EPISODE 454: MCM Student Business Show

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] All right. Excited to have Dr. Tim Bertlesman on the, uh, podcast second time. Second time has been on, it's been a couple years though, and we're gonna dive into a fresh topic of some AI adoption and, and take it all the way into what it's looking like from an EHR standpoint. But before we dive into that, doc, what's, uh, new in your world the last couple years?

What are you excited about?

Tim Bertelsman: Uh, well, excited about where our profession's going. You know, a lot of data that comes out that continues to show that we're doing a really good job at taking care of our patients and keeping 'em satisfied. Getting on track for the future of healthcare and, and today's healthcare, um, and trying to incorporate that into tools that we use every day.

So we've got the, the EHR rolling, which has taken a little bit of our time in the last couple of years.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah, yeah. No, it's, uh, it's always refreshing to hear someone that's excited about the profession and, and where we're going. I try to hang out with those folks more than, uh, the, the ones that are always pessimistic about it.

I think, um, if we were to interview someone from 19 80, [00:01:00] 19 90, 2000, 2010, you'd always find people that were on the pessimistic side of the profession, and you'd always find people on the optimistic side. And I'd, I'd like to look at the optimistic side, right.

Tim Bertelsman: Yeah. I, I really think, I mean, we can all be optimistic and, and think positively about things, but I think that there's a lot of reasons why we have optimism that mm-hmm.

The future of healthcare really means it's going to be who provides the best outcomes and has the highest levels of patient satisfaction. And there's not a single person, regardless of where you stand on that optimistic spectrum, that's a chiropractor that doesn't believe we can do those two things better than most anybody else.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. And I think that's the thing that's exciting now, compared to, you know, maybe 30 years ago, 25 years ago, um, not as much research was out there showing how really good we are, right?

Tim Bertelsman: Exactly. Now, uh, now fortunately, we have a lot of people that are giving us data and really that's, that's the future.

That whoever owns the data and whoever can make best use of that data is going [00:02:00] to win the game. And so we're, we're in a good spot in our profession. We need to get stronger. With using that data to let people know what we're actually accomplishing. If the whole world could see what happened in your practice on a daily basis, chiropractic wouldn't have a, a shortage of patients.

We've had a shortage of capacity for getting those patients into our office.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah, it's, it's so true. And obviously there's, there's no doubt we're in a, you know, it's 2025 coming in on 2026 before we know it, and there's a lot of uncertainty with, uh, a, a lot of things. There's always uncertainty, but I think, you know, we're at definitely at a ref, kind of a inflection point here with, with ai, and I know that's gonna be a big part of what we, we talk about.

And so there's. You know, it's understandable that people have a little bit of unease, uh, around it. Um, maybe there's been other times that it's been like that, that is related to the profession. Obviously there's been, uh, challenging times not related to, to the profession or, uh, not impacting the [00:03:00] profession so much.

But, you know, AI is gonna have some, some impact. And, uh, I'd, I'd love to start out with some of your ideas around folks, no matter, you know, whether they're, I just got off. Actually before this, uh, a call with some students talking about chiropractic business. Right. And one of the things I said is like, you guys are coming right out and AI is here, whereas a lot of us are trying to figure it out.

Right. And, um, so whether it's a student 10 years, in, 20 years, in 40 years in, what are some of your thoughts on, on adoption of, of AI into, into their practice, into chiropractic?

Tim Bertelsman: Yeah, I, I think, um, I, you know, one of the things that really inspired me to take a deeper look at this is I was on a treadmill and watching a, a YouTube video.

And it was a bunch of leaders in business. Um, and they were talking about AI adoption. This was probably about a year ago. Mm-hmm. And, uh, the, um, the person, the head of Alphabet said that by the end of [00:04:00] this decade, there's gonna be two types of companies, those that adopt AI successfully and those that are out of business.

And every single leader in the background of all these other companies was shaking their head yes. To that statement, and it was just profound realizing that, okay, these people know something that's coming down the pipe. We better take a closer look at this. And like everybody, you know, I think we all have concerns that we think, you know, what's AI going to do?

How do we control it? How do we govern it? Is it going to take over our world? Is it going to eliminate jobs? And I think that once we can get past that fear. Um, of realizing that no AI isn't going to take over anybody's world. That AI is not some fancy robot that's walking around doing things on its own.

