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Welcome to ChiroSecure’s 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 everyone. Thank you for joining me. I am Dr. Julie McLaughlin from Vital Health Protocols, and we are here today with empowering women, sponsored by ChiroSecure, and first thing that we want to do, and we always start the show. This way is thanking Kyra secure for being such an awesome malpractice carrier for us and bringing us so much valuable content with all the shows that they do. So let’s everybody do a thumbs up little hearts and let’s show lots of love for ChiroSecure. Cause we wouldn’t be able to do this without them. So thank you so much. So today’s show, I am very excited to introduce to you Jacob McNamara. He is our intern here at my office and, um, he graduated, um, or he’s going to school at Palmer, Florida. So welcome Jacob. I am so excited. You’re here today. Thank you, dr.
McLaughlin. I’m excited to be here. So we have a really great topic, um, that we’re going to talk about and we’re going to talk about preceptorship. So let’s, we have some slides to share with you. So let’s get started on our slides and uh, we’ll, we’ll start, start this going. So we’re going to talk about how we can help the next generations of chiropractors. Get a great start. And, uh, so this is my first time even having an intern or even know that interns needed preceptorships. Um, so what is a preceptorship, Jacob? Could you explain it to everybody for me?
Yeah. So I’ll start with just the definition that is provided by our preceptor handbook from Palmer. They define it as a short term, structural structured clinical experience, education experience, and an off-campus clinic that conforms to the colleges, preceptor program requirements and those requirements, uh, vary state to state, um, and things like that. And, uh, basically what it means to me is, uh, having a mentor to kind of guide you in while you’re beginning practice as a new doc, especially cause there’s a lot of things that we miss in school and you really don’t, uh, even get exposed to until you’re out actually out in the real world, practicing.
Yeah, it is so great because as you guys know, I practice Ben for 30 plus years. We’re just going to leave it at that. But when I went to school, we didn’t have preceptorships and I didn’t even know that it was a possibility. And so did Jacob, could you tell him how you found me and how this all worked out?
Yeah, that’s a pretty good story. So obviously COVID-19 happened during the middle of my clinic experience at Palmer and, uh, that put a whole wrench in me kind of finding, uh, PR uh, you know, a preceptor and I reached out to multiple docs. Um, I kept getting told know, sorry, because of COVID we’re not going to have the room to take on another intern or I share a building with another doc and they don’t feel safe with bringing another person in, uh, with their patients and things like that. So just about everything in the book you can think of is happening. And then luckily I had a patient and she knew a doc in Maryland and she’s like, well, my doc teaches across the country, other docs. And, uh, would you be interested if I gave him your information and you can see if he can find you somebody? So I was like, okay, sure, nothing much other. And then I reached out the next day and immediately I got a response and I was making contact with Julie, uh, dr. McLaughlin, I think we talked on the phone the very next day and, uh, we started getting the bar rural and, and now we’re here.
It was so awesome. This is so random, but it turned out to be so wonderful.
Oh, the best part about it is I’m already experiencing tons of things that we haven’t gotten in schools such as acupuncture, you know, observing that the functional medicine, which is something I was always very interested in. Uh, we just covered very little in school, so actually seeing it in practice live, it’s an amazing experience.
It is. So it’s so good. It’s so good for me because I’m learning things. I’m learning new techniques and things that since I haven’t been in school for so long that I’m learning from you. Um, so it’s really giving our patients the best care. So I really think that there’s been, uh, maybe a myth that we’ve all heard that chiropractors eat their young and all of these things that they’re not helping the younger docs. And I wanted just work on dispelling that myth because helping students help the profession, helping students help us in practice because we’re all on the same team. Do you agree, Jacob?
I couldn’t agree more.
