Dr. Mile Bodzin can be contacted at (877) 343-8950 or by visiting: www.cashpractice.com
Complete transcript (Click here to download this transcript):
Dr. Bodzin: He Facebook people. Doctor Bodzin here with Cash Practice. I want to give everybody a chance on Facebook to take a moment and share this, like it when the time’s appropriate, but I want to give a chance as this video’s rolling, as this live feed is rolling for people to join in. I know sometimes when a Facebook videos get started, it takes a moment for people to start watching. I have some great stuff I want to share with you guys. As I’m waiting for everybody get on, I also want to give a big shout out to ChiroSecure and say thank you so much for having us on their program.
Dr. Bodzin: I was approached by Doctor Hoffman. He’s saying, “You know Miles, we’ve been friends for a long time. We refer people to you guys all the time. We love what you guys do at Cash Practice because we know you keep our members safe and secure.” Actually the conversation we had was one of the leading reasons people have lawsuits brought against them, malpractice suits is really over finances that comes up. It’s like one of the top two or three reasons people get involved in these cases, and as result of that, ChiroSecure obviously, they’re in the business of protecting you and helping you stay protected.
Dr. Bodzin: We have a long standing friendly relationship of working together and they wanted me to go on and share with listeners, and I’m guessing there’s a lot of ChiroSecure clients who are going to be watching this video, if not live, certainly recorded later, and we want to share with you things you need to be doing in order to keep safe and secure. Not get yourself in hot water, not have run into legal problems, and that’s what we’re going to do in just a moment here.
Dr. Bodzin: I’ll also preface this by saying myself, I am not considered, I do not consider myself a compliance expert, but through osmosis of being surrounded by lots of compliance experts, I’ve learned a lot, and I’m not going to act like I know things I don’t know. I’m just going to share with you the things that are best practices in your practice to make sure you’re doing things from a financial side, and a practice side that are not going to get you in trouble, and actually help you grow your practice.
Dr. Bodzin: I want to share those things in just a moment. Again, I want to give a little opportunity for a few more people to join us because again, Facebook, you don’t know we were going to be on here until it actually popped up for you. I’ll get started just a moment, and again, I’ve known Doctor Stu Hoffman for a long, long time, and the whole Hoffman family. I’ve known for a very long time now. Wonderful people, wonderful company. In fact, one of the doctors who works for us here at Cash Practice who’s still an active practice Doctor Margie Smith, I’m sure she has no problem with me sharing this.
Dr. Bodzin: She’s a ChiroSecure client herself. Uses them to protect herself with her malpractice insurance in her practice. I’m not in practice anymore myself, so I don’t have malpractice insurance from the standpoint of protecting for that, but if I did, this is who I’d be working with of course myself directly. As the founder and CEO of Cash Practice, I want to give you a little story of where did it lead to? Why am I here being an expert talking to you right now, because I’m not just some person who built a company or started a company to sell the chiropractors.
Dr. Bodzin: I’m someone who did it in practice. Had a great success in practice. Turn that success into a software business that now helps other doctors be successful in practice, and I’d like to give a little background of that story, so you can see if we resonate. See if you can connect to my story, and that is back in the early ’90s when I got in practice, in Southern California I was opening a wellness center. Now, that’s not a big deal today to open a wellness center, but in the early ’90s, it was a big deal. In fact, where I practiced in San Diego, California, there were no companies at all with the word wellness in it.
Dr. Bodzin: I was the very first business of any nature, not just chiropractors, any nature to have the word wellness as part of our company name, and this is a time period where all of the other chiropractors were doing PI, work comp, auto accidents, back pain, lightning bolts flying out of people’s backs and it’s eight danger signals. All of that stuff was the environment. Now, in Southern California, not only were people thinking of chiropractor for work comp, and back pain, and headaches, and not wellness. They were also very much entrenched in managed care.
Dr. Bodzin: Managed care took hold of Southern California in the early ’90s and right when I got out of school, I want to run a wellness type practice and everybody’s coming in for back pain and neck pain, so their not interested in wellness, and everybody by the way has a manage care program that I’m not part of. Nine out of ten patients that came into my practice had no insurance at all, but I can work with because I just wasn’t part of the panels at that time, whatever. What did I have to do?
