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Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Studin, and today with ChiroSecure, we’re gonna take a little bit of a different turn. We’ve done a lot of hardcore, Neuromuscular, central nervous system, we’ve done MRI, we’ve done personal injury, we’ve done adjust- we’ve done we’ve done a lot. But today I wanna talk about chiropractic infrastructure.
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And infrastructure means… And by the way, one of my dear friends owned an imaging company. He actually was the former CEO of Firestone Tires worldwide and took it over at an early age and rebuilt it because he built an infrastructure. Then he went and he opened imaging centers, and he did radiation oncology, and he had 20 centers and it was, a $100 million business.
And it was a good friend, and I sat with him and I said, “What’s the key to your success?” And he said, “The key is infrastructure. If your infrastructure is not good, you can’t grow. The old adage, you can’t build a house on a shaky foundation. You need a strong foundation, a strong infrastructure, a strong everything, and if you don’t have it, you’re gonna be screwed.”
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Now, infrastructure in, in terms of this genre is about your documentation. It’s about your forms because… A- and I work with doctors all day long. Let’s just go to the slides, and we’re gonna pull one up, and we’re gonna talk about infrastructure. It’s a foundation built on successful assignment of rights, not just assignment of benefits, assignment of rights and documentation, and you’ve gotta have that.
Now, I consult doctors all around the country, and my average doctor’s take-home pay goes up 61% after taxes within the first year. I don’t care if you’re in South Dakota, I don’t care if you’re in, if you’re in, in, in Texas, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Georgia, it doesn’t matter. It’s infrastructure.
Now, why does it go up 61%? Because if it’s a personal injury practice, it’s got the right assignment of rights, the right for information, the right for this, the right for that. I’ll get to that in just a moment. So you need the right paperwork that’s documented. You need validation that things have been received, so now you’re forcing the other side to pay you.
You’re forcing the carrier to resend you another check if they redirect it that it’s not supposed to. But also you want to ensure if you get that knock on the door from the carrier that says you’ve been served, you have the right infrastructure, the right documentation, the right consents, the right not just informed, HIPAA, the right everything.
You have to have, And I’m gonna go through all of those things as well. You have to have the right legal documents because right now the current political administration raised the fines for not having those rights tremendously. Now, when’s the last time you ever heard of someone being taken down for HIPAA?
The answer is never. If you were being sued or fined a quarter of a million dollars and your name went on a an a privacy o- offenders list in perpetuity? Who would you tell? The answer is nobody. But I’m like the father confessor. Every, “Mark, what do I do? I was just served. I was just sued.”
I have a knee-jerk reaction. You know what that is? Call a criminal defense lawyer. I’m the wrong person, and don’t tell me anything because there’s no privilege in our conversation. So yeah, this is big-time stuff, folks. You need to build a successful foundation of assignment of rights. Take out your cell phones, look at your screen real quick, and take this picture.
If you ever want to chitchat with me, that’s my cell phone, that’s my email address. If you want to get any, learn about any of the things we do, there are QR codes there for you. Take a picture of this, but most importantly, take my cell phone number down and please don’t hesitate to call, but call early.
I prefer that. Now, let’s talk about chiropractic mandatory forms. These are your mandatory forms, folks. You know what? You need intake demographics. You’d be surprised how many people don’t have an appropriate demographic form when you do intakes. Take the demographics. Then you need an intake history, current history, past history, family social history.
Patient has to fill all those things out. Now, I wrote EHRChiro the software program, which is killer good by the way, but we made sure that when a patient did that, they could do it at home, and that it automatically populates your records. You don’t have to do that then. You don’t have to ask those questions.
You just have to review it, and you beg better… You had best be sure you can validate in your documentation that you reviewed that. That’s according to the lawyers from State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Geico, the doctors from the consulting doctors from Blue Cross Blue Shield, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna. They all have the same requirements.
And by the way, if you think for one second that personal injury has a different set of documentation requirements than managed care or cash, you’re grossly mistaken, folks. That’s a rookie mistake. Don’t be Pollyannaish and to be suck, “Oh, I’m gonna save 15 minutes. I don’t have to write this. It’s a cash patient.”
Guess what? You know who sues the most or gets you in trouble the most? It’s not a cash p- it’s not a personal injury patient, it’s not a managed care patient, it’s a cash patient. Because the personal injury patient is g- gonna complain to the insurance company. The managed care patient’s gonna complain to the managed care company.
