Dr. Erik Kowalke can be contacted at info@sked.life or by visiting: https://www.sked.life
Complete transcript (Click here to download this transcript):
All right. Hey, hey. Welcome to the top floor. My name is Dr. Erik Kolwalke. I represent SKED, Inc. just want to give a few shoutout and things to ChiroSecure and Alan and Dr. Stu for all that they do, and if you never met Alan before, he’s a guru at all of these webinars that they put on. He does a fantastic job, and stuck with it for a very, very long time. He told me he does thousands of these, so that’s pretty cool. But I’m here because I really want to share something with you guys.
Every once in a while, technology comes along that you’ve never heard of before, and when you learn about it, you’re like, “Well, I don’t know if that would work in my scenario, because what I’m doing in my chiropractic office is working so well, I don’t know if I want to change anything.” And then you learn more about it, and once you start using it, you’re like, “I can’t imagine what it was like prior to doing this.” It’s like when you get digital x-ray, and you’re processing all these people, and you’re like, “I can’t believe that we used to put it through the dung tanks and hang it and you have to keep the doors closed and all this stuff.
How did we even function at that level?” SKED is one of those products that came along. We created this a couple years ago. I’m a chiropractor myself. You could probably hear kids screaming on the other side of the wall. We see tons of pediatrics in our office. And we created SKED out of just a necessity for something better. We wanted our office to function better. We grew really fast, so we’re seven years in practice. We started back 2011, grew really fast. We were able to hit 1000 visits a week in three years, and then we were able to hire on some extra doctors. Our team grew to eight to 10 different team members. So we got to a point, we’re like, “Man, we just need to improve our efficiency.” We’re processing people. But we’re not always providing the most extraordinary experience, because we just have so many people coming in that people can fall through the cracks and we just miss them. That can happen even if you’re 100 a week, 300 hundred a week. You just get busy, and stuff falls through, so what was happening is I was getting voice mails in the middle of the day, and I was like, “Why are getting voice mails in the middle of the day? Everybody needs to answer the phone more.”
Come to find out, it wasn’t that they weren’t answering the phone, it’s that the lines were just busy, and they were leaving voicemails, and so I’m like, “We’re not providing the great experience if people are leaving voicemails. They can’t even get ahold of us.” What I did is I polled our team and they said, “Well, most people are calling to reschedule appointments, confirm appointments, let me know that Johnny can’t make it because he’s going to baseball, so they’re only going to bring these two today, or can Johnny reschedule, come and come with dad tomorrow?” It was like, “Oh my gosh, yeah, that totally works. Just come in.”
So what we were trying to do in the office, which you all are too I’m sure, is when somebody walks in the front door, they see a smiling face, and your front desk is like, “Hey, welcome to the office.” But if they’re on the phone, then they’re like, the person can sign in and not even be greeted. If they’re already having a bad day, it’s probably nothing you’re doing, but now their experience wasn’t great, and that just funnels into all these other areas in the office. So we wanted to get our front desk off the phone, but we wanted to provide the experience be better. We’re like, “Well man, it’d be great if there was just an app that the patients could use, to see all of their appointments, when they’re supposed to come in, they could see the recommendations on there, they could see all of their family members, all their kids, when they’re supposed to come in, when all their appointments are, and if they want to change them, they can just hit reschedule.”
It’ll look through all our filters, when we allow them to reschedule, and just change it in our EHR system. Everybody’s like, “Oh yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, who knows if that ever would happen?” So I started looking around at different technologies, it has to already exist somewhere. Somebody has to have had done this before. This is 2015 probably, 2014. The best I could find was automated messaging, where they were getting appointment reminders and then if they wanted to change, they would text the office back and the office could text them back and forth. But that just would take my team member from the front desk on the phone, to now trying to manage this text platform all day long, and then they have to confirm it, change it, move it in the EHR system. That doesn’t really fix my problem. It just takes my problem from the phone to a computer, and then if we miss and we don’t respond, and then they get frustrated, and we’re still not engaging with people in front of me.
