EPISODE 377: The Swiss Army CA

Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Marketing Show with Dr. Kevin Christie, where we discuss the latest in marketing strategies, contact marketing, direct response marketing, and business development with some of the leading experts in the industry.

Dr. Kevin Christie: [00:00:00] Hey docs, welcome to another episode of Modern Chiropractic Mastery. This is your host, Dr. Kevin Christie, and today I'm bringing you a solo episode, and we're going to think outside the box a little bit as far as maybe the team members you consider as you're growing your practice early on. Now, I've written about it and I still believe Um, the core team of a practice would be obviously you, the chiropractor, and then a front desk, a rockstar front desk, and then a CA.

And then you could layer on there. Now you could replace the CA position if you have a very well-developed preceptor program that's consistent, uh, like we have in our, uh, board. private practice here. Um, and I, I still believe that's a core team. And then you kind of layer on that as you grow. But, uh, what I'm finding is some, some docs are, are thinking outside the box a little bit, and we're working with some of our clients on different ideas of, okay, you know, you've started your practice, uh, revenues [00:01:00] tight, uh, you know, there's not a ton of money to, to hire, but you like to do rehab or.

laser or shockwave or, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's aspects of your treatment that take time and it's outside of say your adjustment in manual therapy and you could use some help. And we're going to talk about a few different types of positions today. And one we've really been talking a lot about is this kind of Swiss army CA.

And this is a person that would function as your, you know, patient care CA help you out with subjective notes and. Rehab exercises and laser, whatever you may be doing, um, that's outside of the, you know, manipulation, soft tissue, and they can really help you out with the clinical care, but then they also could help you out with front desk activities and, and kind of play a dual role there because a lot of you are in a situation where you can't really afford both.

Like you need a front desk and you need [00:02:00] someone to help you out with patient care. Um, Um, so that you can see an efficient amount of people to generate enough revenue and enough profits to, to build a healthy practice. And a lot of you run into the ceiling, a complexity that happens where you started to get busy and your schedule's busy, but there you're spending too much time with the patient, even though you know, you'd like to delegate it, but you can't really afford to bring on the CA because you're paying a full time front desk, and this could be a potential solution for you.

Now, I'm not saying going out and run and do this right now. I just want my goal of this episode. Um, is to start having you think about it. Like when we talk to our clients about this, we have to know all the different factors and make sure it's an accurate decision to make. So I don't know that for you, but I just want you to start thinking about what that would look like.

Right. Because like I know chiropractors that have, uh, they don't, I know a chiropractor practice has a really busy practice and they've got multiple team members delineated front desk. [00:03:00] It's kind of like a floating position, like someone is available to, to, to operate that part of it. Um, so I do know that, uh, I do know chiropractic practices that have a virtual front desk.

There's nobody at the front desk. It's just them and maybe a CA. I think a Swiss army CA would be a great opportunity to have that customer experience at the front, but also have some clinical help for you on that aspect of it. And, you know, so what would a. Swiss Army CA do right again on the clinical side.

I think they can take your patients back and manage the flow of patients. I think they can do the subjective notes when available. Definitely could do the rehab exercises. Some of you don't think they can, but you can definitely train a good qualified person in doing that. Uh, they, they could do your electrical stems and your shock waves and, and lasers if you have that.

And then when they're not doing that, they're at the front and they're acting as the front desk and they're answering the phone and they're checking people out. If they're done with the rehab exercises and it's time to check that patient out, they go right to the [00:04:00] front and do that. And then they ultimately can go Service much of the front desk and to a point, and in my opinion, the goal would be is you would run with this team until you get busy and profitable enough where you can reinvest in the practice and then probably hire a delineated front desk person.

And in that Swiss Army CA becomes more of just your true CA. So I do believe, um, that would be a good progression for you as the finances allow for it, as your practice, uh, grows in that. So that's the kind of the Swiss Army, uh, CA aspect. Another thing you could consider doing is rolling with this, um, CA, this Swiss Army CA for a good period of time.