They’ll make a financial calculus as to whether they’re gonna come after you. But a cash patient only has one patient pa- place to complain to, and that’s your licensure board. And a licensure board by law has to investigate every single complaint, and they are not kind. And it’s usually lawyers who make decisions who are clueless, and they’re always looking to make an example, and they are biased and not fair.
I just had a case and I can’t say what state, that I was brought in to consult for. I do this a lot. And the patient was a cocaine addict. He was snorting away. He was just a drug addict left and right, and he went to the doctor to extort him, and he wanted 20 or $50,000, and he wanted him to falsify his records to his attorney.
The doctor said no, documented everything. He rented… The patient rented a licensure complaint. Guess what they did? They took the… and the patient fabricated a record of the conversation. The licensure board, lock, stock, and barrel, ruled for this drug addict against the doctor. And right now we’re still fighting so he can keep his license, and terrible things happened to this doctor.
Terrible. So please don’t make that rookie mistake. So you need an intake form, current, past, social. You need financial documentation, the appropriate financial documentation, and you can’t have three or four financial pieces in different places in your forms, ’cause often one’ll compete against the other.
And it has to be done by an attorney, not by you. You need a HIPAA, not just form, but a complete HIPAA manual that’s 30, 40, 50 pages long and filled out. That is critical because that’s one of the number one things insurance companies do when they come. “I want to see a HIPAA manual.” You’re supposed to, by law, have meetings a minimum of once a year with your staff and document the topics and who attended.
You don’t have that’s a violation, and the fines per violation can go into the h- tens to 100,000, tens of thousands, up to 100, it’s a lot more than that, thousand dollars per violation. You have to have an informed consent. You know who needs that? Your malpractice carrier. And they’ll give you an informed consent.
Use theirs. ChiroSecure, who I love, has what I feel is an incredible informed consent, and it’s in their welcome packet they give you. Use it and don’t change a word. They’re the risk taker. Then you need assignments of rights, and this is what doctors don’t have. You need assignment of… You need a right to send records, a right to receive records, a right to sue, especially those of you in Florida with the new lien laws that were just eviscerated by that governor who certainly does not have your best interest at heart.
But now you have to have that right to sue, which forms as your lien, and that’s a whole different conversation. You need the right to collect You’re gonna go after your patient. Who’s gonna pay for the collection company? The right to collect. The right for information. Lawyers hate that one. Hate that one.
That is the number one reason why we get paid, the right for information. And you need the right to treat. Your licensure board needs it. You need consent to treat. You then need an assignment of benefits, and one word need… And if I sh- if I share something with you, this is one of my consulting secrets, but I don’t care.
Irrevocable. Everything is irrevocable. You don’t have it in there, you’re gonna get screwed. Patient’s gonna do a money grab, lawyers will do money grabs, you’re gonna get screwed, so make sure you use that word. And then the No Surprise Act. No Surprise Act came in January 1st, 2022, to really the initial reason was for predatory surgeons.
When the patients came into the emergency room, they’d bring in other surgeons, and they would surprise them with huge surgical bills, which often decimated them financially. Guess what? It affects us also. So go Google No Surprise Act, and you need documentation for that. It needs to be in your intake form.
There needs to be language. There needs to be a whole bunch of different things. These are your mandatory forms to protect you from you, to protect you from predatory patients, to protect you from predatory insurance carriers, to protect you from predatory licensure boards. It’s just as easy to do it right as it is to do it wrong That’s the message for today.
It’s just as easy to do it right as it is to do it wrong. So on the consulting side, this is what we do. We help you build infrastructures. Give me a jingle. You already took my picture. You call me whenever you want. So there’s a lot of other things that I want to share with you, a lot. But everything is about step one infrastructure.
You’ve got to build a documentation infrastructure. We’re gonna talk about in the next v- in the next class that we do, we’re gonna talk about clinical infrastructure and things that you have to understand also, that also are gonna correspond to your paperwork infrastructure. Everything is a building block built one upon the next.
So we’re gonna jump out of the slides right now. And folks, I want to share with you that I am honored, and I mean that sincerely, to bring this information to you month after month, year after year, and really have the breadth to talk about pretty much anything I feel that’s responsible. And I can’t thank ChiroSecure enough from the bottom of my heart for giving me the opportunity to do this.
I also want to just acknowledge for one moment Dr. Gerry Clum, who did this before me, who’s no longer with us. I think about him often, and when you talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, we all do, and he was one of the best. Folks, thank you so much. We’ll catch you next time
Learn More About Dr. Studin: https://rebrand.ly/ji3skte and https://rebrand.ly/m6orxhi
Click here for the best Chiropractic Malpractice Insurance
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