EPISODE 433: The Friction Free Patient Experience

Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Marketing Show with Dr. Kevin Christie, where we discuss the latest in marketing strategies, contact marketing, direct response marketing, and business development with some of the leading experts in the industry.

Dr. Kevin Christie: [00:00:00] Welcome to Modern Chiropractic Mastery. Today I'm bringing you a solo episode and we're gonna dive into one aspect of a topic that I really love and the, the topic that I really love is the. Patient experience and really optimizing that. And we've had quite a few different types of, uh, resources for that.

And, uh, we're gonna continue to, to really talk about it often because I think it's, uh, very important to, to do it. And I. I usually will categorize, categorize the patient experience into three core aspects. One is the clinical outcomes, right? Like that's the table stakes. You, you gotta have good clinical outcomes, otherwise you're just putting lipstick on a pig.

And so you, you gotta get clear on that. A lot of great resources for you to keep on getting better, uh, clinically. So that's, that's part one. That's the table stakes. Uh, two is gonna be service. And, and then three is gonna be hospitality. And then there's a, a really good book resource I recommend. And [00:01:00] that is, uh, Danny Meyer setting the table.

And he does talk about the difference between service and. Hospitality. And today we're gonna really dive into kind of a, an aspect of service, and it's gonna be the friction-free patient experience. We're gonna kind of go through a handful of things, uh, that you need to consider to try to remove as much friction as you possibly can.

Um, from the, the patient experience. And it's just something I'm always trying to, um, get better at, uh, help our clients out more with, whether it's our coaching clients or mastermind or CSA, uh, or some one-off things. And one of the things I want to, to kind of mention before, a little bit of housekeeping before we dive into the, the topic today is, uh, I am very excited that, uh, we're gonna be bringing MCM to Europe finally.

And so for right now. Just kind of save the date. It's uh, June 20th, 2026. So if [00:02:00] you're listening this as it comes out, this is July of 25. So a year from now, giving you plenty of notice. Uh, basically, uh, my, my family have had a, we've had a, uh, a goal since, uh, even pre kids, so like 2019. Uh, to, once we did have a family, uh, we wanted to be able to take, uh, six week immersion trips into different cities throughout the world.

Uh, probably mostly in Europe. Uh, there might be some stateside and then some others. Uh, but yeah, that's what we have been setting out to do and we're going to make it happen. We've, uh, we've kind of burned the boats as they say on that. We've put down a big deposit on a place for, for over a month in, uh, the TWA in England.

We're gonna start there, and then we'll move, move around different summers each summer. We're gonna try to do that and learn about the area and kind of immerse into that area. Not necessarily just eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner and vacationing the whole time. I'll be, I'll be working, but, um. Sparingly.[00:03:00]

But as we do these trips, we're going to, um, do a masterclass, uh, each year in that particular area that I am. And so I'm excited that we're gonna be collaborating with Dr. Chris Chippendale, who's out of the UK and, uh, just a, a great doc who's also helping chiropractors. And so him and I are gonna collaborate on a patient experience masterclass.

So again, that's June 20th, 2026. Um, just keep that date right now. We haven't done anything. Register. Him and I have a podcast coming up. We'll be more info on signing up for that. We're gonna be limiting it to probably 25, 30 people and we've already got. Uh, and over 10 people that have expressed interest from a Facebook, uh, post and also from , our US based mastermind group.

Uh, so yeah, we're, we're excited about that. We're gonna dive into the patient experience, so talk more about it, uh, when I have my episode with Chris. So I'll, I'll leave it. That, that for right now. That's June 20th, 2026. [00:04:00] Mark your calendar. We will be in London, so it'll be in London. We do know that. And we'd love to see you, especially our, uh, European audience that maybe I have not met yet.

And, uh, hopefully we'll see you there. Alright, so let's, let's dive in. Um. Resources. Uh, we've had Dr. Brandon Steele come and speak to our East Mastermind this past year on the patient experience. Uh, we've had, we have him speaking to our West Mastermind in 2026, so check that out if you're interested. We do have some spots in the West Mastermind group.

The east is filled. Uh, we've, we had, um. You know, we've had many guests on this podcast. Uh, we've, we've definitely, um, had one recently with Kathy Widener. So check out episode 4 28, and she talked a lot about the insurance aspect of that friction free patient experience. And today I'm gonna run down a.

What we would call the revenue cycle aspect [00:05:00] as well. Um, episode 2 35 was with Joey Coleman and that was, uh, never lose a customer again. That's more on the hospitality side. So again, kind of three buckets of the patient experience, the clinical outcomes, the service and the hospitality. I would say, uh, Joey was on his book is really good in his eight phases on the hospitality side of things and really providing a wow factor.

For that. I think that's, um, very, very important for sure.

