Kats Chiropractic Consultants CHIROpulse

204 The Empty Schedule

• Marisa Mateja

Share episode

Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.  

This week’s topic:   What does it feel like when your schedule is empty?

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 Marisa Mateja.  Michael and Marisa are both seasoned experts in Chiropractic 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:

  • Why your schedule is empty
  • How difficult it is to predict your cash flows when you aren’t scheduling 
  • How much time your staff spends scheduling individual patient visits
  • The cumbersome aspect of chasing patients who aren’t scheduled
  • Simple strategies to implement for advanced scheduling that work
  • …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 personalized 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, and represents the opinions of the speakers.  Seek the consultation of a professional for advice in those areas. And remember…your results using this information may be different than described.

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the Kats Consultants CHIROPulse Podcast
When you are ready we can help.


KC CHIROpulse Podcast. Helping Chiropractors keep their pulse on success. Thanks for listening.



Dr. Michael Perusich:

Doctors, picture this. You walk into your practice on Monday morning, you'll look at the schedule. There's nobody on it. Nobody's called. Nobody's coming in the door. How does that make you feel? Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC ChiroPulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants and ChiroHealth USA. I am your host, Dr. Michael Perusich, and I'm joined by my co host today, Marisa, Mateja, I almost said doctor because usually you are a doctor.

Marisa Mateja:

Oh, I only play one on TV.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

We're on TV.

Marisa Mateja:

How are you?

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Definitely almost slipped out of there. I'm great. Thanks for being here today. Okay. So you and I banter this all the time. What does it feel like when you look at your schedule and there's nobody on it? It's a little

Marisa Mateja:

scary, right?

Dr. Michael Perusich:

It should be It should be scary. It should be, but unfortunately we see doctors doing this all the time. They're not scheduling their patients. Yeah. They're telling their patients what? Nails on a chalkboard. Come back when you need to. Come back. When

Marisa Mateja:

you need to. Yep.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Because every patient has this inborn, innate ability to know when their next chiropractic visits should be. Not the doctor,

Marisa Mateja:

right? I think that's always, yeah. I think that's always the funniest concept is come back when you need me. When is that? I don't know when I need you as a patient. If you're not telling me or directing me or leading me to what the best route is, I have no idea. It may be five years from now before I come back, patients just don't know. It's a bad scenario to get into,

Dr. Michael Perusich:

it's terrible. Okay. So we're going to take a really short break here. Hear a word from our sponsor, but here's what we're doing today. We're diving to this idea of what does it feel like to have an empty schedule? So doctors while we're on break I want you to listen to our sponsors, but while we're on break real quick, look and see how far out are your patients booked. We'll be right back.

ChiroHealth USA:

In today's economy, every dollar counts. Families are facing tough choices, having to reconsider what was once essential to them, but because of healthcare, no one should have to compromise on their well being because of financial constraints. That's where Chiro Health USA steps in, the solution for your practice. We understand the financial pressures families are under, whether they're insured, on Medicare, or paying out of pocket for treatment. By offering discounts on care, you can ensure that your patients can still afford the treatment they need. And at Chiro Health USA, we're committed to making sure no family has to sacrifice their health due to financial hardship. We'll work with you to create a game plan that keeps your waiting room full and your practice thriving. And here's the best part. Offering affordable care not only benefits your patients, but also positively impacts your bottom line. So why wait? Join Chiro Health USA today and join the ranks of the most successful practices. Because when you put your patients first, everyone wins.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the KC Achiropulse podcast. We are talking today, we're exploring this whole idea of what does it feel like to have an empty schedule? And before the break, I suggested, real quickly, go look at your schedule, how far out can you see, and think about this from a business standpoint, if you can only see patients on the books for the next few days, or even a couple of weeks, what is your revenue going to look like in a month? Two months, three months. How do you predict that cash flow? And so there's a whole bunch of things to think about here. But I think what we need to explore is what's the cause of an empty schedule.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. I'd say you've got one of two things. I think you have lack of treatment plans being given either by the doc and not explaining to the patient well enough, what those treatment plans look like. Or you have treatment plans, but you have employees or staff that Aren't taking those treatment plans and doing something with them. That means scheduling them you have you know, one of two problems there

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah, and we hear Those things and all points in between from doctors all the time Some doctors are really good about making the recommendations to the patients, but they never share the information with the staff So the patient gets up to the front desk and the comment is always what'd the doctor tell you? When does he want to see you back?

