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Welcome to ChiroSecure is Empowering Women in chiropractic the Facebook live show for successful women by successful women. Proving once again, women make it happen. Join us each week as we bring you the best in business growth, practice management, social media, marketing, networking leadership, and lots more. If it’s about women in practice and business, you’ll hear it here. [inaudible] now join. Today’s host Dr. Julie McLaughlin, as she talks learning, living, and teaching. And now here’s Dr. Julie,
Hello everybody, Dr. Julie McLaughlin here from vital health protocols and welcome to empowering women sponsored by ChiroSecure So, first of all, I would like to thank ChiroSecure for making all this possible. So let’s give them all thumbs up. Some hearts, some love to show them because they do so much for us in our profession. And they are sponsoring these wonderful events and really giving so much free information for, for all the docs to enjoy. So let’s get started. So what we’re going to do first is we’re going to look at if you are treating other chiropractors or other health professionals in your practice. So I would like you to write in the comments, if you treat other chiropractors or other healthcare professionals in the comments, I would likely to guess that everyone would be saying yes to this question, right? Because we know as chiropractors, how valuable it is to get adjusted.
We know as chiropractors, how valuable the care is that we give. So I would surely hope that we are all treating other docs and that other docs are also treating us. So, but it can be a little bit of a tricky topic when we think about it. So these are the five things I want you to think about. If you are treating other professionals in your practice, number one is time. So let’s face it. Time is money for us. Our appointment slots. All we have to be able to generate income for our practice. All that. We have to be able to pay our bills, to pay our rent, to pay our employees. All of our overhead is time. So time is very, very valuable to us. I also want you to think about money. I want you to think about that. You need money to pay your bills and your overhead, right?
There’s not a single person on earth that doesn’t need this. It’s super, super important, but money also puts a value on things. If you get something for free, even if it has a value, there’s no value to it because you didn’t pay money for it. And you don’t think it’s as important because it was free because free has no value. So I want you to think of money in those two ways. The other thing I want you to think of compliance, if something’s free, we’ve all had patients in the past that we’ve seen for free, that don’t comply with the care plan, because they don’t have value in what you’re doing. And if we don’t have compliance, we don’t have outcome and we don’t have results. The other thing I want you to think about is malpractice. And it’s something that ChiroSecure does such a great job at keeping us safe that, but we also have to be smart and we have to protect ourselves because knock on wood.
God forbid anybody ever got sued, but you have to do the right thing on every person that you see to predict that patient, as well as protect yourself against a possible Malpractice claim. And you want to think when you treat another health care professional, is this a treatment? Are you taking care of that person? Or are you having a business meeting with them and taking care of them on the side? So those are the things that we’re going to talk a little bit more about and dive into. So let’s take a look at looking at these things a logically versus emotionally. So sometimes we make decisions emotionally that logically aren’t the best decisions. So we want to really think about this ahead of time and set up our own procedure in our office of what we do. So the first thing is why would other docs come in to see you in the first place?
So we know other chiropractors know the value of chiropractic care. They know the results that we get with chiropractic care. But what about other healthcare professionals now in my office, I see cardiologists. I see dermatologists. I see primary care docs. I see nurses. I see dentists. I see orthodontists. I see every profession as well as chiropractic doctors. So when we look at all the different healthcare professionals that come in, that is a great, great message because they know how valuable it is. And so if something is valuable, you need to have a price on it because money is what gives us value. Right? So how do you structure that fee for these other professionals? Now, I know it probably varies across the board, but I want you to really think about this and think about it logically versus emotionally. Do you think, Oh, this chiropractor, he’s my friend.
I just want to treat them. I’m not going to charge him. I’m going to give him a professional courtesy, but really what are you doing? You’re giving away your time for free, that you could feel with another paying patient or you say, well, I don’t see them during my office time. So maybe you’re using your free time that you need to recharge yourself, seeing somebody for free. And if you’re seeing them for free, there’s no value to them and it can become burdensome to you over time. So do you give a discount to them or do you charge them your regular prices? Now everybody’s got their own answer and everybody has what they feel comfortable with, but I want you to think about it in a different way. Now, when other professionals come in to see me, I charged them my regular price, because number one, I know compliance.
I don’t want to get in trouble for fee splitting. I don’t want to get in trouble for charging insurance and then not charging the patient, their deductible or their copay. Because all of those things I could lose my license, whether or not that other person is a professional or not. The other thing is, so I have lots of other docs. I have a dentist who comes in every single week and I charge my regular price. We charge that patient, their deductible, their copay, their insurance. If we have cash patients, we charge them cash. That doctor sends me tons of referrals. They know what I charge. They know how my office runs. They know what my care plans are because they treat them just like my patient. And honestly, if I have an issue and I go and get adjusted, or I go to that dentist, they charge me their full price.
