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Hey, welcome to Look To The Children’s show. It’s February, 2022, which is crazy to even say that it’s already February. 2022. But my name is Dr. Erik Kowalke. And this is the Look To The Children’s show with ChiroSecure, thanks to Dr. Stu Hoffman and all ChiroSecure does for this amazing profession to put on shows like this and everything else that they do.
If you haven’t followed them, or this is your first time hearing something like this for cars, you’re make sure you get on their Facebook page and their social media and follow them. They put out so much great. For chiropractors, especially in this crazy environment and world where rules and information is changing so quick.
It’s really nice to be up-to-date and have just the leg up on what’s happening and what’s coming and be prepared as chiropractors. Comment below if you have any questions or any feedback. This show is specific to kids in chiropractic. I’ve practiced in grand rapids, Michigan. We see hundreds of kids every single week and families and lifetime family wellness practice.
The first family that ever signed up in our office 10 years ago, almost 11 years ago is still under care in our office today. And we’re just passionate about serving families and serving kids and principal chiropractic care. And. The full expression of their selves and allowing their nervous systems to function at a high level.
So now we have five doctors, 16 adjusting tables eight adjusting rooms, five exam rooms who have a team of 16 people. So we serve in a big way in our clinic. And this show is for us to share a little bit about what we’re doing and how to impact more kids in your practice. Take back to the.
After lunch or two tomorrow or next week and implement stuff right away. We also started at skid a software program that helps us just scale our clinic and provide a better experience for our patients. So some we’re going to talk about today three CS, we’re going to give you convenience care plans and converting is what we’re going to talk about.
And if you see kids in your office and you’ve been in practice for any number of. It’s just different in, in, we like to we like to keep things simple as chiropractors and with all the practice management companies out there and what we’re taught, we like to do care plans. We like to have specific types of care plans as we can to make it not super complicated for us to figure out for our teams to figure out.
So we might have five to 10 care plans that are probably the most common, there’s always exceptions to the rule, but what we found with infants. Exceptions are almost more common than just the regular standard version. You don’t ever know what’s coming at you, you might have a mom coming in with her infant, with earaches and colleagues and she gets it like she understands.
Chiropractic after you go through your day one education or day one and day two education. We do a group report of findings or new patient orientation. We call it. So there’s moms that come to that better. They’re all in. They totally get it, but their immediate concern is so strong that they don’t even want to think about short-term goals or long-term goals.
They’re like, okay, I know I want my kid to be healthy forever. That’s the longterm. Short-term goal, I don’t want these ear infections ever to come back. And immediate goal is I want them gone as soon as possible so that we can move on with our life because it’s affecting every area of our life.
So if you present them a long-term care plan, 12 months or something, they might not even be able to wrap their heads around that at this point. I just need to know is this even going to work for my kid and by work, they mean, if it doesn’t help with your infant, I got to go through a bunch of other stuff in order to move forward.
And
I didn’t even go through a lot of other things to get this ear infections better. I don’t know if I can commit to that. So you need to think as a chiropractor, it’s not so much, they don’t believe in what we’re doing or they don’t trust them. We’re doing. And if they don’t sign a 12 month, they’re not committing to more to.
They’re they just don’t know what’s coming in their life in the next couple months. And if this doesn’t work, the guy do something else and they’re not going to be able to have the time, the resources potentially to do both, even if they understand it. You have to meet those parents where they’re at.
And so what we do in our office as a 10 pack, we call it, we did, we do like 10. All at once, but I don’t even necessarily know three weeks from now. What frequency I’m going to see that child. It all depends on their subluxation pattern and if they’re holding or not. So I might see them really frequently for a week or two and then reassess and see, okay, what are, where are we at?
How are we doing? How is their spine holding? How is their nervous system adapting? Do you want to do another evaluation or exam on that? On that little chart? And so just know you gotta sometimes take it slow to take, to go on, to go far with that bomb and just meet them where they’re at along that process.
And it’s okay to do that in that scenario. It’s totally different than the guy coming in with low back pain that wants to just try you out. And you’re the 10th chiropractor that he’s tried out. And if it doesn’t work in two visits, he’s not going to come back totally different scenario, even though it’s presenting the same care plan with.
Who it’s coming from and the place that it’s coming from is totally different. So just divide that in your mind and get clarity on that and what decisions make. As far as care planning. And you talked about converting. I have a lot of doctors talk to me about trying to convert moms and dads and parents under care as well.
And this is a very delicate situation because sometimes most of the time the mom also has tons of issues. So as you’re going through the day, one educator, You’ll often see the mom or have the mom say something like, oh man, maybe I could use this too. Or oh, that she’ll start asking questions about herself potentially or about the husband, but you gotta, some parents they’re all in yeah.
All I’ll totally do this too. I think it depends on how severe the situation is with their child. If it’s very severe. They don’t care about themselves at all, if it’s like mildly disruptive to their life, but not severe in terms of effecting every day or the potential outcome of their child health wise.