Uh, another resource we had, we had Miles Boson of cash practice on the podcast and also he came and spoke to our West Mastermind on, on a lot of this, of removing the friction. And, you know, payment services is a big friction point and quite a bit of, uh, practices as we know.

And so I would say that the. Friction-free patient experience. We did kind of a checklist with our coaching group and really worked through it together. A lot of times in our [00:06:00] our calls, we, we add things, work together on making it a finished product, and it's a good learning experience for all of our members.

And I would say the friction-free patient experience is part of that service, but it's kind of like a. A really advanced version of service. It almost teeters into hospitality, but I wouldn't say it does. Uh, so I'm going, I am gonna leave it at that. Okay. And the way we would, would think about, I mean, think about when you.

Um, have to schedule a doctor's appointment for you or a kid or something. I mean, it's just full of so much friction. It's, you know, no one picks up the phone or it takes three days for the call back, or you can't schedule for four weeks, or, you know, it's, I mean, it's just a rigamarole. You go to orthopedist and.

And you go in there after three weeks of waiting you, and you wait in the waiting room for two hours and then they say, oh, you need an MRI. So then you gotta go get an [00:07:00] MRI. Then you gotta come back with the MR MRI disc. And then they say, oh, the M MRI's fine. And then they. Give you PT or or medication or whatever.

And so it took you six weeks to get any type of start to your care. And it's just, uh, so much friction involved and how do we reduce that? Like how do we make this really smooth? And we broke it down into, uh, three aspects. So basically the patient life cycle. And that's gonna be, uh, new patients. Like how do we make that new patient experience friction free?

And you know, when I say friction free, there's always gonna be a little bit of friction. But how do we really aim for that friction free? And there's gonna be existing patients and then inactive patients and, and. I'm just gonna kind of run down some things on the new patient that you want to consider.

Um, you know, you know your practice better than anybody and so I'm gonna recommend some things on here and I want to challenge you to look at it. 'cause a lot of you might say, eh, you know, my practice. I don't think we can do that. [00:08:00] But you probably can, and I probably could give you at least five to 10 examples of practices like yours that are able to do it.

Um, it might just take some teamwork and team effort to work through that. And then maybe there's just some things that aren't gonna work for your practice, that's okay. But ultimately what we find is practices that are, um, firing on all cylinders, um, most of the time, uh, with these can really have a great friction-free patient experience.

Yeah. All right. Number one is online scheduling. Uh, a vast majority of your patients nowadays, they, they don't wanna pick up the phone and call. Um, and a lot of times they want to schedule, you know, they, they hurt themselves and it's Sunday at 6:00 PM and they want to get on a bo. They want to know that they got an appointment.

And so that online scheduling is a great way, especially if you can make sure the technology is, um, very compatible, right? So if you've got an online scheduler, it should be con compatible with your EHR scheduling. So it, [00:09:00] uh, only available appointments show up to that and, and definitely. Um, I think online scheduling's really huge.

You, you know, there's gonna be, one of the things that Strategic Coach always talks about is the front stage backstage. So there's the front stage of what the patient sees in their or the customer, and there's the backstage of what makes it happen. And your backstage is gonna be the technology. Like you need to, you need to bring on a technology company that has online scheduling.

But then, yeah, there are gonna be some. Things that your team members need to handle with that as well. And so you wanna make sure that backstage is functioning well. And if your online scheduling is not compatible with your EHR, that's just one level of, uh, backstage that you have to worry about. And you may need to have your, your humans, um, doing a lot more with that.

Like we, we used to. Have online scheduling that was not compatible with the EHR and it, we just have, we'd have to go in there and block out time. And if someone, if we didn't block out the time enough and someone schedule on there, we'd have to give 'em a call. Like there was some, uh, definitely [00:10:00] some extra work we had to do, but we made it work.

Frankly, but now it's compatible and it's amazing, right? So having online scheduling reduces friction, you know, having your phones answered promptly, uh, and getting back to them quickly. Like, we'd love for your phones to be answered, uh, the majority of the time, Monday through Friday, uh, during business hours.

Uh, but there's gonna be times where it can't be picked up. But is the person checking the voicemails often and getting back to people like really promptly? I think that's a big one. Uh, too many times the, the. Phone tag situation is, is a problem. Uh, and I got coming down. Another aspect that can help mitigate that a little bit.

We'll get there. Uh, but can a new patient schedule within 48 hours? Right, or, or reactivate a patient. Can they schedule within 48 hours? That's a big friction point. If they can't, if they've got, um, you know, severe issue going on physically and they need to be seen and you can't see 'em for six days, like that's a problem and they're probably gonna go somewhere else.

