This two-office Texas multidisciplinary practice fills 5,000 sq ft and finds success with a team approach
James N. Kontaratos, DC, CCSP, instructs patient Betty Boriak on the correct biomechanical procedure for a rehabilitative exercise.
To have a phenomenally successful chiropractic office, you must be willing to work for beans. Literally. Just like James N. Kontaratos, DC, CCSP, who is paid for his services with legumes by the can.
Of course, in Kontaratos’ Plano, Tex-based practice, reimbursement using food in place of hard currency is a valid form of payment one day each year. The rest of the time, Kontaratos accepts only cash, check, credit card, or insurance assignment.
Taking canned beans (along with canned peas, corn, and other vegetables as well as fruits, chicken, beef, and fish) in exchange for an adjustment and other services is a ritual Kontaratos conducts to benefit a local homeless shelter’s soup kitchen. In a nutshell, you drop by the office, receive treatment, and then surrender your edibles.
Understandably, the food-raiser has proven popular among Kontaratos’s patients, not to mention many segments of the at-large community. The goodwill resulting from the yearly event has helped the multidisciplinary practice, Advanced Comprehensive Medical (ACM), grow. In 2003, ACM welcomed 239 new patients; that number was surpassed 9 months into 2004 thanks in part to the food drive.
| Go for Gold |
| One of the most gratifying honors ever accorded to James N. Kontaratos, DC, CCSP, came in the form of an invitation to lend a hand at the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo, where his skills were put to work helping world-class American athletes prepare for triumph at the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Greece. “I was the only chiropractor at the center this past June—and one of only four who were there during the entire year,” says Kontaratos, clinic director of Advanced Comprehensive Medical in Plano, Tex, and Dallas. However, as in private practice, Kontaratos had to build a clientele while there at the training center. “The first day, I didn’t have many cases come to me,” he says. “Most of the athletes’ trainers just didn’t understand what chiropractic could do for the team. So I had to spend the next several days educating about chiropractic.” The effort paid off because, in short order, Kontaratos’ daily case volume grew briskly. “By the end of my time at the center, I was busy every day,” he tells. Kontaratos was at the center for about 3 weeks, working full-time hours every day, weekends included. Athletes at the center spend their days practicing their sport in full-out, pedal-to-the-metal fashion. The result is they become finely honed competitors, but in the course of that honing they suffer overuse injuries aplenty. “The athletes I saw the most frequently because of overuse injuries were the wrestlers and weight lifters,” Kontaratos says. He reports that the goal of the US team was to win 100 gold medals in Athens. They ended up bringing home 103. Having been associated with so winning a team should have translated into a huge marketing advantage for Kontaratos’ practice. Unfortunately, US Olympic Team officials frown on practitioners attempting to forge a little gold of their own by commercializing the relationship, so Kontaratos has been largely silent about his contributions to the American effort. However, for Kontaratos, what he took home to his patients—deeper insights to the workings of human anatomy and a few new tricks for coaxing higher levels of performance from the musculoskeletal package—was worth far more in the long run. “I worked with physical therapists and athletic trainers. I learned from them techniques I could apply in my own practice,” he says. “It was great being able to pick their brains.” —RS |
Team Players
ACM consists of two offices. The one in Plano is 3,000 sq ft, a third of which space taken up by a fully equipped, rehab-oriented gym. The second office is 2,000 sq ft and located about 10 miles away in neighboring Dallas.
In addition to Kontaratos, there are two other chiropractors in the practice: Yaron Lohr, DC, and Bobby Fisher, DC. There is also a pair of medical doctors: Jerel R. Biggers, DO, and neurologist Sharon Woodruff, MD. Rounding out this mix is massage therapist Bob Klaiber and various independent contractors who provide nutritional counseling, workout training, and other essential services. “We treat as a team,” says Kontaratos.
Kontaratos takes pride in the fact that ACM is a 100% referral-based practice, making expenditures on advertising unnecessary (apart from internal marketing support, such as newsletters and a weekly health-info lecture).
The practice generates revenues that are 65% cash and 30% insurance, with the remainder mostly coming from PI and, to a lesser extent, workers’ comp.
Patients hail from all walks of life, but included is a sizable contingent of athletes (Kontaratos, by the way, is the official doctor of the Dallas Harlequins, a professional rugby team).
“We treat our patients using the same approaches as we do our athletes,” he says. “We work the patient back to functionality, then take them to a higher level with strengthening, toning, and overall better general health.”
After arriving at the front door, new patients undergo an extensive initial examination that runs the gamut from head to toe, with x-rays in between. The practitioner conducting that exam might be one of the chiropractors or one of the medical doctors, depending on the nature of the complaint. However, before treatment is administered, each case is presented to the full-care team for a joint determination of how to proceed.
“In every case, the goal is to restore the patient’s bodily frame to full integrity, or at least as close as is humanly possible,” Kontaratos says. “We do that through adjustments, strengthening exercises, and cardiovascular and weight training.”
ACM came about as a result of the principals realizing that, in this day and age, in order to be successful, turf issues and egos must fall by the wayside so that practitioners of different stripes can treat together.
“Our concept has been that we put the patient first,” Kontaratos explains. “It doesn’t matter who is predominately responsible for getting the patient well, as long as we work as a team and achieve the common goal of making the patient as healthy as possible.”
Front row (L–R): Nery Franco, CA; Myka Hartness, office manager; Tanya Walsh, insurance/bookkeeping. Back row (L–R): Yaron Lohr, DC, clinic director; Robert Klaiber, massage therapist; Kontaratos; Eric Wilkins, therapy aide.