Dr. Bodzin: Well, I had it figured out, but I’m going to keep this really short because we have a short period of time to be together, but I struggled. I got to a point where I almost gave up on practice. I got to a point about a year into practice where we ready to sell it and go back to engineering, which was what I was doing before chiropractic. It got so bad that my wife and myself and our little girl, [inaudible 00:04:54] at the time, who’s going to be 25 this month, but she’s a little baby at the time, we ended up moving back in with my parents because we couldn’t pay our bills.
Dr. Bodzin: It got so bad for us that I literally had to pick up the phone and call my parents and ask for help. It was a real embarrassing time, quite frankly for myself. It was during that time period where we moved back home that I really put my engineering hat back on, and I got some help, and I finally really figured things out over the next couple of years of to succeed in a cash based practice. In a model where people were paying me directly where insurance wasn’t involved. To the point of which, I actually end up having great success in practice. From that bottom dwell, that rock bottom place, we ended up skyrocketing to a place of having tremendous success, and that success is measured in both the dollars, but more importantly in the patient retention we have.
Dr. Bodzin: You see, in my opinion, it’s just my humble opinion, and that is the key to being free from insurance dependence, the key to being successful in the cash bottle is to focus on patient retention, and that’s what I discovered. You have to retain patients in order to have the success in a cash model. If you’re a struggling doctor, you need to pay attention in what I’m about to do. If you’re struggling with patient retention, you maybe kicking butt in other areas, but meanwhile your PVA’s 12, or your PVA’s 20 or PVA’s 30, which is not great. Even a PVA of 60 is not great. It’s better than a 12, but it’s not great.
Dr. Bodzin: By the time I sold my practice in 2011, to dedicate myself full time to working Cash Practice, at that time, I sold my practice, our PVA statistic showed we were just over 300 visits. That’s how long my patients were staying with me. Just over 300 visits. What’s extraordinarily high, which basically is a definition of a wellness practice. Pay attention, I’m going to share a couple of things with you right now that will help you in practice to both safe and secure, and that’s one thing we do. Everything we teach is making sure it’s compliant legal, but also when you apply these things in practice, you will see patient retention go up.
Dr. Bodzin: When your patient retention goes up, everything is improved. You’re more profitable, your collections go up. Your stress goes down. Everything is a better when you have high patient retention. If you would like to learn more about this on your won at a later time, we’re going to put up a slide, a picture for you to see where you can download a free e-book. You could go to cashpractice.com at any time and get this e-book, or right now you could text, and when we get that image up there … It’s up. Okay, I’m told it’s up. You text ChiroSecure and your full name and email to 619-609-0521 and you will get to download the e-book called The Four Secrets to Skyrocket Your Cash Collections Without Giving Up Insurance.
Dr. Bodzin: It’s going to summarize some of the things I’m going to talk to you about right now, but you could download this and on your own time, later on read through it. At some point, when you go to cashpractice.com and you’ll see place to download it by putting in your name and email, or if you have your phone out, you could just text right now, ChiroSecure, your full name and email to 619-609-0521. Put ChiroSecure in there so we know where you came from. When it comes to marketing, it’s always good to know where people come from and how we connect.
Dr. Bodzin: Let me give you the four things, step one as doctors, you must give people objective measures and feedback. If you don’t give people feedback on a regular basis, if you don’t give them objective feedback to know how they’re doing, you will lose people. Doctor, I guarantee you’ve had patients come to you who’ve been to other chiropractors, and if you ask them the question, why are you coming to me now? Why are you not going back to the prior doctor? Assuming it’s not because they moved or changed locations, they just made a change of chiropractors.
Dr. Bodzin: I bet you’ve heard them say things like, “Well, I just don’t know how he’s doing over there.” “I don’t know. I just felt like the doctor kept wanting me to keep coming back.” Something to negative sentiment like that, that comes from that prior chiropractor completely failed to communicate to the patient the progress they were making. That when a patient doesn’t know they’re making progress, they will leave, and that’s a loss of a patient. What do we do to solve that?