And then you could have a virtual front desk. Right. And we've had, uh, Pablo, uh, from Avid Med on our podcast, uh, a couple of months ago, a few months ago on this. And it's a really well developed virtual front desk. You [00:05:00] can, you can actually go to our website, modernchiropracticmarketing. com because I'm a full disclosure kind of advising them on this, what that would look like, and there's a tab on it and you can, you can reach out to them on that.

But, um, you could, and there's other options as well for, for virtual, um, front desk, but you could have someone that is handling, you know, billing and, you know, in this situation, if you're in network insurance, you might want to have billing outsourced to somebody. Uh, so maybe not the virtual front desk, but maybe a billing company, right?

So like in our practice, we, we outsource our billing. So I think that would be a good option for you. Um, if you're talking about insurance verifications and then, you know, Pre authorizations and just all the other tasks that a front desk person does, uh, some of that your Swiss army CA could do during downtime.

If that's a lot, uh, there, if there's enough downtime, um, or again, a virtual front desk could do that. The virtual front desk could definitely answer the phone. So between having online scheduling, like [00:06:00] very robust, really clear online scheduling and virtual front desk, you don't have to worry about the, the phone.

The people calling and scheduling that's taken care of it for you. So now you're a Swiss army CA can really function on the clinical side and, uh, checking that patient out and, and, and ultimately giving them a good experience there. And I think that could be a really good combo. And then, um, at certain point again, when, when the demand is there and the profit margin is there, you could then.

grow into that core team again, just to reiterate what I feel is that core team of a chiropractic practice is the chiropractor is the front desk is the CA those three. And then you build around there, you know, maybe you're adding an associate to there. Maybe you're adding preceptors to that, maybe a, uh, a second CA and then you get big enough.

You might even have an office manager, right? And I think that's, um, how you would [00:07:00] grow, uh, accordingly with that. Now, the other thing that, uh, another unique position that I've been really kind of chewing on. over the last year. And I'll even tell you what we did. Our practice is like, I would love to have the kind of the need and to be frank, um, the extra profit margin, you know, we have the, we have profit margin, our practice in it, and it's going really good with it.

Um, this would be kind of a luxury position or, you know, If you just really were humming along and you saw the value in it could make sense. And that would be a patient experience coordinator. I could see in this scenario where you've got a full time front desk person, you've got, uh, multiple doctors, you've got some CAs.

And then instead of hiring a second front desk, you hire this patient experience coordinator, and then they have some redundancy and, and understand. the front desk and then can, you know, obviously fill in as needed or help out the front desk. But this patient experience coordinator, I look at as someone that's [00:08:00] their job is to make sure that the patient experience is just world class, right?

Like things, uh, could be, you know, office tours and, you know, It could be getting them signed up on an app that you have. It could be, you know, getting the birthday list for that date, actually texting them through your two way texting service. It could be them monitoring your, some of your, your patient, uh, some of your patient communication tools like, uh, uh, track stat or, uh, you know, review wave or, or, you know, patient driven care.

There's a lot of great. there and services and softwares. It could be managing some of the community outreach thing you're doing, uh, to, to do that. Um, and, and, you know, it could be even like, okay, you wrote the patient a script for an MRI following up with that patient. How was, how was your MRI experience?

Did you everything get done? You sent that patient out for an ortho visit or. You find out one of your patient's, uh, husbands is having, husband is having surgery, calling them and say, Oh, I just [00:09:00] want to check on how your husband's doing after the surgery. Like just like going above and beyond, like thinking so outside the box.

It's almost like that, um, you know, that just extreme ownership of your practice and then offering a hospitality level. That's just a world class. That's what I look at is this, uh, is this patient experience coordinator. Would be amazing to do. And so what I want you to do is like, what would your dream patient experience coordinator do in your practice?