Marisa Mateja:

So to me, that's just being not prepared for your day, so

Dr. Michael Perusich:

exactly. Which is funny. You brought that up. Cause we're just studying that in one of our masterminds here recently.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. I think being prepared for your day is huge. Do you spend the time to talk to your employees in the morning about. What is it that we need to get done today? What's on the schedule? How are we going to handle those people when they come in? What communication are we going to use? What are those things that help us succeed in our day? And if we're not having those conversations, we're leaving it to chance.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah. We don't want to leave anything to chance in business ever. We want to try, you can, not that you can control everything, but we want to try to control as much of the business as we can and Doug on it, scheduling is one of the places you have control.

Marisa Mateja:

It is. And there's good news. There's a way around it. We avoid those questions like, when did the doctor tell you to come back? Because the patient's never going to tell you the full story, number one. Especially early

Dr. Michael Perusich:

on in care, they don't remember.

Marisa Mateja:

If, as an employee, you're relying on getting your information from the patients that are coming up, you leave yourself in a position of only being able to schedule one visit at a time. And that's never going to be enough. If we're looking to fill our schedule, number one, number two, to be able to look out. at any length of time to be able to predict what's the practice going to be able to do. So there's plenty of things that come in there, but the best thing you can do is advance multiple schedule your patients. It's give them a schedule, let them understand what they're supposed to be doing and don't rely on them to either tell you or you to say, when would you like to come back? That's like nails on a chalkboard for me. That's one of the biggest mistakes. I see offices doing one of the biggest,

Dr. Michael Perusich:

but Marisa hold the bucket right there. You're telling me, I know the answer to this, but you're telling me that patients will actually schedule out their treatment plan.

Marisa Mateja:

Oh my goodness. I always find this question hilarious because it's born out of not spending the time to train on these things one, but it's also born out of, I've always done it this way and I don't want to do it any other way. And so I'm just going to tell you that patients won't do it. But in reality, patients will really follow our lead. If. We give them the right verbiage and we explain to them and we talk to them with transparency. So I think it's important to note that, I never had an issue with patient scheduling minus, I will say I had two or three patients that never would schedule out because they wanted to talk to me. And so if they were scheduled out, they didn't have. A major reason to stop at the front desk. And so I found that those were the couple patients that didn't have a lot of people in their lives and they were older and they really valued just visiting. Yes, you may have a few patients like that and that's okay, but

Dr. Michael Perusich:

those patients were the ones that always came in more often than what we would try to schedule them anyway.

Marisa Mateja:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think there's a thing there that you have to understand who your patients are and those kinds of things, but for your working class of patients, I would say for the most part, they like to know And be able to schedule around things, right? So it's a value to them to be able to put, get put on your schedule. I had a lot of our patients scheduled a year at a time. I only had to talk to them one time a year about their schedule. That didn't mean that I wasn't building the relationship with them all the other times that I visited with them, but I wasn't stuck just doing a task with them.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Okay. I think you just blew everybody's mind out there. I can hear the cars driving down the highway listening to the podcast and their heads exploding. You scheduled our patients out for the entire year.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. And we're talking.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

No, I want to. Yeah, hold on. I want to clarify that because I don't want people to think my acute care plans were a year long. No, my, yeah, my acute care plans were, traditional 12 business 18, but whatever the patient needed. But we would also schedule all their maintenance care and our maintenance care patients weren't once a month. They weren't every six weeks There were every one to two, maybe three weeks Yeah, and they would schedule out for the entire year and I hear doctors say this all the time I have certain patients who don't want to schedule I don't disagree that you'll have a few. Think about it, Docs. Who doesn't put things on their calendar, especially if they're of regular occurrence?

Marisa Mateja:

I prefer if I go to my massage therapist, if I go to my hairdresser, I'd rather them just schedule me out for the year. I know that I go every five weeks to get my hair trimmed, like clockwork. I prefer that just to be a given. I don't want to sit there every single time and spend the time right there going, okay. Yeah. Let me count five weeks. Yep. That's where I want to be. I'd rather her just say, Hey, I noticed you come in every five weeks. Let's just go ahead and save that spot for you. Great. Because I like a specific time on a Friday. I know exactly when I want to be on their schedule. So I prefer them to just say, Hey, I noticed that this is your time.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah, exactly.