Dr. Bodzin: I want you to imagine right now you’re in chiropractic school and you started school and the first day of school, they said, you will not get any feedback. You will not know whether you will graduating until the very end. Of course, you wouldn’t do that. It’d be crazy, right? What do you get during school, during the entire time you’re in class? Through your whole schooling career? You get progress reports along there. You get report cards letting you know how you’re doing. That’s what we created for Cash Practice. This is called our wellness score. Let me hold up to the camera. You see there, it shows a grade of a 67 with a D.
Dr. Bodzin: This is actually what we call a wellness report. I want you to imagine right now, you had a new patient come in. You do report of findings, and you say to your patient, “Hey, Allen, based on everything we just saw here, we’ve determined your health as a D.”, and guess what happens when you do that with a patient, no longer does the patient say, “Well, can you just pop my neck and get rid of my headache.” It changes the conversation. What they say is, “Holy crap. That’s not good. What do I have to do to be an A.”
Dr. Bodzin: It removes the conversation away from symptoms, and it focuses the conversation on what’s going with their health. Now, I just got done saying about patient retention. The wellness score serves three purposes. Number one is what I just shared with you. Add a report of findings, you’re going to show it to a patient, and it helps them be motivated to follow your care recommendations. That’s number one, and you’ll see you here all these are in colors. This is measuring all the different things we measure, and it gets out of this really nice report that gets produced and it’s a really nice fancy thing.
Dr. Bodzin: You could actually customize it with images of X-rays, and all kinds of cool things that you could do to present a nice summary report to a patient letting them know how they stand. Now, you did this report for a patient, and they’re under care, so I said the first thing this thing does is it’s great for enrolling new patients. The second thing it does, is it’s great for patient retention. Imagine that your re-exams, you’re not showing the patient how they’ve got. They went from a D and we all struggle with re-exams explain to a patient why they still need to get care. Or why do they have to keep coming on, or we go through this whole song and dance of educating them, versus just showing them, “Hey, you went from a D, and now you’re a B-. Great job. Keep up the work.”
Dr. Bodzin: When you show the patient objective measures in a understandable format, using letter grades, you will see they just stick under care. They’re not going to go, “Well, I’m done.” They don’t do that. That’s the wellness one. Again, because of the brief of time we’re dealing. I’m going to leave it at that. The third thing that the wellness score does is it’s a great new patient marketing tool. You could use this as a great screening tool. There’s no expensive equipment you have to buy. You just take it out, take some parameters. Use your laptop, measure some things, and show the patient the lead, or I should say the lead at that point. What their grade it, and use that as a motivational tool for them to accept your offer to come to the practice.
Dr. Bodzin: That’s tool number one. I want you to picture right now, you’re with a new patient, you did a report of findings, you showed them their wellness score, you just reported to them they’re a D, and they’re like, “Holy crap. I need care.”, and you’re like, “Great. Let me show you the care plan.”, and you go through a treatment plan and you go through the process of showing them your treatment plan, and now you need to present to them the second important thing in running a cash based practice. Now, you must give them a comprehensive financial plan to cover all of the care, and then give them affordable payment options.
Dr. Bodzin: This was the thing that was the crocks of what I did in practice in the mid ’90s that took me from struggling to great success, and that is you package your care into a compliant legal document that has all of the service, all of the fees, all the proper discounts, and we apply the ChiroHealthUSA contract discounts. For those of you who are familiar with ChiroHealthUSA, that’s who we partner with to make sure that you are staying compliant in your discounts. Our software is the only software in the market that takes their contract and then implies the discounts appropriately and creates a contract where the patient is given payment choices.
Dr. Bodzin: It’s a multiple page document. It actually has in here very clear legal terms so that when the patient’s enrolling in care, it handles all the situations like what if they stop care? What if they’re auto-refund? What if they owe you money?? What if they get a car accident, now they’re a PI case? What if they go on vacation? All these kinds of things that are important nuances that occur with a patient are all handled. It even has a place where it tracks the amount of responsibility they have per visit based on the plan.
Dr. Bodzin: Should they have stopped early, they know exactly what their financial responsibility is. From the standpoint of legality and compliance, this I will say is the most important thing you could be doing in your practice, is making sure you’re using a compliant document, and we’ve had this used on several million patients to date, and to this day we’ve had “zero” issues at all with any patients ever using this programs and all over the nations. This is the second tool.