And I know you may not have a solution for it right now, but it may mean you [00:11:00] need to hire someone. You may need a ca, you may need an, an associate at that point if you are so busy. This is a problem I see a lot with practices and we help them out a lot with this. Uh, you know, and, and we've seen a lot of results with it.

But if you're so busy and you can't see a patient for a week, but yet you can't afford. An associate, um, we've got some, we got some problems there, and we gotta figure that out, right? Um, that's just a harsh reality if you are busting at the seams, but there's not enough margin and it's a chronic problem in, in chiropractic now with reimbursement.

I get it. But there's ways around it and there's strategies. Um, but you should be able to schedule patients within 48 hours. Um, I, I highly recommend that. Moving on. And some of these, yeah, like I could spend an hour on each one of these topics and that's kind of what we do in our coaching calls is really work through that.

I think we spent 15 minutes on that one topic of. Uh, what did, what do you do if you can't [00:12:00] schedule someone out for 48 hours? Uh, or if you can't get someone in within 48 hours, uh, the next is having online paperwork. God, that saves a, a ton of time and, and really having a good system around with your team expressing how important it's for them to fill out the online paperwork, and if they don't, to show up to their appointment 15 minutes earlier.

Right. So online paperwork is huge. Short wait times, you know, you wanna make sure that you're, you're, they come for the new patient exam and they're not waiting in your, uh, reception area for 45 minutes, uh, or even 20 minutes or 30 minutes. So you want to try to limit. It's gonna happen occasionally, but short wait times.

If you can really peg that and get that down, that is. Big friction reducer for sure. Uh, something we recently did, and this kind of almost goes into the hospitality category, but I also think it is a friction free part, so I put it in here, which is a welcome video. So like, for my practice. It is just kind of weird.

We're, we're on North military trail, which is the, the north mil. The north part of military trail is the actual street. Like there's a south military [00:13:00] trail, like, as you can imagine. But then our building is weird is that we have two towers, um, and they're not connected internally. They are connected physically, uh, and there's a north and a south building, and we happen to be in the south building.

And so people know that our address is North Military Trail and they assume we're in the north building, but we're not. Uh, and there's a couple other things with parking and stuff. And so we did a, a nice two minute welcome video that served a purpose of like solving that and we kind of made light of it and how to get to our office easier.

And so we send this to every new patient. We, we two-way text to them. This video that they can watch prior to it. And we all, it also serves a purpose of meeting the, the two doctors, seeing our nice office, uh, talking about, you know, certain things like filling out online paperwork and then also our kind of model of care.

So we want them to understand and expect, you know, kind of get to know us a little bit before they come in. And so, consider a welcome video. We had it professionally done, brought in a videographer, made it really. First class, [00:14:00] in my opinion, and we send that to our, uh, patients. Okay. Now the next one is I'm gonna, I'm gonna dive into a little bit and, um, but not, not fully.

Uh, I did actually, um. You know, if you're interested, email me, Kevin, at modern dash.com. We actually do a monthly physical newsletter, um, where we put out, uh, fresh content on the newsletter. We actually mail it to you and it's nice and it's, um, it's, it's very helpful in my opinion, and we've gotten good feedback on that.

So email me if you want to be on that. We just need your. Your name and mailing address for your clinic, and we've been mailing that out to, uh, over 500 chiropractors now, and it's been been awesome. But I did put a, this month an article on this and the revenue cycle is essentially, you know, it's an insurance billing or, or the cash, your cash practice.

But you know, part, it's, it's, particularly in healthcare, it's the process of managing the. Financial aspect of patient care from initial contact to final [00:15:00] payment collection, it encompasses all administrative and clinical functions that contribute to capturing, managing, and collecting revenue for services provided.

Um, and there's really eight parts of this, and I'm not gonna dive too much into each one, but. Um, I'll, I'll run through it and then I'll kind of mention a couple snags that people have that impact the friction of a practice as you can imagine. But one is patient registration and scheduling. Two is insurance eligibility verification.

You gotta get that right and smooth charge capture right is what you do as a doctor. Claim submission. Payment posting, denial management, patient billing and collections, and in reporting and analysis, and six and seven denial management and, and in patient billing and collections where we get a lot of snags and that impacts the, uh, patient experience.

I mean, we've all, we've all fell victim to that where, uh, you do everything right and there's an insurance snafu and then that. Becomes an issue between the doctor or the practice and the patient. And it's frustrating. And so you, you gotta really dive into this [00:16:00] revenue cycle and that's where I want you to listen to that episode with Ka Widener, episode 4 28.

She dived into a lot of this, but you gotta get good at this. And this is that backstage, right? Like this backstage, if done great for the most part, never shows up to the front stage too much, right? There's no issues. When done bad, we get all kinds of issues and you frankly don't collect enough of your money that you should.