And, and they give me the care that they give to their patients. So that into thinking well, as chiropractors, maybe we trade adjustments. Like they adjust me. I adjust them. But maybe that doc has a much more critical issue than you do. Maybe you’re on maintenance care. And that doc needs to see you three times a week. How does that work out? And you never want to lose a relationship over something like this, where you don’t feel that even trade that fair trade to your best bet is to charge what you charge your fee is your fee. No matter what person it is, what patient it is, your fee is your feet. Because then everybody is really being compensated fairly and you don’t feel slighted and you don’t feel like your time’s being taken up and that person’s getting the care they need, because how do we handle scheduling people compared to other patients?
Are you just slipping them in the back door, on your lunch? And then you don’t get to eat? Or are you seeing them before patients, are they taking up your patient time where you could be seeing a paying patient and helping someone else who’s actually coming in to see you in your practice as a patient, or you’re seeing them on your time off. So it really gets to be a problem. And so it can be a problem for the doc who’s treating them. But then I’ve also seen, unfortunately, in some Facebook groups that the doc who wants to get treated feels entitled and they want a certain time and a certain day. And if the doc doesn’t accommodate them to that, they’re angry because they feel like, well, I’m a doc, so I’m special. So I should be entitled, but it just doesn’t work out that way.
Because then you have hard feelings and people are bumping heads, and we don’t want that. So if you’re upfront and you do what you do in your practice, everybody’s the same. You’re never going to have that conflict. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to have a lot of conflict in my life. So my rules are the same. It might, my fees are the same, whether it’s a doc, whether it’s work comp, whether it’s pie, whether it’s insurance, whether it’s cash. It’s just what I charge, because that is the value of what I do. And let’s face it. Who doesn’t deserve it to have chiropractic care who would be devastated? I think I would die if I wasn’t allowed to have chiropractic care the rest of my life. So we need to have that value on what’s really, really important. So let’s talk about what is important when we’re providing those services.
So are those services and protocols unique just for your patients and you don’t use them with other healthcare professionals, maybe you have a chiropractor come in and say, Oh, they’ve been adjusted before. So I’m just going to quick adjust them. I’m not going to do an exam. I’m not going to send them for blood work or x-rays if they need that. No, we’re not going to do that because you are doing that patient a disservice. You are opening yourself up for malpractice for being out of compliance. You’re going to give them the time of an exam. You’re going to do an exam on them. You can get to any kind of testing that you need to do. I do a lot of functional medicine in addition to chiropractic and my practice. And I have docs from all over the country contacting me. Well, could you look at my blood work?
What could you look at my father’s blood work? And my sister’s blood work, I would be happy to. I would be happy to give them all the time and consideration and utmost attention, but they have to make an appointment on my schedule and they have to pay for that services. Otherwise I would be out of business. I would not be able to see and help the people I help because I couldn’t pay my overhead. And it would become very burdensome. So I want you to think about it. When I first started practice, I had this big office and I didn’t have any patients, but what I did is I closed all the rooms. We had closed treatment rooms, then we don’t know, but we closed all the rooms to the treatment rooms, except for one to make the office look really, really busy because I knew that I had to spend the right amount of time with that person.
Because once I got busy, maybe I’m not going to spend as much time and they’re going to feel slighted. So you never want anybody to feel slighted. So whatever your time for your exam, if you do your exam in 20 minutes or 30 minutes, you do that for the health professionals. And I guarantee you will see this in payback because you will get referrals. Because think about this, the docs that you see that you treat for free or reduce fees, do they refer you patients, are they just there to get their quick adjustment and leap? Right? So these are the upsides and downsides of this. By treating them as a patient, they know exactly what patients expect and they know the quality of care that you’re going to give them. So you want that because they will refer you tons of patients, because they have respect for you and understand what you do.
And that you really take the time to take care of people. That’s going to be your upside. The downside is it might feel uncomfortable not giving that professional courtesy, but you can assure them if I’m coming to you, I’m going to pay you as, because that’s what that fair trade is. And so when we look at this, you’re going to stay compliant. You’re going to stay out of having any kind of malpractice, anything. Well, they’re another doc. They’re not going to Sue me. You don’t know, God forbid, something happens. You don’t know. And if you don’t have the records, you’re not charging them. You’re seeing them on the weekends. Maybe you’re adjusting them, you know, on a bench in the hallway or whatever it is. You’re not doing what you do with your normal patients. You can get yourself in trouble and you can not do a service to somebody else.
So think about these things. I know that it can be tricky because our emotional brain, we want to help everybody. And we’ve, we could give it away for free. We would, but our logical brain has to be smarter and do the right thing. So, because I believe in all of you and I want you to stay on mission and stay on task. And, and with this focused intensity, you will succeed my friends. And if you want to know more about what I do, you can go to online vhp.com as vital health protocols. And if you want to know more about ChiroSecure, be sure to check out their Facebook page, their website, because we love ChiroSecure And they have done so much for us in our profession and helped us in so many ways by bringing programs like this. So next week, I want you to be sure to tune in and no, not next week, sorry, two weeks from now. I want you to be sure to tune into another empowering women show Facebook live with Dr. Nicole Lindsey. So I will see you next time and have a great day.
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