Take Four

Find the unlimited potential of your office by reassessing with four basic practice principles

How should chiropractors encourage and revive their staff when business is down? Some may handle the situation without tact or sensitivity. There is a fine line between motivation and intimidation. Expecting more new patients, better collection rates, recalls, and increased services are the norm. But without guidance, your staff may be meandering off-course.

When business is slow, it is a reality check. Blame it on the staff, economy, changes in insurance, managed care, even weather, but the truth is that when a slump happens (and it will), you need to reassess the basic fundamentals of a chiropractic practice: service, attitude, procedures, and loyalty. When one of these four aspects is shaky, you must find out which one is weak and coming up short.

Service With a Smile
Build a sense of purpose toward serving patients with the correct intent. When the staff is focused on statistics and not on people, motivation will be very short-lived. Miss a goal, and everyone is down. Goals can have a negative impact. Your office may have actually increased in business, yet still fallen short of a goal, soi everyone feels they have failed. If an office is dedicated to service, the money will come, the statistics will reveal the efforts, and the patients will notice the difference.

Develop a million-dollar practice with million-dollar smiles. A smile that comes from the heart and does not stop at the lips, but reveals itself in the eyes is worth more in business than technical skill. Even a stranger can detect a half-hearted smile. A genuine smile shows self-confidence, while a forced smile appears phony. A smile is universal language for communicating more effectively; it opens the other person up to listen to what you are about to say. A smile makes people gravitate to you. Patients love to come into an office that is filled with smiling, caring, service-minded staff.

Attitude Adjustment
The Carnegie Institute of Technology analyzed the records of 10,000 people and concluded that 15% of success is due to technical training (brains and skill), and 85% to personality factors—the ability to deal with people. In other words, the reason for success is attitude.

Enthusiasm is catching. The message your office gives to patients is either upbeat and positive, or lacking and anxious. A pessimistic attitude toward your profession, the insurance industry, current financial situation, personal relationships, or coworkers are all reflected and amplified in your ability to deal with patients.

Get an attitude adjustment! If patients gravitate to a smile, they are cemented to an uplifting attitude. When the office exudes positive energy, patients heal faster and feel better. These patients refer their friends and family. It is a wellspring of growth cultivated by simply developing an atmosphere filled with a great attitude. Adopt the attitude of belief in other people, belief in their potential. Staff and patients are infected by the doctor’s attitude.

Unfortunately, people can also react to a negative attitude. If you decide before hand that a certain patient, coworker, or insurance adjuster is going to be difficult to deal with, chances are you approach the situation with a defensive attitude. You set the stage for confrontation and the other person usually does not disappoint you.

Instead, plan to defuse the situation. Listen, before you speak. Rephrase the other person’s main complaint or concern, and make sure you understand the situation clearly. Ask the other person what they would like to see happen as an outcome or solution.

Offer a goodwill atonement. If a patient is complaining about a treatment, suggest a complimentary visit; if an insurance adjuster makes a derogatory remark about chiropractic, do not let it ruin your day. Send some literature with a box of candy (to sweeten the disposition), offer a free seminar to the company to update their education. If a coworker is always late, or ineffective in the job, ask what the problem is, and determine the proper solution. Maybe they needed to be reassigned to a different position with fewer hours. Whatever the situation, your reaction and your attitude determine the result.

Perfecting Procedures
Sometimes unlimited potential is buried in paperwork, clutter and poor procedures. An office that has barriers to growth must recognize the limitations and redesign before proceeding. Capacity limits are usually hiding in three areas: space, time, and staff.

Growth can be sabotaged because procedures are neither effective nor efficient. Change barriers into bridges by organizing workflow, people skills, time, patient flow, and, when possible, redesigning space. Sometimes the smallest changes result in huge rewards. If clutter is problematic at the front desk, in the insurance department, or in the office, buy milk-crates and some hanging pendaflex folders. Once you have categorized your clutter, your space looks better and work productivity increases.

If time efficiency is a problem, make sure the front desk has a properly designed appointment book that allows sufficient time with each patient. When it too long in the treatment room is the problem, buy small timers (like digital clocks) that stick to the wall outside of treatment rooms. When a doctor gets caught-up with a patient who likes to talk, set the timer to go off in 30 seconds. Once the timer starts beeping, the doctor has an excuse to open the door, or if it is the doctor’s fault, the sound of the beeping gives him or her a reminder that more patients are waiting.

Proper staffing is essential for growth. Understaffed, untrained, or unappreciated staff can subvert the best-laid plans of success. Empowering individuals strengthens the core essences of any business. If one word could describe what employees want, it would be respect. Salary, benefits, authority, responsibility, and titles are overrated to the real issue of respect.

Streamline procedures for the most efficient use of staff, space, and time. Do not have one employee duplicating another worker’s task. For example, many offices still have a dual system of paper and computer: the front desk CA uses a pegboard system and then an insurance CA posts the daily backup into the computer. This wastes time and money. A daily report is generated from the computer at the end of each day to verify that all patient data has been input correctly. There really is no good argument for doing both. Optimize the potential for the insurance CA to be using his or her time more wisely by calling on past due claims.

Lasting Loyalty
The true measure of success is happiness. Statistics are not measuring sticks—just numbers. For some doctors. seeing and helping 30 patients per day is a goal. For others, it would be downsizing. Success in numbers depends on your perspective.

Maximum success means that everyone involved is happy—doctors, staff, and patients. Your office should be creating an environment of the elite—a place where people just like to be, warm, comforting, healing, and relaxing. Imagine your office being a nirvana, an escape and a peaceful place that resonates love and healing the minute someone opens the door. The reception area is clean, neat, and comfortable with soft music and a waterfall trickling to relax your patients.

People would not only not want to leave, they would refer everyone they knew there. Patients would be so loyal they would come to your office even if their insurance companies did not pay for chiropractic and you were not on the managed care approved doctors’ list.

Imagine, too, that your company is the best place to work in the entire community. To work there would be an honor. Your staff would be loyal and would have the practice’s best interest in mind. You would never have to worry about marketing for patients or finding the best of the best employees.

This is not a dream; it is all within your reach. You can exceed expectations by choosing to focus on service, attitude, procedures, and loyalty. Break the glass ceiling of the ordinary and become extraordinary, it really does only requires that little extra. CP

Ces Soyring, CA, is cofounder of the National Academy of Chiropractic Assistants (www.naca-online.com) and a chiropractic consultant. She can be reached via email: naca_csoyring@yahoo.com.