Marisa Mateja:

I want to take my time. So I think it's important to explore that option in your practice for many purposes. One for being able to predict the future of your practice and not be stuck in the 30 day cycle. I think That's another factor that we start

Dr. Michael Perusich:

over

Marisa Mateja:

every single month. And I've never understood that.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

It

Marisa Mateja:

makes no sense, right? So you can schedule staff that are listening. You can schedule beyond 30 days. It's okay. And I feel like that's always been a crip up in this profession. Is only scheduling within that 30 day window. And I think that's something that we can avoid.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

So we need to take another break. But when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about how we create that mind shift, if you will. Not only in the practice, but with our patients as well. So we're talking about what does it feel like if you have an empty schedule? It doesn't feel good as we've already explored and we talked about a few of the reasons why. So when we come back, we're going to talk about this further. So hang in there. We'll be right back.

Kats Consultants:

Kat's 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 Kyra Pulse podcast. We are talking about having an empty schedule and how to avoid how that feels because it does not feel good. Marisa we've talked a little bit about how that happens. And so much of it goes back to communication strategies. And when we're talking about strategies, in order to put good strategies in place, we first have to plan, then we have to train, then we have to rehearse and make it a habit. So it's a four step process. And so you can't just walk in one day Docs and tell your stuff. Hey, I want all my patients scheduled out for the entire year. It won't happen You've got to have the right communication strategies. So let's just walk through some of that, Number one doctors when you are making recommendations for patients, how are you going to communicate that to your staff?

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah You've got to find out whether it's on paper, if it's on dry erase, if it's Right.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

How's it going to happen in your practice? Is

Marisa Mateja:

it in your notes? Is it in a Is it

Dr. Michael Perusich:

in a chat box?

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. Where is it at? How do you communicate? That's number one.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah. And then, what is the staff going to do with that? What's going to be their communication process? There may have to be some internal communication with staff. about scheduling. Maybe you have patients who get a lot of therapy and your therapy department needs to be involved in the scheduling as well as the front desk people. So we need coordinated communication there. And then how's the staff going to communicate it to the patient? And do it in a way that's not only efficient, but the patient understands the value of it. That's one of the most important parts.

Marisa Mateja:

Absolutely. The value for the patient is it's their time. It's their space. They, we have reserved this for them, and the value for them is a time saving. They don't have to spend all of their time at the front desk, just scheduling an appointment. It's going to be. Efficient for them because now the visits are on the schedule. And guess what? They come in, they get adjusted and they leave it's quick. It's easy for everyone, including the practice.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yep. And one of the biggest misconceptions, you just made me think of this, one of the biggest misconceptions about advanced scheduling is staff gets it in their mind that it takes too much time.

Marisa Mateja:

Oh gosh. Don't you think if you add it up all the time that you spent scheduling a person each time that they came in, okay, I'm going to guess you're into three or four minutes every single time. Our software nowadays allows you to advance mobile schedule very easily. Very

Dr. Michael Perusich:

easily.

Marisa Mateja:

You can pick the day how, what the frequency is and all of those kinds of things and click a button and it populates everything. So you're talking maybe five minutes the first time, but each additional time that they come in, you're talking three or four minutes. That's a lot of time added up for each individual patient. So instead of spending your entire day only scheduling people. Or making phone calls to follow up on people who didn't show up, that's the other factor, when they know that they've got that treatment plan, they understand it, the transparency of it is on black and white paper, whether that be emailed to them or printed out or however you get them that schedule. The reality is it's right in front of them and because they see that frequency and they see what is expected of them, it makes it easier for them to make those appointments.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

So you just made a great point. It's a great retention tool, but it also keeps patients engaged in their care plan so that staff isn't have to be having to constantly chase patients down. I don't understand how you keep track of patients who are supposed to be on a care plan if you don't schedule them. Because number one, the patient's not getting a reminder. Number two, they're not on your schedule. So now your schedule could just be this haphazard, crazy, maniacal thing to try to manage in the day. If everybody wants to come in between four and five 30, all of a sudden, and you don't have the schedule spread out. So it makes sense that now you may be creating capacity issues around certain parts of the day. And we all have. Busy times of the day. And what about that patient who can only come in between five and five to 30? Are we going to make it so that there's a hundred patients in the clinic when they try to come in and they get frustrated and quick care because they can't ever get seen in a timely manner? Or is it better to tell that patient, Hey, that's a really popular time of day. I'm going to go ahead and reserve that on Tuesday and Thursday, every week for the rest of your treatment plan or every week for the rest of the year, whatever it might be. Yeah. How great is that? What a great services that