AI is something that we have to inspire. We have to have the creativity, we have to tell it what to do, and we have to edit what it does in order to make it useful. So it's just doing the things that we don't like to do and doing them much faster that the pro, the ability for it to process data and do meaningful.

Things, [00:05:00] and there's a lot of people who say, I don't wanna use ai, but they do that they, they're using Google Maps or ways to navigate to their, uh, vacation. They, they don't like getting garbage in their Gmail account, so they're using filtering or they wanna see what movie to watch tonight. So Netflix or YouTube tells them, you know, what might be a good recommendation.

All of those things are ai and they're not, not some fancy robot. They're just tools that make our lives better. If we can use that in our profession responsibly to help improve our relationships, not replace the relationships with a computer, with a robot, but to enhance those relationships, enhance our care, I think we'll win.

And I think that our profession has to, um, be cognizant of what are the risks, but also be opportunistic to seize the opportunities that are out there.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. It's, it's human plus ai. You know, like one of the things on a, on a marketing side that I do, um. And, and it's that human plus AI is, a lot of times I take a podcast interview like this [00:06:00] and I get the transcript from it.

I run it through script, get the, so that's where I get the transcript. And then I, uh, will run that through one of the, the ais and I'm say, okay, write me a. 750 to a thousand word blog based off of this transcript. So it's your information to mine, the conversation we're having and it develops it. Then I run it through Grammarly, which also uses AI and makes sure it, it's checked and I then I run through it and removes certain things and adds certain things and, and do it.

And then it becomes an email that we send out. Right. And it's, it's my information, your information. And we're just using that leverage of, of the AI to make it something that's really good versus I'm not going into chat GBT and say, Hey, write me a blog email, you know, whatever. And it just comes out like that.

And so I think that's just one example where, um, you know, you, you're gonna be able to use it, but it's still the essence of, [00:07:00] of us, of our information and our, and our prompting.

Tim Bertelsman: So, yeah, it's, it's an amplifier of your creativity that it couldn't have done any of those things by itself, but with your input and with your guidance, it created something great.

And realistically, how long did it used to take you to do those things? And how long does it take you now? I know

Dr. Kevin Christie: it's, it's, it's eyeopening. 'cause if I was gonna write a really good. Thousand word blog, and I had the idea of what I wanted to write about. You know, I'm sitting there, I'm spending a, an hour and a half on outlining what I want to do, you know, like it is, it's, it's definitely a handful of hours that do a good one.

Tim Bertelsman: Absolutely. Yeah. 6, 6, 7, 8 hours that it seems like you should be able to write a blog in no time. But having written plenty of them, it's, it's a massive investment that you know that in order to make it count, it's, and, you know, we, we can't, um, I'm not using AI to, to write any blogs at this point in time.

It still takes me four, but those three agonizing hours of going through it [00:08:00] and rewriting this paragraph and fixing this sentence, that part's gone. Um, that, that, those are the things that can be cleaned up really quickly.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. Yeah. I, I wrote a book that Parker had published back in 20, I wrote it in 2019.

Came out in 2020, um, doing it right. Modern chiropractic marketing. God, what a labor of love. That was. It was good book too. It was fun. When, uh, the editor brought it back to me, I was like, oh, wow. My, my grammar not great.

Tim Bertelsman: This was pre Grammarly.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yes, it was. But um, all right. So, you know, with, with the AI adoption, you know, it's not gonna be complete, taken over the world and everything like that.

What do you think the essence of the AI adoption will be?

Tim Bertelsman: Oh, um, I, I'm, I am a believer in that first statement that businesses will either learn to use it, uh, or, or be outta business because somebody in your profession will learn to use it. That if we look at adoption of, of any [00:09:00] technology. Um, the telephone, it took them 50 years to get to 50 million users.

A computer took 14 years to get to 50 million users. The internet took seven years to get to 50 million users. Jet GPT took two months to get to a hundred million users. So the speed of adoption is, is rapid. The speed of meaningful utilization may be a little bit slower, but like anything, um, we didn't get to be good, um, chiropractors or athletes or business people or anything without practice.

And the same thing's true of the ai. So I think it's just dependent upon how quickly can people practice to, to get good at it and realize what are their use cases? Where do they find great value? Where do they find that it's, you know, neutral? And identifying where are the things that it's negative, that it's better not to use it for certain things.