And that's what we did. And then what we did was we wrote it down and we have a daily checklist and we have a weekly checklist, right? Like on a daily checklist is. review requests, like what patients on our schedule day we should we ask directly for a Google review, right? So we wrote out this position as if we were hiring it and we put together a weekly and daily task list.

And then for us, what we've done in our practice, again, it's, we have, uh, we have two doctors, [00:10:00] myself and Dr. Gage. Uh, we've got a front desk full time. And then we have anywhere from one to two preceptors, usually two at a time. Um, and then sometimes one or. There's like some gaps in that, but we said, okay, um, let's, let's have the preceptors tackle this position.

And then with the help of our front desk and in some of it's for the doctor, like we do, uh, we use an app called Bonjoro, which I've mentioned before on our phone. It allows us to record a quick little video welcoming the patient. And then it sends it to their email, but it's in the videos embedded into the email.

So when they open the email, they click the link and it's like the thumbnail and it's a video. So it's not just like a downloaded video. So it's got a good user experience on that. And so the day after the new patient exam, the doctor, the treating doctor shoots a quick Bonjoro video and sends that to the patient.

So there's some things on here that the doctor does as well, but we put together a nice list and that becomes our, our patient experience coordinator. [00:11:00] Um, as far as what it would look like. And then we just have our preceptors and front desk and doctors, uh, do certain tasks on that. And we've delineated, which is which for, for each.

And so coming back to that Swiss army CA, if you've got a, like a killer rockstar and you actually paid him well. So like, again, let's, let's play this out conceptually. You know, you're going to hire someone that's got a good, you know, they've got a high capacity, like they can learn, they got a good personality, like there's their quality, right?

And maybe you're paying them 25 an hour. That's, I know that might sound a lot for you, but let's just say you're doing that because you're going to get real quality person. And that person is going to kind of wear three hats. Uh, they're going to be a Swiss army CA. And I think it could really roll into three things.

One is again, your clinical care CA, Two would be front desk activities and tasks and patient checkout. And three could be this patient experience coordinator, you know, and they're working full time job, maybe 38, 40 hours a [00:12:00] week. And there's going to be some downtime. And when there's some downtime, they're doing things like sending thank you letters to patients or whatever, what have you, right?

Like you, you tease this out well and plan it out well to where, okay, uh, first order of business is, is, you know, patient experience when they're in the. In the, uh, office and you greet them and then you're going to take care of the clinical side of things. And when you don't have, uh, the clinical side of things, you're going to handle some of the front desk checkout stuff.

And then when there's neither of that to do, um, we're going to, uh, look at our patient experience weekly and daily checklist and do some of that. And I think that would really make a great. Swiss Army CA in your practice. Again, just to kind of reiterate that one is the clinical role they would have. Two is the front desk role they would have, and three is the patient experience coordinator role they would have.

All bundled into one. If you needed to really handle Uh, billing, you would outsource your billing. If [00:13:00] you wanted, you know, the phone's ringing off the hook and you got a lot of different things to do, uh, as far as insurance verifications and all that, all the stuff that we know front desk has to do, um, you could then consider layering on a part time or full time virtual front desk to handle that.

And, and then that could build you a unique team that you could get very profitable with and then just start maybe building out a little bit more of your traditional team, um, as you grow. And maybe you don't, maybe you love this model and you just layer on a second Swiss Army CA, right? Uh, that's something to consider as, as well.

So, uh, I hope that was helpful, short and sweet today. Uh, really been. In our coaching programs, uh, with Dr. Kurt Kippenberger and Dr. Ashley Jordan and myself as coaches, we've been working with a few of our clients on this Swiss army CA to bridge that gap early on in practice. And so we've been teasing this out and the details of it.

And, uh, just wanted to shoot a quick little [00:14:00] video. Sorry, let me redo that. I wanted to shoot a quick little, uh, podcast episode for you on the idea and just get yourself thinking. And if you feel like you need some help on this, um, and you could use a little bit of coaching, uh, just go to our website, modernchiropracticmarketing.

com and you'll find all kinds of great information on there and our different programs.