No Shows & Workflow

Okay, everybody, so let's talk No Shows today. We wanna talk about work flow. I wanna talk about how workflow impacts no shows, impacts patient compliance. And so, when you're working with your practice owners; or practice owners, when you're working with your patients, one of the biggest things that we hear, whether it's on our cloud platform, whether it's on our store fronts, whether it's on our apps, whether it's on operations technology coaching program, the biggest thing that comes across is "How do I not only improve my new patient rate?" but "How do I keep those patients in my office?". And so, one of the biggest things that workflow allows us to do is automate that. Because the bottom line is that it's been done, it's been figured out, it's not a secret anymore. There are so many consultants out there, and it's a shame, but a lot of them will say they have the secret to patient compliance, they have the secret to how to make sure patients don't miss business. But that's not a secret, there is no secret.

The reality is, that when it comes to patient compliance, it's all about monitoring, controlling and building a patient community. And if you're doing those three things, that's it; that's the secret sauce. But that was figured out a long time ago. The thing that actually takes this to the next level, is when you can automate it; is when you can actually have, whether it's a piece of software, a process in your office. I mean, generally, software makes this a little bit easier, so POI's cloud-based platform is a great way to go. But the bottom line is you wanna have a way to automatically discover - not after the fact, but as it's occurring - when a patient is starting to lose compliance, so that your staff can immediately take action. And not take action in the sense that "We wanna make sure that you're coming in" or "You owe a balance" or, again, a "management by fire" tactic. You wanna think of it, again, as a community. You wanna think about it as "I have a patient. They came to me for a reason. They need my care. They're missing appointments. I need to approach it as a caregiver. As someone who loves and cares about this individual, how can I give more of myself as a clinician, as a practice owner, as a staff member? And to expect that as a patient? How can I give more of myself so that this patient feels the level of commitment, makes a bigger effort, a more consistent effort to see the results in their care?"

And we're talking a lot about repeat visits here, but this goes as well for non-repeat visits. It doesn't matter whether you see that patient three times a week or twice a year. The reality is that you want that level of consistency, that level of understanding of how important that is. Whether it's your yearly physical or it's your three-times-a-week chiropractic adjustment and everything in between. And it's so easy for patients to fall off the wagon, so to speak; it's so easy for patients to forget why they should take care of something. And the chiropractic world sometimes, I think, feels unique in this. But think about other things; think about any condition that's intermittent. If you have some kind of intermittent symptomology and you schedule an appointment with a specialist and then your symptoms go away; by the time that appointment comes, how likely are you to keep that appointment? Well, if I'm feeling really good, I might rationalize to myself, I might lie to myself, but I might tell myself and convince myself that I don't need to go to that appointment, I don't need that appointment. Especially if you've got a practice that doesn't have no-show cancellation fees, right? Cause then there's really no skin in the game. Then it's really just "I've got no symptoms, there's no negatives for not showing up. So why?" Right?

And of course, that's the wrong way to look at it. But that's what essentially happens, because we're talking about a cost, and at the time of that cost, we've got no symptomology, we've got no immediate feeling of need. And so we want to, in creating a patient community, we want to establish continuing need. We want to establish continuing need if you're coming in for a repeat, or if it's a non-repeating or a very infrequent repeating thing, we want to establish as a patient community, as a practice community, the need for consistency, the need for compliance. And that comes from, number one, recognizing it in real time and not after the fact and managing by fire; number two, managing via community, so managing via care, as opposed to managing via conditions; and third, we want to make sure that as we're managing that, we're doing it as a community, so that everyone has a hand in it, even your biller. A lot of people don't think of the medical biller if you have one in your office, or if you outsource them. Whether it's outsourced here in the U.S. or outsourced outside of the U.S., however you're not having it inside your practice, the people you consider your back office are really an extension of your office and so they should be a part of your community. And in fact, the less they feel a part of your community, the less your performance is gonna be, the lower your AR, no matter how closely you monitor metrics.

That quantitative part of it only goes so far. At some point, you have to have that community; you have to have that feeling that you're part of something greater, that you're part of something that's greater than the sum of its parts. And so when we think about actually building that patient community, we think about compliance when it comes to no-shows. Workflow is critical, because it automates that process. It creates a way to automatically register those issues, automatically apply the correct result. So, if you have a script, an outline, whatever it is; automatically gives that to the person that needs to make the communication to get that no-show back in the office. And it sets an expectation on how long that kind of task should take, and that expectation should be set on how long it takes on average, so that you're being reasonable with your request. So, I hope this helps. Workflow is a big deal. It's something that our entire model is based on, whether it's one of our products or our services, we're all about workflow. Because it's true that the monitoring, controlling, all of that is really important. But the reality is that automation is what creates six, seven, eight-figure businesses.