Dr. Kevin Christie: That makes sense. And then, um, as far as that, like getting better at these things and stuff like that, what are some of your thoughts on, because a lot of people talk about the, the [00:10:00] prompting or prompt engineering. What are some of your thoughts and insights on, on that and improving?

Tim Bertelsman: Yeah, it, you know, if I could tell my kids one thing, um, it would be to learn to make efficient prompts.

So prompt is just the words that you put into that chat box. That, and all of us have used chat, GPT, or Clot or Gemini. You just see a, a, a chat box, just like you would if you did a Google search. And then you get to tell it to do something. So that's where the prompt goes. And the prompt's, just the instructions I would tell my kids to, to do better, uh, prompts.

Um, that initially we'll use it for emails, write this email so that it sounds friendlier, help me write address code for my office. Um, and one of the, one of the, um, things that we found great value is. Is thinking about what could we do to help summarize a note, like a voice to chart type of process? So we know that documentation's the number one hassle in a chiropractic practice.

We surveyed hundreds of evidence-based dcs above [00:11:00] billing and collections. The number one hassle is taking notes. So you think about how can we do something to make that a little bit more efficient, that a quarter. Of a provider's day is spent on notes and we don't get paid for notes, but we also don't get paid without them.

Yeah. Um, so, uh, I use chat GPT and, and again, a, a compliant version where there's not data sharing, um, to say, let's make a prompt. And I started out with the prompt of summarize this transcript into a soap note. Well, it was garbage. That it doesn't work really well. So then continually refining that. Um, and we spent six months just, you know, using it and re and, and then reviewing it and then figuring out what went wrong and refining it, and then using it in practice until we had a prompt.

That is, is really good. It's, um, it, it's a little bit like a slot machine, you know, you pull it except good things come up every time and so it's kind of fun to see. Just turning it on at the beginning of a visit and listening to, uh, the patient and then watching what comes up. [00:12:00] And there, there are times that I'm amazed.

I'm like, yeah, they did say that, didn't they? That when I'd go to do the note, I would've never remembered that they talked about this nuance of their problem. But it catches all those things. Um, and so I think that's more of the evolution of it, but that just comes through the prompt engineering, learning how to make a prompt, and then seeing the magic happen in, in the end of, uh, getting the prompt, testing it, identifying the weaknesses, and then retesting it.

And really the core of any prompt, um, it would be to, um, number one, tell the, tell the LLM, the Gemini or, or chat GPT. Who you want it to be. Imagine that you could have any expert in the world standing in front of you. So do you want, you want a master chef in front of you 'cause you'd like it to make a recipe with the six things you have in your fridge?

Or would you like a social media marketing expert standing in front of you because you wanna write some posts and then tell it about the task that you want to do, the details, uh, what kind of outputs you have. And then asking you to ask questions is, I think one of the big things. So you define the task.[00:13:00]

I want you to act like a social media expert and design a marketing plan to increase my social media conversions for for my chiropractic office. And then what kind of persona do you have? So more specific, the better, and write this toward a sixth grade audience and write it in a casual tone is I'm talking to a friend.

And then what's the output format that you want? Do you want a bullet list? Do you want a spreadsheet? Uh, do you want a PDF? And then if you can give it specific examples, like if you, uh, routinely write social media posts, give it four examples of how you write that it knows your voice. It knows how long you'd like the, the social media post to be.

And then I think the most important part of any prompt, especially a more sophisticated prompt, is to ask it, to ask questions. So before you start, what specific questions can I answer that would help you provide a more tailored solution to this problem? And that's where the real uh, benefit comes in.

It'll ask you five or six questions like, oh, I should have told it to do that. I should have told it to do [00:14:00] that. Well, it knows what you should have told it to do, and then you'll get a meaningful output that you can use and, and then refine. If you don't like it, say. No, I asked for a sixth grade reading level.

If you hadn't specified that, it came out as an expert level. So just learning how to make those prompts and use those prompts and then practice them after you, after you start seeing one use, you'll see more uses. It'll go from just writing an email to then writing office policies. And I think one of the best, uh, utilizations is just a brainstorming partner that if you ever wished, I wish I had a partner, which I wish all the time, I wish I had a, a meaningful, useful partner in my businesses.