Dr. Bodzin: I mentioned the wellness score is the tool for demonstrating the need for care. The cash plan calculator is our tool that creates this stuff that makes it easy for people to enroll in care. That’s the second thing. That last two are very simple, the third one is our auto-debit system for payment processing. One of the concepts I stumbled upon in practice and I’ve been saying this for years, and I’ve seen some other companies steal this idea or this saying I say because I’ve never saw it anywhere before, and I started saying it, and now I see some other people using my exact language, and that is, you got to remove the thought of money. The more often people think of about money, the less of they see you.
Dr. Bodzin: Doctors, this is why most companies want you to auto-pay their bills. For example, a cellphone company, they have your credit card info and you automatically pay your cellphone bill every month, and why did they do that? They do it so that you’re not being reminded of the payment because if you’re reminded of the payment, you’re likely to go shop at a competitor, and see whether you can get a better.
Dr. Bodzin: With our patients, in order to increase retention, what we find is if you stop reminding of the money, automatically run their payments, and our cash plan calculator that creates these plans is integrated with our auto-debit system, so that when you build these plans, you can actually enroll the patient in the care, and start auto-debiting their monthly payments associated with it, and the fourth and last system that we have, is our drip education email marketing system.
Dr. Bodzin: It’s the marketing component of the system, so that you could send out email campaigns for funnels, for clicking, click funnels, or those types of things. You can create landing pages. You could do email blasts. You can do campaigns of a series of emails to educate people. There’s all kinds you can do, and most people watching this right now are probably pretty familiar with email marketing. It’s not a new concept. It’s been around a long time, and our drip education email marketing system is a great program for doing that type of thing.
Dr. Bodzin: If you’re familiar with AWeber or MailChimp or Infusionsoft, all of them do similar things. Ours is one of those things. It does that just as well, if not better than many of those products, but again, it’s all under one platform. Rather than having your separate MailChimp over here, and you’re separate payment process over here, and some other tool over here, you have it all under one umbrella.
Dr. Bodzin: Cash Practice systems, we provide, and I’ll wrap it up with this, four key systems. The wellness score for demonstrating the need for care and showing progress of care. The cash plan calculator for creating the financial plans to enroll patients to care, and these are all the things I did in practice to get to this 300 PVA. It’s the synergy of working with all four of these systems that creates this tremendous retention. Again, the wellness score, the cash plan calculator, the auto-debit for payment processing, and our payment processing lets you do everything. Everything from using an EMV chip terminal, to using a USB swiper for swiping credit cards. We have a mobile app for doing mobile transactions.
Dr. Bodzin: Anything you want to do payment processing wise, you could use our system for, and then fourth, like I mentioned our drip education email marketing system, and when you join Cash Practice, you’re getting all of that plus you’re getting the training, the support along with it. If you look at any of our reviews, go look on our reviews, you’re going to see five-star reviews across the board as opposed to some of the other larger companies in our industry, you’ll see other companies out there that have a lot of mixed reviews about their service.
Dr. Bodzin: We consider ourself a service company that provides software, not a software company that provides service, and as a result our culture is, we are here to service you doctors. You and your team, all trainings included. Go to cashpractice.com and you go look at the pricing and learn about all those things, but what I would encourage you to do as the first step, is download that e-book, and if you want to get further information, you want to get exposed a little bit more to us, you’ll see a button on cashpractice.com, you’ll see where it says schedule a consult or a free consult you can do.
Dr. Bodzin: You could click that button and schedule time that one of our Cash Practice experts will spend about 10, 15 minutes with you on a phone call, answer your questions, see whether this is even a fit for you, and if it is a fit, then they’ll offer you the opportunity to get a demonstration of the software. No obligation to do anything. It’s just an opportunity for you to learn more about what we could do to help you succeed, to attract, enroll, and retain more patients. With that, I want to say thank you to ChiroSecure. If anybody has any questions about this, feel free to comment in the video below. Feel free to comment. Hit the Like button, of course. We love to do that.
Dr. Bodzin: Share it on Facebook. Share it with your colleagues, and more importantly, just ask questions in there, and I’ll be happy to reach out and if I don’t answer myself, I’ll make sure the right person or company answers them. I want to say again, thank you to ChiroSecure and all the best to you guys. If there’s anything further we could do for you, please let us know.
Speaker 2: This has been a ChiroSecure production.