So we had to create it. We created it, it started as just an app on their phones, to see appointments, manage, make new appointments, and reschedule. It just exploded in our office. People were like, “Oh my gosh, can I use this?” We have probably 800 to 900 individual patients a month, using this at our office. And if you looked at all of our reschedules now, rescheduling appointments and making appointments, we’re over 3000 a month. If you look across the country statistic wise, it takes five to eight minutes for somebody to reschedule an appointment or make an appointment, either across the front desk, if over the phone. So you take five minutes, the minimum, times 3000 a month, that’s a lot of minutes, times $15 an hour, we’re looking at $3500, $3600 a month I’m saving in what I’m paying employees to do that’s now a way better experience for the people.
Because Sunday night they can log on, see all their appointments, they know they’re scheduled for the week. They can move them around. It’s already filtering through my EHR system, letting them know what times are available, filling that slot in so when I come in Monday morning, we look at our schedule. It’s 95% accurate, because all the people on there know and have rescheduled and moved where they could go. It allows us to plan. We know this is the amount of people coming in, this is when we need these team members and these shifts. It’s just streamlined the entire process. I think about all these analogies because people ask all these different scenarios, and the first thing most doctors are like, “I don’t know if I want to automate that. What if they reschedule on the wrong time, or I could only see one new patient an hour, but then if I want to see two adjustments, if I see the new patient, so that screws that up.” We just automated all that stuff.
Coming from an office that sees 1300 a week, we know a lot of little scenarios that need to work out perfect to be as efficient as possible. We created this only for chiropractors and all of our resources and all of our development goes into the chiropractic profession, just you all support if you’re connected with ChiroSecurity know-how, how devoted they are to the profession. I’m excited about that as a chiropractor creating a technology for chiropractors. We haven’t gone into dentistry or audiology or optometry, or anything else, even though we get requests all the it. We’re different. Our chiropractors are different. We see people a lot over a long period of time. And we need specific details. We want them to know, and we want them to fill out paperwork before some visits, and all kinds of different stuff, so we just pouring that stuff into SKED. What could we automate and make it easier, a better experience for people? Reviews is in there now, where they can get links to your Google review if they had a good experience, and boost your Google reviews.
Care plans. They can see the recommendations on their phone now. It’s really taking all the information that you work on in the office, that you train as doc, like I need to tell them my recommendations, and need to remind them, and I need to remind them why they’re coming to the office. And to make sure they know they need to come back one more visit this week and all this stuff that you try to keep in your mind. Tell every patient every time they come in, if you put that in the pocket of them. How many people are sitting in your waiting with their phones? Everybody. And now you just have a resource to connect with them. So it’s grown and we just keep adding stuff to it, but it’s really a technology that if you don’t use it currently, which you probably don’t even know that it existed prior to watching this, because it’s never been created before.
You need to check it out. You need to click on … in the comments we have link below, you can click to schedule a demo. Our team will walk you through this is how it works. This is how it would work with your system. You could tell them, this is how many doctors we have, these are our scenarios, these are our open hours, this are our closed hours, this is when we see new patients. They could tell you how it all would work. And let people reschedule. We have offices from 10, 15, 20 different clinics, and one group to one doctor with no CA, and they’re just running the whole clinic with SKED and 600 square feet. People just reschedule, schedule through SKED, and they have open adjusting, and they can manage it with super low overhead.
No matter what spectrum you’re on, it can work and free it up and create a technology that makes people really walk in your office and start using it. You’ll be like, “Wow, this is awesome.” And then what they’re going to say is, “I wish my dental, I wish my other provider had this, because it makes it so easy for me to make sure that I’m getting in when I’m supposed to get in the office, and connect with the office and get their chiropractic care, which is really what it all comes back to. We want people to get chiropractic care. We want to expand knowledge of chiropractic and how the nervous system functions, and if we can help people get into chiropractic offices better and faster and easier and more efficiently, then that’s our sole purpose too, and we have over 50,000 patients a day across the country using the app, to schedule and get into offices now.
It’s grown really fast, so I encourage you, check it out. Learn how it works with your system, and thanks again to ChiroSecure and Alan and Dr. Stu. We just appreciate what they do for the profession so much. Give them a shout out on here. They work really hard at bringing you guys all this content with the webinars and the live events that they do, so thank you again guys, and again, my name, Dr. Erik Kowalke. The website is www.sked.life. We’ll put a link below in the comments so you guys can access us there too. You can schedule a demo through the website, be we’d be happy to show you how it works and you won’t know how you ran without it.
This has been a ChiroSecure production.