Okay. Which I don't, I just have Brandon, and if I did have that meaningful partner and could ask it questions, what would I ask it? And, and just asking it those sort of questions. And you not, can't necessarily trust every answer that it gives you as though it's legal advice or, uh, state law or HIPAA compliant advice.

But you can certainly get a lot of ideas out of it and say, well, think about this, or think about this, or Here's what I would recommend. And it really [00:15:00] inspires thought. And then you can, you can brainstorm with it. And, um, develop a, a lot of ideas very quickly.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah, I, I agree. And then I'd love to ask a question and what your thoughts on it are is, is, you know, the doctor using it as a companion on the clinical decision making of things.

Uh, maybe it's uploading a MRI report that's got stuff on it and coming out with the best practices from their treatment or referrals out and, and. Do. Do you think at this point the patient looks at it as a positive, potentially the doctor, it's Doctor plus ai, or do you think they're, the patient isn't ready, ready to know that the doctor might be using AI for clinical, uh, decision making and recommendations?

Tim Bertelsman: Uh, that's a great question. It probably depends on the patient's familiarity. Yeah. That if a patient has a significant fear of it, they probably won't trust the ai and then they think that their information's going to be all of a sudden used as some sort of extortion plot against them at some point.

Yeah. Uh, or [00:16:00] any other conspiracy theory. Um, I, I think if the patient is comfortable with it, that they would appreciate that. That if they realize that this is just a database is all it is, and it's just pulling from the knowledge of the world, and if I could, uh, harness the world's knowledge to help me solve your problem, would you like me to do that?

And I'm still going to use my clinical discretion that I'm not going to just follow blindly, the advice of any ai. I'm not gonna trust any of the advice it gives me. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna vet it with my knowledge. So there's a couple of things that AI is never gonna replace. It's never gonna replace our hands that plumbers and chiropractors have very little risk of an AI tool ever replacing them.

But fortunately, chiropractors have a very realistic possibility of having AI help them. And I think that our patients can appreciate that too, that, look, I'm still in charge of the decisions, but if I could have a a little bit of clinical decision support in this process. That's gonna help me and it's gonna help you.

It helps me be a better doctor, and you get better outcomes, and that's why you're here. [00:17:00]

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah, we had a one not that long ago, and we used the version that's like the deep research, um, which I've, I found useful for this situation. But the person was concerned about shockwave and something that they had done surgically and, and, and, and.

We knew it was not a contraindication, but we ran it through AI looked, you know, and then printed it out, gave it to him. He's like, look, this is deep research. We explained the difference between deep research and maybe not deep research, and then where the, the, the references were coming from and, and gave it to him.

And, and then he felt pretty good about what that spit out as far as Okay. Yeah. It's not a contraindication, you know?

Tim Bertelsman: Yeah. Putting, putting his mind at ease as to there's, uh, there's something that has a little bit of a, a background to it.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah, exactly. And tried to explain to him and, you know, and, and he took, he, he, he, he liked it.

Right. So I just wanted to ask that question. Um, one of the things I'm excited about just in general, is I feel like we've, you know, you, you go through these different phases of [00:18:00] of, of where we're at. You know, there are two things I would say that's happened over the last 15, 20 years that's bogged chiropractors down.

And you already mentioned one, which is. Uh, EHRs and notes. Uh, you know, if it was 1993, you just scribbled some lines on a piece of paper and your notes were done right? And then obviously we had to be compliant and do all that, and that's bogged people down. And I would also say the second thing. Is that a lot of chiropractors have felt, especially over the last 10 years, that they had to create so much content marketing and do all these things to try to compete in their communities.

And so they, we found a lot of chiropractors getting bogged down with both, uh, notes and, uh, trying to be a marketer and create content to, to build their practice. And then what gets, uh, thrown, uh, to the wayside, unfortunately, is a, they're. Uh, sanity, uh, b sometimes their, [00:19:00] um, concentration on patient care or focus on patient care.

And then sometimes, uh, you know, their family, uh, EHR notes and, and having to do, create content and all that. It, it, it's almost like three different jobs and into one. And I think we've, we've hit our, um. The, the worst it's ever gonna be in those situations. And I'm actually excited that I think, um, the, the AI leveraging AI is going to allow chiropractors to, uh, have really good marketing.

