation. I talked to a patient this morning that was going on vacation. And the good news is I've already talked to him and I already know. But if I didn't know and they didn't mention it to me and they came up, staff would come back and I'd go, you know what? Let's see him right before they leave on vacation. And it probably wouldn't be a bad idea when they get back from vacation to schedule an additional visit because it sounds like they're going to drive about 11 hours during this time. And I'll tell the staff that they ran up front, or I'm already talked to the patient. In this case, I talked to the patient about that today. And so we scheduled accordingly. We didn't just cookie cutter it even with maintenance care. So the coordination was there, not only with my staff, but with my patient and now with the staff as well, because they already know that's, what's going to happen.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

And so your staff has to understand these things. They have to have permission to implement these things. So if they hear that a patient's going on vacation, we call this vacation scheduling. You. There's a way to schedule them before and after and the great thing about it is sometimes you even pick up an extra visit, but it's good for the patient. There's that, there's also vacation scheduling if the doctor is going to be out. So the staff needs to know, number one docs, and we see this happen all the time, they need to know when that's going to be. And they need to know a couple of months, at least in advance of when you're going to be gone so that you don't have to reschedule patients. But you vacation schedule around a doctor's vacation too. And it's before and after, if you do it right, you don't lose any patient visits. So your staff has to understand that. So you have to create that coordinated communication so that they're plugged in to how those kinds of things work.

Dr. Troy Fox:

Yeah. And talking about the vacation scheduling, if you can schedule your vacations a year in advance, and that includes like with our clients, we ask that they schedule our. Virtuals because we do a lot of we do a lot of virtual summits, virtual meetings during the year that are already planned well in advance. And so we ask that our staff actually schedules out time for that. So that way, when you're scheduling patients, you're working around that from the beginning of the year. My next vacation is in october. I know the exact dates. I know when I'm leaving, when I'm coming back and it's already on the schedule way in advance. What does that do? It makes it really easy when staff is trying to schedule out. We can schedule around that really easily. We can also see when our schedule is getting really full one direction or the other, and we can start to work our schedule a little bit. So it's good for us and good for the patient because none of us want to come back and have all of last week's patients on this week, right when you get back from vacation. Because then you go, why did I even take a vacation? So there's gotta be that communication with staff as well. There's so many little caveats that if you learn to communicate, work better.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

And how many times do patients get to the front desk and they've got a question about something and your staff can't get to you? And honestly, it doesn't look real great unless it's something major. It doesn't look real great that they have to say, oh if you'll hang on for about 10 minutes, I'll try to grab the doctor in between patients and find out. Now there are times when that's okay, but if it's just something simple. Like, when do I need to come back? What if I'm sore tonight? Or, maintenance care, this is a big one. Patients just going into maintenance care and they find out that maintenance care isn't covered by their insurance, but it's the same adjustment. So now, why isn't it covered? Your staff needs to know how to answer questions like that. That's part of that whole coordinating. Uncoordinated communication strategy. Yeah. So I was going to say that

Dr. Troy Fox:

goes back to preemptive communication as well. We're not going to get into that today, but that should have preemptively been talked about a long time ago before you ever got to maintenance care and then reiterated at maintenance care. And that's, I'm gonna leave that at that one. Cause that's a whole class about preemptive.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Exactly. Exactly. So we got to take a quick break. We're actually a little behind on this. We're going to take a quick break. Quick word from our sponsors. We'll be right back.

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Dr. Michael Perusich:

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the KC chiropods podcast brought to you by Kats consultants and chirohealth USA. We're talking about coordinated communication in your practice and how important that is. I want to talk a little bit, Troy, about where some of this actually happens. And I'm just going to prime the pump here. All of you should be having little meetings, five or 10 minute meetings before you start each day part, or at least in the morning where you talk about all the patients coming in that day. And this helps set everything up for that coordinated communication. I know you do this in your office. We always did it in our office. Our clients should be doing it. If you're not out there, you better be doing it, but there's a powerful impact on your practice and your patient care when you do these.