So we want to make sure that the message is out there, that if, if you don’t have an intern, you’ve never had an intern reach out to the schools because the process I found out was really, really easy to get signed up. And it’s been like the best experience for both of us because we really are on the same team. So I want to really disperse that disillusion, that practicing docs don’t want to help other docs coming up because the truth is we absolutely do. It’s in everybody’s best interest. I think we can all agree that there aren’t enough chiropractors in this country because we all have so many patients that we can help, that we need more docs. We need to get bigger and stronger and have our voice heard and have our services felt by so many people across the country. So, you know, what can you learn slash teach in three months that wasn’t taught in school? So we talked about some of the things, you know, acupuncture and functional medicine. What are some of the other things?
So some of the big things that I’m sure all, um, new docs and, uh, fresh graduates are really, really interested in is proper billing procedures. Um, how to put value on your service as a doctor, because we get all this great education. We learn so much about the human body and how to help and heal people. But when you’re in student clinic, you have different types of pricing, the patient’s coming in, they know that you’re a student, so they kind of, uh, have that over their head thinking, you know, you know, just not giving you the value that your treatment’s actually worth. And we just don’t really have a good understanding going out and practice. It’s like, okay, this is how much I’m going to charge for an adjustment for my exams. And, uh, that’s one thing that’s been really great and you’ve been showing me, you know, every single day, every step that goes along with the billing procedures and just, you know, new patient flow, returning patient flow, how do you use your EHR? And, uh, I think that’s one of the big things that we as new graduates really need is how to properly bill. Uh, so, you know, we can make some money and continue to help people. Yeah,
Absolutely. And you know, when I knew you were going to come in, I thought of all, I wrote a list of all the different things that we do in the office, because I know when I went to school, I got zero business training, like not one single business class. And when I graduated and I told my dad, well, I need to open my own practice. I need to get alone. And he told me, well, you need to write a business plan. I’m like, well, what’s that? And he’s like, didn’t they teach you that in school? And the answer was no. And so I think that I really want to make sure during this preceptorship, that, that business part, that marketing part, the patient flow, the insurance, all of that stuff that you’re able to learn, because that’s something that you need for the entire rest of your career. Um, yes. So when we think about like the clinical hands on experience with real patients at every stage of care, what do you think about that experience now here versus what you were exposed to before?
So, uh, the biggest difference I would say is, uh, probably the pace, um, at school, we didn’t really see as many patients, there were so many, you know, student interns and, you know, so many, you know, just as like a few patients. So you spent a lot more time with the patient, um, through every step of care and in actual practice. And what I’ve been seeing here is you kind of work your flow. So you can see as patient, um, getting, doing some sort of, uh, other therapy or modality while you can start seeing another patient and kind of, uh, the pace that, that goes as well as just, you know, like the first and the second day visits, how to talk to the patient. It’s a lot different when, um, you know, you’re in practice versus you being at a school, you know, trying to convince the patient like, Hey, you need this care. This is what’s wrong. This is how we’re going to help. And, you know, moving on from that point.
No, that’s excellent. Those are the things that, you know, I learned through experience. And if I can give you that shortcut, like here’s the words that I learned that worked. And, um, th that, that’s what we want to do, because those are things that we really don’t learn in school and you learn them. And then the beautiful thing is we see patients every day, so you get to practice and, and that’s the way that we get better. And, you know, I like to role play. We role play a lot in the office because it’s practicing. So, and so
That’s another thing to add that, sorry, doc, we’re in this bubble at chiropractic school where, you know, we’re surrounded by so many individuals that just know so much about chiropractic and something I know that I struggle with personally is the communication part with a patient that, you know, they don’t know, they don’t have the same education as us. They don’t know the human body like we do. And observing you communicate with the patients with the knowledge that you have and the way you’re able to, uh, you know, adjustable pieces for the patient for them to understand has been extremely beneficial.
That’s awesome. Yeah. I th I tell lots of stories to my patients, so they get it because we need that to be stick. We want them to be compliant if they understand it. And you’re right in school, we, you know, talk in our big doctor lingo and terms, and everybody knows what we’re talking about, but the patients that they get really lost. So it’s really, it makes it, it’s a fun transition to, for me to be in practice for so long to remember back what it was like to be in school. Well, what about the business side of practice? Um, you know, obviously we talked about the insurance a little bit, but the billing and the collections, is that helpful to learn.