When Kontaratos went looking for a medical doctor to join ACM in 1995, he wanted someone in possession of “a shared vision of bringing a higher level of healthcare to the patient.” It was not easy lining up such an individual—at the time, MDs who would even give chiropractors the time of day were few and far between. But Kontaratos persisted, and finally found a willing physician.
Actually, the groundwork for ACM was laid much earlier, in 1989, the year Kontaratos completed Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. Originally from Toledo, Ohio, Kontaratos chose to settle in Dallas after friends from the University of Oklahoma (where he did his undergraduate work) introduced him to the area. “I really loved it here,” he says. “This was a city of huge potential.”
Fresh out of Palmer, Kontaratos was welcomed to an established group of Dallas chiropractors. In 1992, when he went out on his own and moved to a 1,400-sq-ft office that he shared with another solo practitioner. Both practices experienced abundant growth. But, by 1995, the two were bumping up against each other for lack of space.
That, plus a desire to obtain sufficient room for offering a range of rehabilitation services and to accommodate a larger variety of ancillary services providers, prompted Kontaratos to pull up stakes once again. This time, he relocated to a generously-sized suite in a Plano medical office building. ACM was born.
| Leap of Faith | | Climbing to dizzying heights of success has never fazed James N. Kontaratos, DC, CCSP. Climbing to dizzying actual heights (as in tall buildings), that’s another matter altogether. “Yeah, it’s true,” says the Plano, Tex, practitioner. “I was acrophobic.” Was. Until, that is, he conquered his fear by forcing himself to parachute from an airplane buzzing around several thousand feet up.“Going up high was something I had trouble with, so I took action to be able to check that off the list of things I couldn’t do,” Kontaratos says. This was an insight worth absorbing, given how well it has helped Kontaratos develop a can-do sense about the building of his practice. “I feel I can take just about any leap of faith necessary to grow my practice.” Leaps of faith—like the one he recently made by enrolling in medical school to eventually be able to add an MD credential to his name. “My objective is to become better equipped to address the disconnect in the minds of many people with regard to where they should turn first for spine care,” he explains. “Most consumers go straight from their primary care physician to an orthopedic surgeon, and aren’t aware that there’s something in between—chiropractic. As a profession, we’re getting out that message. But as an individual practitioner, I feel I can do more to further that message. The best way available to me is dual credentialing. As a chiropractor who also happens to be a medical doctor, the message will be more credible and compelling in the eyes of some people we’ve not been able to really reach.” After Kontaratos completes his medical schooling in 2008, he will emerge as a physiatrist, an ideal specialty for him because of physiatry’s emphasis on musculoskeletal rehabilitation. “More than anything else, I’ll be a well-rounded practitioner,” he predicts. “The extra knowledge I’m already gaining from this process is absolutely invaluable to myself and my patients. I’m one who firmly believes in the old saying that knowledge is power.” —RS | |
Gifts That Keep Giving
A critical component of Kontaratos’s practice from the very first has been wellness. As such, he offers a forum for patients interested in achieving exactly that. He reveals that, today, about 70% of ACM patients opt to participate in his wellness program (enrollment is limited to patients who have undergone chiropractic treatment or other rehab intervention and have already had their baseline problems addressed).
“People,” he says, in setting the stage for an explanation of the program’s appeal, “have a fatalistic attitude about aging and pain. They tend to think pain is something they will have to endure as a part of growing older and that the older they become the worse the pain will be. I disagree with that. If you show people the right way, through nutrition, spinal care, and overall general health care, they can actually improve the quality of their life as they age. I have a patient who is 94 and has been in our wellness program since the beginning, and she’s in better shape now than she was 15 years ago.”
Kontaratos expects the program to make an even more valuable contribution to the practice as time passes because the Dallas population is graying, portending that more and more people will need this kind of help.
He insists that offering and conducting a wellness program has no shortcomings, especially since it’s mainly cash based. “From the patient’s perspective, the program is simply about continuing their care—it’s not about paying.”
Much the same can be said about ACM’s charity work; it is not about paying so much as it is about continuous caring. ACM conducts charity events twice a year. Each spring, the practice designates a day in which all revenues generated are donated to a local nonprofit organization. “We try hard to get as many people coming in on that day as possible, since the more patients we treat, the greater the sum we’re able to donate,” Kontaratos says.
Lately, the beneficiary of this fund-raiser has been the Susan B. Koman Breast Cancer Foundation, a nationwide charity headquartered in Dallas, with which the practice became involved as a show of support for the not-insignificant number of breast cancer survivors among the ACM patient base. “We felt it was a good cause to rally behind,” Kontaratos says.
Then, each autumn, ACM collects canned goods for the homeless. This is done in conjunction with a food drive organized by the Salvation Army.
About 3 months prior to the food drive, ACM patients are notified of the event and asked to begin collecting canned goods for donation. Bringing in as little as a single can is enough to qualify a patient for free services that day, but nearly everyone happily contributes more than just one. “Some people bring several shopping bags filled with canned goods,” says Kontaratos
Many of those who show up with food in tow are existing patients and they receive care as usual. Newcomers on the other hand, receive exams and x-rays.
Both charity events always take place on a Saturday. That way, more people are able to participate. “You get a bigger turnout when you hold an event on a day that most people have off from work,” Kontaratos indicates. “We donate about 6 hours of our professional services time that day and see as many as 100 people. These events are great opportunities for us to get out the word to the community about us and about what we do here.”
Judging by the growth ACM experiences, it would be fair to say the community likes very much what it discovers in the course of those encounters.
Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Chiropractic Products.
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