Marisa Mateja:

it is a great service and it makes our patients feel valued in our practice and they feel special. Not to mention, it's probably a cost saver for the patient. So think about the patient that comes in two or three times, drops out of care. And then you don't see them again for three or four months, but oh gosh, we have to go through a full exam again because you didn't continue with your treatment plan and we got to see what you have been doing and where you're at, where your body's at. We're starting all over with patients when we do that. it costs patients extra money and time if we aren't careful. So I think it's a cost saver for them as well.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

It's huge. And today's patient there, they lead busy lives. They need to put things on their calendar. I think you'll find most of your patients will tell you, I need to put things on my calendar. My gosh, look at our calendars. I live by my calendar. I live by it. And have to, and if something doesn't make my calendar, A lot of times it gets missed. So we, you, this is not as hard as you think it is. It's really pretty simple. So first off you have to address your strategy. How are you going to plan your strategy to make it work? Then you talk to your staff you develop that plan, you train, you practice it, and then just try it on a few patients. You don't have to try it on everybody day one, just try it on a couple of patients. let you and your staff get the hang of it and then go wholesale with everybody.

Marisa Mateja:

Absolutely.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Pick a few patients that you know, and your staff will know docs, your staff will know exactly who these people are. They're going to be the people that pull their phone out or their paper calendar out. Every time they're in the clinic, they plan everything. Those start with a handful of those and just Get used to the idea and see how it feels and you have to understand your scheduling system in your EHR program as well because it can really be a valuable tool because I know you, you would tell patients, okay, I'm going to build out your schedule. I'll have it for you next time. You didn't do it in front of the patient, you would spend. Three, four, five minutes, putting it together, you'd print it out and you'd have it for him next time

Marisa Mateja:

or emailed it to him, or I made sure that their first visit was on before I left the practice and I emailed it to him before they came back in and then when they came back in, I reiterated, Hey, I put together that full treatment plan. Did you get that? Yep. I got it. Great. It's already on my calendar. Excellent. That's all we needed. That, that's the way the conversation goes. It's Simple. So use your tools for sure, because you do have scheduling options within all of those EHR systems that allow us to do this advanced model scheduling very easily. So I definitely do that.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah.

Marisa Mateja:

One of the things I would say is that here's a little statistics for you. I know Dr. Fuchs loves statistics, practices that are using the AMS. Typically report an increase in 30 percent of repeat visits within three months.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Wow.

Marisa Mateja:

That's a big

Dr. Michael Perusich:

step. That's substantial because 30 percent more patient visits also probably means 30 percent or more revenue.

Marisa Mateja:

I'm just saying there's the benefits.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

And your patients are going to love it. So 30 percent retention increase, 30 percent collection increase. The patient retention with this is insane. The time saver that it is for your staff and the level of communication that you create to me, this is one of the biggest things that coordinated communication. Now your staff knows what the treatment plans are. So they're helping to support the value of your chiropractic care with the patient.

Marisa Mateja:

Absolutely. And that goes back to that initial point that we had is Howard. Are your employees getting the communication about what the treatment plans look like, making sure whether it's written down verbalized in a huddle, whether it's, I've got some people that have laminated sheets that they just dry erase every day on. I don't care how you do it. Just get the information in the appropriate hands so that they're not. In a position of having to ask the patient when do you need to come back? What did they tell you? Because the minute we do that, we look very ill prepared. We look like we don't know what we're doing and we have no idea why or when the patient should be coming back when we're doing that. So it puts. staff in a position of looking like they don't understand chiropractic care and we never want to put them in that position.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Exactly. Exactly. So the benefits are huge. It's a win for the clinic. It's a win for the patient. It's a win for your staff. There's not a reason to start implementing something like this in your practice. And if you need help with it, this is one of the big things that we do at Kats Consultants is we help doctors implement. strategies so they're efficient, they're effective, and they increase your profitability and really help to streamline your practice. So if you need help, give us a call. Let us talk through how we might be able to help you in your practice.

Marisa Mateja:

Absolutely. And don't forget to share and comment. We appreciate you doing that. That helps our viewership grow so other people can use this information as well.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Marisa anything else to add?

Marisa Mateja:

Nope. I think that's it.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Okay. Very good. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to the KC ChiroPulse podcast. I've been talking all day. Brought to you by Kats Consultants as well as ChiroHealth USA. We appreciate all of you listening out there. We'll see you next time.