I. Without them breaking their backs doing it. And also the EHR note system situation's gonna be a whole lot better and that's gonna get a lot easier. And I'm gonna have you speak to that in a minute. Um, and so what that's gonna then do when done right is now free up that. Chiropractor to really be able to focus on patient care, which is the, the table stakes.

That's why we're all here. And it will free them up to [00:20:00] maybe do more in-person human connection marketing, getting out in the community and having time to actually, um, get out there and meet people. And I think that's gonna. Uh, come at a, at a increased premium to be able to be in person for certain things because you won't be bogged down.

And so I think we got a really good scenario. Um, if we leverage this AI appropriately, take a little bit time. I know there's gonna be a learning curve. You know, it's gonna add another layer, but you're gonna get really good at, it's gonna free you up. And so that's my, my long-winded excitement there. But I want you to kind of.

Tease out to, to our listener here, what you think the future is of of EHR and AI and how it might help with soap notes and that type of stuff.

Tim Bertelsman: Yeah, uh, I'd love to do that. Um, what you said really resonated. I remember in practice, you know, you see your 10 patients a day and you're really busy and, and then you do some marketing, um, and you get patients.

So you turn the faucet on and then you [00:21:00] get busy in practice, which means you have more notes to do and more things to, to, to manage. So you take your foot off the marketing gas pedal, and then when you take your foot off the marketing gas pedal, the good news is you have more time to market because you're not.

As many patients. So it's a constant, uh, hitting the capacity button in either marketing or the capacity, uh, stop point in, in clinical, uh, capacity. And the more that you know, I always think about using the a ED, the automate, eliminate and delegate that. What can I automate in my marketing or patient care and what can't I, what can I eliminate and what can I delegate?

So I think that. One of the things that they, that a good EHR can do is determining what can be automated in these processes. That all the things that we used to do, like letting patients set up appointments. They can do that online. We can send out automated appointment reminders and follow up calls. If they miss their appointment, we can send them a reminder saying, you missed your appointment.

I have another one next Tuesday at three. Do you want that one? [00:22:00] Uh, the automations among, uh, uh, for billing and insurance verification, so pre insurance verification and, um, automated ERA uploads, those are the things that we've taken a lot of time to build in the system to say, what can we automate in these processes?

And then obviously the documentation, which is the number one hassle and by far what we've put our most energy into. Uh, how do we make a meaningful note that can get you paid and keep you paid? But not take all day to do that right now. So many EHRs in the medical field just puke out a note and you don't know if the patient had an auto accident or, or hemorrhoids.

It all looks the same and it's just this, this pile of garbage and getting to the three sentences that are different or a challenge. So we wanted to do something different. Um, our EHR, um, we, we used something called a chief complaint survey to collect patient data. So before the patient ever comes in, you're able to go through an O-P-P-Q-S-T.

And this isn't just a stock series of questions, it's not a template. We spent six months refining [00:23:00] this system as to what's the next question, if this is positive or negative. And our coders put together a good experience that you can text or email to patient. So before the patient ever walks in the room.

My entire O-P-P-Q-R-S-T has done. I ask a couple of clarifying questions like, I see on your medical history you had, uh, diabetes. Are you seeing your doctor for that? Is it under control? Any symptoms from that? Great. We can clarify those things, but my consult has dropped from 10 or 15 minutes, uh, down to two or three minutes of clarifying questions, and then the voice to chart of just capturing those details.

I don't even have to write that down, that the patient is taking metformin and it's been under control for four years. If they, if they mention it during the visit, it shows up in the note, so that's really taken the subjective time down. Then the one thing that we are most excited about is we have a patent pending process that we kind of flip the way a soap note is taken, that we all do similar things for similar diagnoses, that if you have a patient with carpal tunnel syndrome, you're probably gonna do LANs test and [00:24:00] reverse LANs and carpal compression, and a median nerve tension test and rule out the cervical spine.

You probably know that you're gonna do some myo fascial release of the wrist flexors and you're gonna mobilize their wrist and elbow and their neck. You're going to give them some stretching and exercises and you'll do nerve nerve mobilization. Maybe you'll do some laser or shockwave as well. Whatever your protocol is.

Your protocol. And typically it's gonna be pretty similar for all carpal tunnel diagnoses with a slight modifications. So what we do is we let the provider put in the diagnosis because when you see the patient you, you go through the subjective. And then you put your hands on the patient to assess them, keep your hands on the patient to treat them, and then go pick up your pen and do the note.

