5 Ways Your Practice Might Be Losing Money

Highlights

• Chiropractic practices may experience inefficiencies in patient payment and billing and high expenses in inventory management and IT upkeep.
• Our cloud-based ChiroTouch solution helps chiropractic practices reduce no-shows and prevent claim denials.
• ChiroTouch in the cloud saves money on IT maintenance with automated backups and upgrades.

Providing quality patient care is an essential aspect of your chiropractic practice. However, managing multiple scheduling, insurance, and billing workflows while delivering a high quality experience to your patients is a lot to juggle. Your practice could be at risk of losing profit and growth opportunities if you struggle to keep all those balls in the air.

Evolving to cloud-based ChiroTouch can help improve your practice’s productivity and performance in several areas. Here are five things that can cause your practice to lose money.

1. Patient Payments and Billing Inefficiency

Patient payment and billing challenges can cost your chiropractic practice time and money. The American College of Physicians reported that physicians spent 49.2% of their time on administrative tasks and only 33.1% on direct patient care.

Manual entry for billing can become time-consuming and increase the likelihood of human errors if your staff members enter payments, confirmation numbers, and patient information into your accounts manually. If you don’t have an automated payment system, patients must repeatedly provide their credit card or insurance information to your chiropractic biller or assistant whenever they visit your practice.

When patients encounter inconvenient payment services from your practice, they may leave negative reviews online or not recommend your services to friends and family. Dissatisfied patients can lead to lost revenue opportunities for your practice.

Automating patient payments using an integrated payment platform can streamline the chiropractic billing process, allowing you to process payments faster and reduce patient wait times. An integrated payment solution lets your biller operate from one platform and update patient ledgers automatically so you can get paid faster.

With ChiroTouch, patients can view their statements in the patient portal and make payments online. This makes payments more convenient for your patients and reduces collection time for your practice.

2. Claims Denials

Chiropractic practices can lose up to 30% of their potential cash flow due to claim denials and reimbursement delays when using an outdated practice management solution. According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association, nearly 65% of claim denials are not resubmitted, a significant missed opportunity for increased revenue.

Most claim denials are due to coding errors, submission delays, and inadequate documentation. For example, Medicaid or Medicare will likely reject your claim if you enter the incorrect code or fail to document the need for treatment.

The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) reported approximately 42% of denials result from insufficient prior authorization. According to MGMA’s survey, 7% of healthcare professionals reported that untimely claims filing results in higher denial rates.

Training your staff to verify patient information and recognize the insurance plans you accept will help you prevent these issues. Your staff members must also inform patients about their payment responsibility under the No Surprises Act. ChiroTouch’s coding engines and practice-wide syncing capabilities can help your staff prevent denials of insurance claims.

Features like CT Verify and CT ProClear can improve your insurance process; users enjoy an average claims acceptance rate of 98.06%. ChiroTouch’s touchscreen functionality and customizable macros allow your practice to maintain accurate, HIPAA-compliant documentation.

3. Missed Appointments

On average, chiropractors lose over $3,200 monthly because of missed appointments. As a whole, the American healthcare system loses $150 billion a year due to no-shows.

Digital communication tools like CT Engage can help your practice reduce missed appointments and foster stronger patient–practice connections. With CT Engage, you can also send personalized follow-up messages, a great way to check on a patient’s well-being and remind them to follow any post-treatment instructions you may have given them.

Patients can feel better supported in their care journey and provide valuable feedback to the practice. A personalized message on special occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries of patient care can show your patients that you care about them beyond just their chiropractic care.

4. IT Maintenance

The costs of maintaining and upgrading your practice’s IT infrastructure and software can be astronomical and significantly decrease the practice’s profitability. An IT service provider can charge up to $3,000 to upgrade a practice’s server to SQL standard with the likelihood of updating it again in a few years. If your practice experiences unplanned downtime, every minute can cost you up to 35% more lost revenue than scheduled downtime.

Cloud-based ChiroTouch eliminates the need for IT technicians to upgrade software and replace outgrown servers, resulting in substantial savings. ChiroTouch offers best-in-class security protocols and a 99.94% uptime guarantee. What’s more, your data is automatically backed up and secured, ensuring the privacy of your patients’ sensitive data.

You can also check uptime, billing and payment information, and electronic claims data from the last 90 days. By migrating to ChiroTouch, you avoid software downtime and bypass future hardware and software upgrade expenses.

ChiroTouch allows practices to scale up or down to meet changing demands while providing top-notch patient care. With ChiroTouch, your practice can save thousands of dollars a year while providing your patients with the highest level of service.

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5. Inventory Management

Poor inventory management can negatively impact profitability and patient satisfaction. Insufficient inventory can lead to missed opportunities to meet patient needs, resulting in lost revenue and patients seeking care elsewhere. Overstocking can negatively affect cash flow, take up storage space, and make inventory tracking difficult.

When you use ChiroTouch for inventory management, you can free up time and effort spent manually recording and tracking inventory, allowing for more focus on patient care and practice growth.

ChiroTouch’s cloud-based system will enable you to manage your inventory efficiently. As you sell items, your inventory levels are automatically updated. You can also set reorder levels and receive alerts when your stock runs low to ensure items are always available.

Migrate to ChiroTouch and Safeguard Your Practice

ChiroTouch offers chiropractic practices several advantages, such as workflow integration, increased profitability, and improved patient care.

The user-friendly interface and role-specific features of ChiroTouch enable you to run your practice to your exact needs. Streamlining insurance payments, scheduling, inventory, and software maintenance can improve patient satisfaction and cash flow management.