Yes, that is very helpful. So we do at Palmer, at least we have some business courses towards the end of our time there, and they’re great. And we do definitely learn in them, but we had COVID, which made things unfortunate. So we weren’t in person. So there was some, you know, misunderstandings with class and missing certain things that you wouldn’t be able to ask the teacher in person that we missed out on. But other than that, it’s still just really not enough actual knowledge and education given to us on the business side. And when you’re actually in clinic at school, uh, you know, we only accept so many different insurances. A lot of people will just pay cash because their prices were so cheap. Uh, depending on if you were a student or a first responder or things like that, your care could have been, you know, discounted even more. So it just wasn’t like a realistic, uh, situation we were in as far as, you know, opening up a business in the real world. And that’s one of the greatest things about preceptorship, I think, is seeing that side and you know, how to incorporate, uh, your skills in business.
I, I think that’s great, cause yeah, we made sure that we said, Hey, you’re going to learn how a patient with insurance when we’re in network is handled, how a patient who has insurance, but we’re out in network cat. So that would be cash patients, Medicare patients, um, you know, how we do care plans, all of those things. And that really, that business side of it, as well as the marketing, you’ve been doing some live videos with me, we’ve been sending out email marketing and we’re working on a lot of virtual things because we know in Illinois, things are starting to shut down again and with COVID. Um, so that’s why the functional medicine, we do some weight loss, those pieces. We want to give you a really good balance of learning everything that whatever you do, wherever you go, they’re going to be things that you could use for your entire career. And, um, that’s my goal. And I would hope that other docs were thinking about getting an intern and being a preceptor would consider the amount of experience that they have, that they could share with somebody is huge and that they should totally do it. Um, you know, so we, we sat down and we talked about our marketing plan. And, um, did you learn marketing in school or is it different out here in the real real world?
So we, we have to make a business plan. It’s a very rough business plan. Don’t get me wrong and there is a marketing portion of it, but, uh, it’s still, it’s just not very realistic when you’re not really doing it. And we weren’t actually allowed to market, uh, you know, Facebook or anything like that during school, uh, because there were certain rules against that and things like that. You couldn’t, you know, market these prices and things. So doing the videos with you has been awesome, kind of you showing me, uh, the systems you use to spread your message out there, uh, has also been really beneficial, actually really eye opening too. Cause I didn’t realize how much, how involved it really was.
Awesome. And it’s great when you have a plan and that generates referrals and it generates knowledge because we really choose to market by education. We educate our patients. So, um, it it’s been so fun for me to not be doing it by myself and have somebody else to do it with. So I think it helps the preceptor. So this is how the experiences help me, hopefully as much as it’s helped you. Um, it’s been just such a fun thing into any docs that are out there that are considering having an intern or didn’t even know that it was possible to have an intern. I would highly highly recommend it because we need to help prop up this profession. We need to help that next generation of docs be successful because it’s only going to help everybody. Would you agree Jacob?
A hundred percent? I couldn’t agree more. Uh, you know, there’s a lot of gaps in our education. Uh, we learn a lot how to pass the board exams and do well on those. Uh, but as far as how to make it as a business, um, the preceptorship is probably the most beneficial thing I can say that I’ve experienced throughout my time at school.
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. It makes me very happy and I hopefully all of you will consider doing a preceptorship and taking on interns in your practice because as you know, I believe in all of you and together we can take this profession to the next level. So thank you so much for joining me today, Jacob. I really appreciate it. And if all of you want to know more about what we do, um, our websites online BHP, and of course we have to think ChiroSecure. They are the most wonderful sponsor. And I want you to be sure to join us in two weeks and empowering women with dr. Nathalie Beauchamp. We’ll see you soon.
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. [inaudible] we hope you enjoy this week’s Facebook live event. Please like us on Facebook comment and share. We look forward to seeing all of you next week for another episode of Empowering Women in Chiropractic. Now go ahead and hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. Thank you for watching. Have a beautiful day. This has been a ChiroSecure production.
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