Well, by the time you know the note, you know the diagnosis and if you know the diagnosis, you know what tests you probably did for those series of diagnoses and you know what treatments you did, and you know what patient home advice you're going to give. So once you drop, drop in the diagnosis, you just modify a couple of factors and your initial note is really customized to that patient, to what you [00:25:00] do and is done very quickly with all the details of what's positive and what's negative.

Um, and I think that's what we're most, most excited about as far as the automation, our notes are. Are, um, very, very, very quick and, and very good. So it's made the toughest part of my job, the easiest part of my job. Uh, and then from there we, you know, we certainly want to collect data because again, whoever owns the data is who's going to own the future.

So we want. Uh, homogenized data. You can't just have, you know, data in random formats and, but if we have homogenized data saying, because we have a chief complaint survey, we can collect, you know, what was the age? What was the character of pain? It wasn't the patient's own terms. It, it was, you know, they had 20 choices for what it was, but it's one of those.

So by taking those homogenized data, we can really define what are the predictors for di diseases and conditions that we treat? What are the most effective treatments based upon what you did? And once we have that, we can use those and put [00:26:00] them into the data lakes, make them publishable insights and truly elevate our profession.

And that's, that's the, the primary goal of the whole project, is to see our profession become that undeniable best choice for patients and payers. We have to make chiropractors more efficient and arm them with the most potent tools. Whoever has the best tools is gonna have the best outcomes and win the game.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. No, I love that. And it's gonna be. It's gonna be exciting for the chiropractor too, once they can free this up. I've, I've experienced where I've coached some, some chiropractors and I get down to the root of it and the fact that they're bogged down and behind on their notes and they've got 70 notes that they haven't done yet.

It almost subconsciously sometimes, I mean consciously, but it definitely sub subconsciously will. Prevent them from growing their practice because like you mentioned earlier, uh, you know, it's like they can't imagine having more new patients or more office visits because they don't want to deal with the notes of it.

Have you, have you seen that before where it kind of, it blocks [00:27:00] them subconsciously from growing just the note pile up. Well, I, I've seen it personally

Tim Bertelsman: exactly when I started in practice. Yeah. Uh, we had paper charts, uh, and then we went and got to a paperless EHR, which means we had more paper than we ever had before.

Uh, and anytime that I would, you know, I just, I, I just got rid of my office. Now I'm over here at Cairo op, uh, all except eight hours a week. I still wanna stay in practice to understand practice that if you're designing an EHR for chiropractors, you gotta be one. Yeah. Um, so I'm gonna continue practicing those eight hours, but I got rid of my office.

Desk. We brought another chiropractor in and my desk has this little, um, spot on it that the sun has not darkened and it's where the charts had sat its whole life and however tall that tower was, was the inversely proportionate to how many new patients were going to be coming in that week? Yeah. When you get behind the, the universe knows.

And so when you get busier, you bump that capacity limit and all of a sudden the new patient faucet slows down.

Dr. Kevin Christie: It does. And then even from your staff, like, um. [00:28:00] I'll kind of go a roundabout way here. The Scheduling Institute, they work a lot with Front Desk and they have a whole thing about incentivizing the front desk on new patients because one of the things we fail to realize is that.

A lot of times our, our front desk dreads more new patients because it's usually more work for them. Right. But if you were to incentivize them financially, they would be okay with the extra work because they see money attached to it and they inherently, you know, they put more effort into getting, oh, Sally mentions her son needs to get come in and he makes sure the sun comes in.

Right. Um, and I think it's the same way as if you have a, a system and it's using ai. That makes that new patient experience way easier for not only the patient, but also the front desk. Then they're not gonna look at going from 25 new patients to 50 new patients in a month as a big deal. Whereas if, if it's [00:29:00] cumbersome for that new patient on both the patient and the front desk, that can be a block there too.

Is that something that you've, you've noticed?

Tim Bertelsman: A hundred percent that, yeah, that, that, um, vibe that the front desk is getting off when, when somebody calls or when somebody comes through the office is very perceptible and a hundred percent that if the front desk isn't on board, if all the raindrops and your, your cloud are not moving the same direction, um, you, you're, you're not gonna have much power behind that, that channel.