Dr. Troy Fox:

It's very strategic and it's also very team like I think it draws us together as a team when we need in the morning. And we don't go over every patient. We don't talk about real heavy stuff. It's usually a very quick meet up about where our sticking points might be. Who do we have? That's going to be a new guest in the building today. So we need to make sure that we're aware of that and that they're going to be coming into our building and we want to give them the very best. Not that we don't give all of our patients that, but we want to make sure that we identify that we're not going, who are you? We know that we have somebody that we have not met that's going to be coming in the building at approximately this time. So we look at new patients real quick. We also look at what's their condition, what special considerations may we have to make, and then we're off to the races for the day. And we're ready to go. And we do it again in the afternoon when we get ready to do our afternoon session. Okay. This afternoon, we've got Bobby Sue coming in at three 30. She's not been in our office before. Sounds like she's in a Walker and she's had a fall. So let's make sure we got somebody near the door at that time to help her get in just little stuff like that.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah. Yeah. And your front desk, here's a lot of things from patients, maybe one of them heard a patient who's coming in today. The other day when they were in, they talked about going to a soccer tournament this next weekend and watching their kids play soccer. There's some opportunities there. Number one, The patient may need to come back in sooner after sitting on the bleachers all weekend because we all know that just wrecks the spine. Oh, yeah. There might be an opportunity to get their kids under care as well. So all kinds of solid opportunities open up when you have this high level of communication with your team.

Dr. Troy Fox:

Now, the one thing I want to talk about real quick with our coordinated communication is yes, so we meet in the mornings and the afternoons just briefly, we have staff meetings, but here's the other thing that you can do, and I think this is very powerful. So you hire a new staff member. And you're like, oh gosh, now we got to train them. All this stuff that everybody's learned, right? You and or your staff can have specific procedures. With Kats, we have as well, we have training for CAs. To get them to the training CA and certification program. But if you have specific procedures that are, really specific to your office, why not do a little video? And if you're not on an LMS learning system, it's no big deal. Just pop a couple of videos up on your laptop or whatever. If you have an LMS system, it's great. You can just enroll the new employee. In the LMS system and go boom, boom down through the system and it works really well. But I've got a little bit of both and some of the things that I do, but I think it's really important that as we onboard new staff members in our practice that they are at that point given all the tools to where they know how to communicate and they're not going to remember it all. There's going to be a learning curve, but if you give them all those tools up front, And you don't have to sit down with them for hours on end to give them those tools. They can do it over their launch hours over a break. We don't have it. We don't have a patient in the building for some reason. Today, we have a new patient slot that's open. God forbid. I want everybody to be busy, but maybe you got 30 minutes. There are 15 minutes that you're not working on patient care. That staff member could be doing a short little video. Then at that point, watching one of our procedures, maybe how doctor does dry needling in our office,

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah, absolutely. They should understand all your therapies. They should understand what techniques you do you utilize. They should understand what conditions and what conditions you don't see. They should have an idea of that. So we sometimes call around the offices just act like a new patient. And one of our big questions is always what techniques does the doctor do? I'll be darned if probably 75 percent of the time, what we get back is Oh, I don't know. If you can hold, I'll see if I can find out and they'll come back five minutes later. None of us really know. So can I get your number and we'll find out from the doctor and call you back. And that's just a pure black

Dr. Troy Fox:

communication. Yeah, that's a simple one. But you know why it happens. Here's why it happens folks, because you as chiropractors believe that everybody knows about everything you do, your patients will tell you, they'll come in and go, Oh, I didn't know you worked on elbows or I didn't know you helped with allergies or, they'll come in all the time telling you stuff, your staff needs to do all that stuff too, even if you just did a quick rundown through a little video, here are a bullet point list of conditions we treat and how, and why chiropractic is effective. Maybe a one sentence thing with it. You're going to give the staff a lot of information for later. Who knows? They may even print that out and put it by the front desk. So when somebody calls, they go, yep. And here's why it helps it. You can give your staff all kinds of cool stuff

Dr. Michael Perusich:

real quick. We're going to take another really short break for a word from our sponsors. We'll be right back. I want to talk about when we come back, I want to talk about, we've talked about staff, talk about associate doctors and coordinated communication as well. So hang on everybody. We'll be right back.

Kats Chiropractic Consultants, your partner in chiropractic success. We are dedicated with one on one guidance to bring you all your practice management needs. Let's supercharge your practice. Give us a call today.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the KC ChiroPulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants and ChiroHealth USA. We're talking about coordinated communication in the office and how important that is. We've been talking a lot about coordinated communication with our staff, if you have an associate doctor, They're part of that team, and they need to be involved in that coordinated communication as well. And Troy, you brought up a great point about the onboarding process and how that starts the process of coordinate, coordinated communication and gets them dipped in the water, if you will, how that's, How and why that's so important. We need to do the same thing with our associate doctors because we see a lot of associate doctors coming in and it's like the first day your kid learns how to drive. It's just tossing them the keys and saying, okay, take off with my 60, 000 car. We don't do that. We want to make sure that we test them out and those kinds of things. So we need to do that onboarding process with associates as well.

