Quips, Tips, and Quotes – to Keep You Smiling all Month

There’s nothing like a good belly laugh to start the New Year off on the right foot.

To help, we thought we’d spread a little more holiday joy by collecting a few of our most-loved chiropractic jokes and favorite customer quotes. But that’s not all. We also pulled together a few ideas to consider as New Year resolutions – to help get your practice off to a great start.

Read on to enjoy tips, quips, and quotes to keep you smiling and help your practice operate smoothly all year.

Four Quips Because Laughter Is The Best Medicine

Question: Why do chiropractors make great interrogators?

Answer: Because their patients crack easily under pressure.

My friend told me to visit the chiropractor and I was skeptical at first but now I stand corrected.

I turn heads every time I go to work. But that makes sense, I'm a chiropractor.

Question: How many chiropractors does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Just one, but it takes six visits.

Four Cracking Tips to Keep You Practicing Happy All Year

Tip 1: Make the most of the Subjective section of your SOAP notes

The subjective section of your SOAP notes includes the patient’s description of their chief complaint, the history of their current medical condition, and how it affects their activities of daily living (ADLs). This history includes information such as when the complaint started, where it is located, the duration of the complaint, the severity of pain, and whether the discomfort radiates to other parts of the body.

If the patient i returning for a follow-up visit, document these notes as changes since their last session, including pain scale ratings and same/better/worse self-assessments. Each of these should include a brief description of how the patient arrived at this opinion. For example, the patient may report, “The pain is better than last time because I can sit longer without discomfort.”

Learn more about our new Subjective Patient Self-Check-in feature here.

Tip 2: Use the right CPT Codes simplifies billing and pass audits

Using the right CPT codes for billing (including the 97014 CPT code) can help you get reimbursed faster and support a more profitable practice. However, the opposite is also true — using the wrong codes can call for extensive rework and delay your payments.

At ChiroTouch, we’re helping chiropractors bill correctly the first time and save time in the process. With a streamlined billing workflow that simplifies insurance coding, our software takes the guesswork out of billing. As a holistic practice management platform, we help you connect patient health data to insurance and payment processes. Have all the information you need to easily pass audits — or avoid them altogether.

If you run a paper billing or cash practice, you can benefit from ChiroTouch Core’s integrated billing features and compliant, customizable macros. With ChiroTouch Core, you gain access to features that help with CMS-1500 and superbills, and customizable macros templates that let you complete compliant SOAP notes in seconds.

For larger practices or those that use electronic insurance billing, ChiroTouch Advanced provides additional features that help you streamline and integrate insurance processing, including CPT code usage, claims submission, and reimbursement. ChiroTouch Advanced gives you all the benefits of ChiroTouch Core, along with full claim cycle management, auto-updated claim status, and ERA auto-posting.

Tip 3:  Take time to review your HIPAA programs and compliance

When was the last time you reviewed your HIPAA program? Are all staff members trained on the program?

Having an up-to-date HIPAA program is critical for your practice.  Make sure that your knowledge is up to date on the required HIPAA Security Compliance Evaluation, HIPAA Security Risk Analysis, a Privacy and Security Risk Management policy, and have a Breach Notification policy in place.  Also, don’t forget about your Notice of Privacy Practices for your patients.

If you are participating in chiropractic insurance billing, make sure you have a solid compliance program in place.  There is no doubt that a records request or an audit that it will be a nerve-racking process.  However, having a process  to address these areas of compliance, you can have more confidence in the outcome of these types of investigations.

Maintaining compliance keeps you from losing potential revenue from  penalties and helps you bounce back quickly if faced with an audit. It may be tempting to loosen up those good practices when you’re not under the duress of a direct audit, but compliance is a critical part of mitigating risk in your practice. Aside from its importance in keeping us participating in the overall healthcare conversation, compliance keeps you from having to retrace steps, gather data, and prove conformance should your business come under question.

Tip 4: Improve your practice’s efficiency with automation

Like the idea of automation but not sure how to apply it in your practice? Cloud-based ChiroTouch can help make you more productive by doing the heavy lifting for you – there’s no need to spend hours figuring it out on your own.

Online appointment scheduling, for example, lets patients take a more active role in their healthcare, freeing up valuable time for your front desk. Workflows that work right out of the-gate guide providers and CAs through documentation in an intuitive manner and create narratives based on intake forms and self-check-in patient subjective questionnaires. And full claim cycle management electronically submits claims to payers, tracks progress, and automatically updates claim status.

Using cloud-based ChiroTouch ancillary products can take automation even further in your practice. You can send appointment reminders, prompt patients to leave online reviews, set up recurring payments, and avoid redundant data entry compared to using paper-based intake forms.