So getting the staff on board, and fortunately that's where AI can really come into play. And automations can come into play, that it's hard to automate the things that you and I do in a treatment room. Yeah, you can enhance the relationship, you can enhance your decision making ability, but you can't really change how we're touching patients and impacting them and, and.

You can at a staff level though, that so many of their tasks that they don't like anyway, they don't love answering the phone. They don't love rescheduling appointments. They don't love taking payments. [00:30:00] They don't love collecting intake forms and insurance data and taking pictures of driver's licenses.

Those are things that, that they would love to automate too. So. That's one of our goals is to, you know, continue to make care, feel more human, not more technical, but take away those things that just are not contributing to that human relationship. Yeah. And automate those processes.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah, I love it. I think there's a world where you can increase your volume of patients, so obviously revenue and profits, you can, um, increase your.

Free time as a doctor and you're not using your Tuesday afternoons that are off to do notes. Instead, you're maybe spending time with the kids or on the golf course or going to the gym, something like that. Uh, and I think you can get, you can increase your energy and, and enthusiasm around being a chiropractor.

Tim Bertelsman: Yeah, it's amazing what a little bit of, of time and taking away those, those tough tasks that we're all empowered by certain things and we're all drained by certain things. And most of us, [00:31:00] especially, you know, your audience could do most anything that they're given any task. But the things that empower them, um, are giving energy.

The things that are. That are taxing to them are draining the capacity to do that. And most of these things that are able to be automated are the things that are draining us anyway. None of us went into the profession so that we could get better at processing paperwork. Uh, we went into the profession to be able to use our minds and our hands to help heal people and to be that authority in the community.

And I think that's where technology and automations can help move us more quickly to make us feel more empowered at the end of the day. While having seen twice as much and hopefully cutting our overhead in half because so many of the things that used to take manpower now don't.

Dr. Kevin Christie: And I think that goes back to why you're probably excited, uh, for the profession in the future amongst other things, is that I do, I I, I do agree.

I think this is, you know, as it goes, is gonna be that thing that gets, 'cause a lot of people go back to, oh, I wish I was back in the nineties [00:32:00] with chiropractic, you know, this, that, and the other thing is like, this could be, not that it's gonna go back to the nineties and we're probably not gonna get reimbursed by the insurances like we did back then, but.

We can decrease overhead reasonably, we can free ourselves up. And if, I think if you take that, if you, if you leave here with one thing, I would probably sit down and I would jot down all the things I hate doing in practice and then start to look at where could this, where could AI do it? And just start tackling that.

Have you, have you run through any type of audits like that of like a, I hate this audit.

Tim Bertelsman: Oh yeah. Time audits and we, we do those, uh, here on the Cairo upside. Having, having everybody say, what are you doing throughout the day? And it's no fun to write that down to say, okay, I did, uh, I processed insurance claims and then I made phone calls.

Uh, but really looking at that and then, yeah, going through that, a ED saying what could be automated, what could be eliminated, what could be delegated in this process, and [00:33:00] determining who's supposed to do each of those things, and then finding the tools to help make, make that happen. And starting with the low hanging fruit, that it doesn't have to be some comprehensive plan that radically changes your world.

Um, you, you don't want to start with projects to boil the ocean. Start with projects that solve your biggest problem. Find, find out what that is, what's sucking up most of your time, and what's one solution that you can do right now to help, help ease that process? Can you just get rid of that task? Can you have somebody else do that task?

Or can you find a, a tool that automates that task?

Dr. Kevin Christie: I'm gonna add a tagline to your a ED, the defibrillator of your practice,

Tim Bertelsman: of your life.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Really breathe some energy into that thing, right? Get it, get it. I love it. Yeah. Alive. That's why you're the

Tim Bertelsman: marketing guy.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Well, Tim, this has been, uh, this has been fun.

Is there anything I, I didn't ask or anything that you, any other, uh, insights for the chiropractor in this as we navigate this?

Tim Bertelsman: Um, I, I think just being willing to embrace that change that [00:34:00] I always think of. My father-in-law who is a painter and he's gone now, but he, uh, said, you know, when airless sprayers came out, by the way, we sprayed this, Brandon and I painted this office, um, and it's the Cairo op office when we moved into it.

