Five Simple Ways to Keep Your Practice Growing in Hard Times

Highlights

• As a chiropractic practice owner, you must take steps to protect your business in case of an economic recession.
• Recession-proofing your practice means streamlining your workflows to optimize efficiency and patient care.
• Cloud-based ChiroTouch lets you automate billing, insurance, and scheduling and simplify documentation to help you succeed in any economic climate.

Two-thirds of economists predict an economic downturn in 2023. Due to high medical costs, independent chiropractic practices are not immune to the economic recession, with nearly 43% of Americans reporting that they or someone in their household have delayed or postponed healthcare.

When an economic recession strikes, you need to maximize your chiropractic practice’s efficiency through workflow integration and productivity tools to ensure patient retention and revenue growth. Learn how our cloud-based solution can help you survive future recessions and thrive in uncertain times.

Five Ways to Keep Your Practice Growing in Hard Times

A recession can impact your chiropractic business’s bottom line. With potentially fewer patients in your office, you need to maximize efficiency to provide streamlined patient care, reduce operating costs, and simplify billing and insurance to see optimized cash flow.

Integrating all workflows into your practice management software ensures your practice remains sustainable and profitable during challenging economic times. Cloud-based ChiroTouch gives you features like digital intake tools, integrated scheduling, and automated billing and insurance. These tools can help ensure your business doesn’t lose out on patient appointments or revenue in an economic downturn.

Here are a few best practices that can help you maximize profitability while meeting your patients’ needs during a recession.

1. Switch to a Digital Intake Process

Implementing digital intake processes for your patients helps you streamline your office procedures and minimize the cost of physical intake supplies like paper, pens, and folders. An average business with four employees spends approximately $92 per month on office supplies, adding up to over $1,000 annually.

Digital intake through a cloud-based system eliminates the need for extra expenses like storage cabinets, paper, printers, and ink, saving you money on office supplies. Many chiropractic clinics are switching to online digital intake and forms services to avoid manual errors, streamline the patient intake process, and reduce time spent on administrative paperwork tasks.

And patients are asking for it: 64% of patients prefer an online intake process over manual check-ins. They also prefer receiving important forms and notices through online portals over paper mail or handouts.

CT InForms is a digital intake forms service that allows you to simplify your patient intake and forms processes using cloud-based technology. Using CT InForms,

2.  Simplify Chiropractic Billing

Only 7% of practices attempt to obtain estimated co-pays and deductibles at the time of patient service. With cloud-based ChiroTouch, you can provide point-of-service payment options like online payments, credit cards, Apple Pay®, and Android Pay™ for patients to take care of their invoices and collect revenue faster.

Providing a range of payment options to your patients eases their financial burden and increases their chances of completing treatment. With one system, your staff doesn’t need multiple vendors and products to collect payments.

If your solo practice uses insurance billing, has automated insurance billing features to reduce the amount of time spent on billing tasks. Among these features are automated charge codes that connect to SOAP notes and automatic diagnosis codes to ensure accuracy when submitting claims to insurance companies.

3. Automate SOAP Notes

Chiropractors spend a lot of time recording accurate SOAP notes for each patient visit. Approximately 94% of chiropractors report creating SOAP notes for their patients several times daily.

However, manual documentation of SOAP notes can lead to errors. In fact, one in five chiropractors report that poorly written SOAP notes can negatively impact patient health outcomes.

The automated SOAP notes feature in ChiroTouch saves you time while documenting patient visits accurately. ChiroTouch’s charting section allows faster documentation by automatically populating patient information from check-ins into the subjective portion.

Customizable macro buttons and a same-as-last-time (SALT) function for frequently used text in SOAP notes help you generate Medicare-compliant SOAP notes in seconds, reducing the time you spend on documentation and saving your practice money.

{{newsletter}}

4. Reduce Claims Denials

Timely claims payment is essential to running a successful chiropractic practice and can be the difference between thriving or falling behind in an economic downturn. Automating your claims process can help you achieve a claim acceptance rate of 98.06%, improving your practice’s cash flow and increasing revenue.

Cloud-based ChiroTouch features an auto coding engine that syncs with the whole practice, reducing errors and the need for redundant data entry processes. The software also uses customizable macros to help you enter the correct CPT codes at the time of treatment, which update across the platform, preventing manual coding mistakes.

Using allows you track the entire claims process from beginning to end, ensuring that your claims are approved quickly. These claims are run through an automated clearinghouse to ensure timely and accurate processing.

5. Integrate Scheduling

Integrated scheduling ensures your practice performs well in all economic conditions. Keeping your appointment book full and minimizing no-shows can improve your bottom line.

A 2020 review on the impact of no-shows on healthcare providers found that a 12% no-show rate in one organization led to an annual loss of $89,107. The study also found that reducing this rate by just 5% could increase revenue by $51,769.

With ChiroTouch, you benefit from automated scheduling that saves your staff time and reduces overhead costs. Your patients can book and cancel appointments online, allowing them to reschedule rather than calling to set up another appointment. This makes booking with your practice convenient, boosting patient numbers and helping you receive excellent feedback.

ChiroTouch’s integrated appointment calendar syncs with the rest of the platform, allowing your staff to easily view the practice schedule and see which patients have checked in and where they are in their session. It also uses a color-coded feature by appointment type and sends automatic patient alerts at various points during the patient journey, so you don’t miss a patient and lose out on a referral.

Switch and Save Time, Resource, and Money

To see cloud-based ChiroTouch first-hand, schedule a demo with a ChiroTouch Specialist. See how our cloud solutions can help you run your practice more efficiently.