And so the revenue cycle, you gotta get really good at that to have a friction-free, uh, patient experience. Okay. Alright, moving on. Uh, scheduling the entire treatment plan out in advance, right? So you get a new patient comes in, you're gonna see 'em two times a week for four weeks, whatever it is. My recommendation is to have your team up front, have the bandwidth to schedule that entire treatment plan out.

We coach on this all the time. First, learn it from Jay Greenstein. And it's really helps with them getting the preferred days and times that works for them, so they're less likely to cancel or reschedule because if you're [00:17:00] so busy, right, some of the people can't fit people in and you're trying to schedule their appointment each time they come in and they, you know, and it's, it's Tuesday and you gotta see them on Thursday or Friday, but you're already booked up and you try to squeeze them in somewhere and it doesn't really work for them.

That's a problem. And so you want to get your patients, it might take a little bit of time upfront, but if you get the majority of new patients scheduling their treatment plans out, guess what happens when they get checked, when they're done with their treatment, they just, you know, they're done. Uh, which takes me like into the next one is having the payments stored on file.

Stored payments is amazing. We use that in our practice and so many of our patients, because they schedule their treatment plan out and they store their payment on there, they're basically waving goodbye when they check out. And they don't have to come check out anymore. So when you get that upfront on that new patient, it makes the rest of their visits over that month or whatever, a lot less.

Friction filled, right? They're not checking out and have to take their card out and pay and then schedule and figure out their calendar and doing all that. So definitely [00:18:00] recommend that. Okay? Um, and then, uh, you know, consider with your cash PR patients, maybe short, short treatment plan packages, you know, a 10 visits, payment plan options, things like that to remove the financial friction that might happen.

And, um, we could dive into whole thing there, but that's really what I would recommend with your, uh, new patients and then other existing patients. Uh, some of it's the same, you know, short wait time in the office for each visit. This other one here, I really believe is a big one, is two way texting service.

So I, we've gotten a point. We're the one we use through our computer, our front desk, like we're just communicating with our patients through text a lot now, uh, whether they're, you know, they're five minutes late, we say, Hey, Mary, just making sure you're making your 3:00 PM appointment. She texts right back, oh yeah, on my way, just in the parking lot.

Um, or. Um, we two-way text that welcome video. Uh, people two-way text us to schedule their visit. Hey, do you guys have anything [00:19:00] open today at four o'clock for an adjustment? Things like that. So we're two-way texting with our patients through this service quite a bit, right? We're really doing a lot with that.

Um, you know, existing patients, again, online scheduling helps payments stored on file. Um, seamless referrals. Like, do you, can you refer outta your practice really easy? You know, you get to point out, we use the, our CSA digital dashboard and we have all our providers, doctors, performance coaches, anybody. On there.

And if I need to send Mary to the orthopedist, I just Slack, message my front, say, Hey, can you get Dr so-and-so's information there? She goes on the dashboard and then copies the information up there, and then two-way text it to the patient Now for a seamless referral, which is great. Um, are your exercises that you give to your patients, are they accessed digitally somehow to where they have their home exercise program?

Um, you know, at their, at their fingertips, right. Is your staff and doctors [00:20:00] getting back to patients on their particular needs? Right? Are you sending 'em for an MRI and there's a snafu there. Um, is a, is a patient calling as a question and it's a long time. Patient of yours? Are you giving, getting back to them?

Maybe patient emails you something and you're doing that. Are you, is the, are the doctors in the staff doing a really good job of getting back to their patients when needed? Okay. I think that's a. That's a big one. Right? And with your inactive patients, it's a, it's a lot of, a lot of the same stuff. I think one of the things I've added to this is access to, to your health education.

Like are you creating a lot of good health education content that they're able to get through email and through social media and through different, uh, formats to stay updated on the latest in health. And, um, I think that's a big part of what you can do as a chiropractor to be more to them than just.

When they're in your practice and can you provide them with value even when they're not in your practice? And I [00:21:00] think that's important. So, um, that's most of what we went through in our coaching call on the friction-free patient experience. My challenge to you is to kind of do an audit. Of where the friction points are for your new patients and for your existing patients and, and tackle it diligently.

It'll go a long way if you get the clinical outcomes right. You get really good service and it's frictionless. And you start to then layer on really cool hospitality things, uh, you will have a remarkable patient experience and you will increase your referrals, uh, to your practice. And you can spend less money on other things like marketing, although you should be spending money on marketing, but really good practices that are doing well with this.

Spend some money on marketing but not have to spend a ton and get a ton of referrals with it. So I hope that was helpful for you. That is the friction free. Patient experience and uh, if you need more help with it, we challenge you to consider coaching and we feel like we're [00:22:00] doing a great job on this front as well as others.