Um, and so we got an airless sprayer and we spit out 15 gallons of paint in about three hours. And so obviously far quicker than a guy with a roller. Yeah, especially these two guys with the roller. And he thought how, when they came out there was a lot of concern of people saying, I'm not gonna use a a, an airless sprayer because it's gonna take our job away.

We use brushes and rollers. And he said that those people who didn't adopt no longer got jobs because you could do it so much faster and so much less expensive. And people who did adopt didn't get slower or didn't go out of business. They had more business. In the same way that iPhones didn't replace computers, and technology is not going to replace us that we're here, but technology can help us deliver those hyper-personalized experiences, and that's gonna mean happier [00:35:00] patients, it's gonna mean better outcomes, uh, if we can co cut costs by eliminating those, uh, repetitive tasks that nobody enjoys anyway.

We're good. So in the future, those automations, including AI, can help us make better decisions, can help us do what we're here for, and give us more time for what, what we're not, uh, we're not getting enough of now. So I would say just be willing to adopt that. Keeping an open mindset and picking one task and, and trying to make it happen and realizing.

Uh, that our profession is in a tremendous spot that no one delivers outcomes like we do. No one delivers patient satisfaction. Our patient satisfaction survey that we sent out to all of our providers, so now we have 3000 providers in 16 countries. We had almost a million, um, not encounters, but a million different presentations.

So somebody comes in with carpal tunnel syndrome, that's one presentation for their whole course of care. We see that, um, the satisfaction of that is that [00:36:00] 99% of chiropractic patients are satisfied somewhere between good and excellent, that it's less than 1% that considered their care fair or poor, which is absolutely unbelievable.

97% likelihood to refer to that provider in the future. Now we're getting tremendous outcomes. We're doing it quickly and efficiently. We're in the driver's seat. Now we have to leverage that data, spread that message, and let other people know, uh, what we have to offer and we can accomplish that if we work together.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. No, I love it. It's, it's exciting for sure. Um, obviously Cairo Up still has its bread and butter and you guys are just amazing for the practitioner and the patient and the reports and all the things you guys do. And then now, um, you know, with the EHR stuff, how can, uh, our audience find out more?

About what you're doing both on um, your traditional chiro up, how we all know you guys from the last probably what, 15? Have you used it 15 years now?

Tim Bertelsman: 11.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. 11. Yeah. Awesome. You guys have been a amazing over that period of time. And then, and now the [00:37:00] ehr, is it the same place to go? Is there, is there different URLs?

Tim Bertelsman: Nope. All the same. Just chiro.com and, um, chiro is the platform, so we're the business. We have, uh, anything from free assets like our blog, our newsletters, our webinars. If you just wanna learn new stuff that's out there, we summarize everything that comes out. We monitor all the research that's published each week for different providers summarizing it.

Uh, so we have free resources. Maybe you need more to include patient education, um, and Google reviews or, um, you know, PCP newsletters. So we have our essentials product, which has been around for a long time. Is incredible because of the providers who have helped us refine it for the past decade, literally.

And then we have our EHR, which now has a few hundred subscribers to it, and we're evolving every day based on their input, uh, to become that tool that, that, uh, allows our profession to get the, the recognition that it deserves to become that undeniable best choice.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Yeah. And I [00:38:00] can speak to the, the, um. The feedback you take and improvements made.

You know, we, in our mastermind group, we have quite a few now that have, um, added your EHR and even within our group, they've kind of started a, a little focus group to help each other out and then also bring it to you guys. And then you're, uh, this, this episode will come out after the fact, but you're coming to New Orleans for our mastermind meetup and doing a little focus group there also, and, and getting feedback from everybody.

And so it's been good to see that, uh, that kind of back and forth.

Tim Bertelsman: That's the only way we build. You know, we, everybody has ideas, but without making those ideas something that's good for the community, they're just a small pool of ideas. Uh, we appreciate your help, your, your group's help and all of our subscribers help.

And really, the profession's help in building this into something. This is a co-op. This isn't a Brandon's product or my product. This is our profession's product, and that's, that's what we're here to build.

Dr. Kevin Christie: Well, this has been [00:39:00] great. I appre really appreciate your time and then, uh, we'll have to have, have you on again, uh, sooner than two years from now.

Tim Bertelsman: I'll, I'll look forward to it. Always do. And, uh, I hope everything goes well for, for you, uh, continued success and your missions. Thanks, everything that you're doing for our profession, proud to be on that same team.