Dr. Troy Fox:

A lot of times as we get that new doc in, a lot of times they're like, Oh my gosh, thankfully I can finally take a break for a few minutes and you literally just wind them up and let them go. And then you find out later, they don't have any of your verbiage. They don't even agree with you about patient care. And they're in there with your patients who are now coming back to you going, doc, I saw the new guy the other day and he didn't even want to see me again, no future. And you're going, what now all of a sudden you're panicking. Cause you realize you've made a huge mistake because he's gone out and wrecked the car. But he didn't tell you back to the garage like it was. And somebody came and told you, Hey, there's a big scuff mark on the side of your car. So honestly, as we work with associate docs, I get that we're all really good doctors coming out of school, but we may not all agree. You guys know as well as anybody else that for a thousand chiropractors out there there's probably about 500 different philosophies. Within practice about how you practice and so when you bring an associate doc in He has to not only and you should already know This is this point through the interview process if they agree or disagree and if they're willing to Adopt what your philosophy is in your practice, but then you have to actually teach that Yeah, you don't just talk about it in the interview and just assume they're going to figure it out So here's a real

Dr. Michael Perusich:

life example. I was talking to an associate doctor in an office the other day. He's been there about a year and a half, and he was telling me that he just had learned from the owner of the practice. He had just had learned this concept called medical necessity, and he wasn't aware that in his treatment plans and so forth that he needed to be medical necessity. Proving medical necessity along the way. So he wasn't scheduling the patient for exams and those kinds of things. And he was way past the number of visits on most of his cases that he really should have been for compliance purposes. And you all should be proving medical necessity out there by the way. But that's a real life example of, Oh, He never was told anything and there was probably just an assumption made by the owner of the practice that well, you know Everybody knows that right? No, you've got to teach and talk about all the procedures and Those little idiosyncrasies in your practice your philosophy what you do your techniques your conditions your thought process on cadence of care. There's a whole slew of things and I don't mean to overwhelm everybody. It's really not that hard, but it happens when you have this, these repetitive communication, tactical sessions, like a little huddle in the mornings doesn't take much. Your staff meetings should be every week. And remember, the more often you have this communication, the less time it takes. So make sure you're building those kinds of things into your daily schedule.

Dr. Troy Fox:

And when you're meeting with your associate docs, and associate docs, you guys too should want to meet and always be at the two reasons you should be at the clinic before it starts. Number one, I don't want you running in the back door and straight into the adjusting room. Your headspace is not right. Get into the office, get your headspace, right? You two should meet every day. You should also be talking about before you go out for the huddle because eventually your associate doc can run the huddle for you No, you should go out before you go to huddle Talk about some of those patients in advance and why there's going to be some important details that you need And how you think through it so that way they start seeing your thought process doctors And then as associates you should be gleaning from that and then you should also after the launch I think this is a great time to do this. Go over a case or two real quick. Docs explain how you got to from point a to point B on a couple of cases, because you do that a few times, the associate doc then understands it. Cause you have to remember we did what five hour exams or something like that coming out of school. Come on now we go from a five hour exam to about a seven minute exam when you get into practice and all of a sudden, and that's supposed to come out of nowhere, right? You're just supposed to be able to do that. No wonder we're stretching these guys when they come out of school. So associate docs, you need to learn from your lead doc, lead docs, realize that they need a little bit of grooming on their end too, to be able to achieve what they've got, just throwing them the keys isn't going to be a good guy.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

That's correct. So we've been talking about this concept of coordinated communication. It's incredibly important. Make sure you're doing this in your practice and make sure everybody on your team is on the same page. And if you need resources to help with these kind of things, check us out at Kats consultants dot com. We've got all kinds of resources. This is a huge part of what we do is helping you build and develop it. An incredibly valuable and successful team around you because we can't do this alone. So go check us out at Kats consultants. com and make sure you like, and subscribe. It. I'm not sure where it's at and subscribe the podcast. We appreciate all of you. Our podcast is growing like crazy because of you listeners out there. And we appreciate all of you. Troy, anything else to add?

Dr. Troy Fox:

No, I think we're good. I think we're ready to get out there and get to work and communicate well this afternoon. You guys can have a huddle today before your afternoon session.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yes, let's do it. All right, everybody from all of us here at Kats consultants. Thanks for checking. Thanks for checking us out. Thanks for tuning in today. We'll see you next time.

Dr. Troy Fox:

See y'all later.