Or they don’t see it like that, then they’re more open to like themselves and getting themselves evaluated and checked. But if you mix that up and you don’t read that right. The parent is very concerned about their child and the overall wellbeing and the health of their child, and is a very serious situation going on.
And you start talking about the mom or the dad, you’re going to totally blow it. And you’re going to miss the opportunity to serve that child which is your main goal. So don’t over. So on the first visit, it’s going to come, you know what, what you do is remove nerve interference and you’re the best at it.
And you’re the only one that can do it. You’re not in charge of getting it, your infections go away or the colic or whatever it is, you’re not treating that condition. You’re removing retrieval, subluxations. You’re improving the nervous system. In turn, when you do that, the body’s going to function heal better, or that your infection is going to go away.
I have no idea, but I know the nerve indifference is going to improve and I’m going to improve the function of the brain, its ability to communicate to the body and the body back to the brain. And in turn, what happens most of the time is ear infections go away and get better. But don’t commit to what you can’t control.
So you can’t control symptoms, you can control what you’re really the best at right. Removing nerve interference. So communicating that really clearly on the front end is probably the biggest key to converting and converting being you need to get the infant adjusted. I think that’s like space one, the home run is the lifetime family wellness, the whole family center care forever, but sometimes.
It’s a grand slam on the first visit and the whole family signs up, and that happens very frequently and sometimes it’s very slow and you’re just moving around the basis. So I think one of the big mistakes that we make, or maybe we just don’t focus on it enough is we pour all of our education and all of our resources into converting on the.
So if we can get them to hit a grand slam and the whole family gets it and they’re under lifetime family wellness care. Awesome. But if they don’t and you just go to base one, let’s say, and you just get, a few visits committed to for this child. Then there needs to be the same amount of effort and education to get from base one to base two and base two to base three base.
Home run. And so sometimes we still have the system set up in the adjusting room, flow and process to do that really effectively. So I want you to think about that. Like you go through so much effort on the first few visits, but it might be visit 10 when the symptoms are starting to improve.
And now the mom or the dad is open to even thinking about getting evaluated themselves. So you have. Really remember that record that and your EHR, whatever system you need a system and a process to follow back up and, continue to conversion process around, the other people in the family and getting them started in and you just might need to wait 10 visits to ask for that.
And then they gotta go back through that process. So it’s just a different, totally different system. And it does take more work and more effort and more intense. To do that. And I think what happens most of the time is we just forget about it. We get 10 visits in the child is doing better.
We maybe sign another care plan a longer term. We move into the short-term goal of these ear infections don’t want to come back and then we move into a long-term goal and we just never get the parents as assessed or evaluated. And it’s not that they didn’t want to it’s that they’re alert their life’s busy.
And if we’re not thinking about it and bringing it up and talking about it, they’re not either because they just moved on, their immediate need and. Urgency was fixed through the process. So just remember that record, that follow back up, even if it doesn’t happen initially it’s not necessarily like they didn’t convert.
It’s just, it needs to go through a different system and a different process than you would typically go through. So that’s converting and care planning around infants and kids, I think might help you guys a little bit. The third one which I think you really need to focus on at 2022 is. This is big time, high level.
If you could do one thing this year, that’s going to improve your internal referrals. That’s going to drive more engagement with your social media, drive more people in your community, talking about your business and your mission and what it is that you do. And I’m speaking for. Experience, we’re literally doing all of these things.
Convenience is something we focused on for multiple years. Now we get 60 plus internal referrals every single month because we just focus on, I shouldn’t say, just we focus on experience and continue. And making the whole process great for every person that walks through our door and convenience is probably the biggest one.
And what do I mean by convenience? Think about what it takes for one of your patients to come into your office for an appointment. They have to remember the appointment. They have to make sure it works with their calendar, their schedule. My, I have, we have six kids and they’re, they had dance this weekend, three basketball.
For hockey games, a tournament, we didn’t get home til 11 o’clock last night, they won in a shootout. It was epic. So now they play tomorrow again or they play today, which, it’s just crazy. So in the middle of the week, we have a tournament to go to a half an hour away. I didn’t know that was going to happen last week, let alone three months ago when I built out my schedule for chiropractic visits.
So parents are constantly changing their schedules, trying to make the. Inherently, hopefully you did your job on the education. They get it. They want to come into your office. The reason they’re not most of the time and the reason they’re missing their appointments is because you don’t make it convenient for them to change their appointment to a time that works with them.
They have to call you, and you’re only open 20 some hours a week. So they have to find a time that you’re open to call you, to tell you that they need to move their appointment. And it’s just not convenient. Nobody wants to call anymore. I had a dentist appointment last. And the lady, that every tire Proctor, every time you go somewhere and they say, what do you do?
And you say, chiropractor, they start going off on all these stories. So she tells me I canceled my chiropractic appointment today and I didn’t make any new ones because I don’t like calling. And I don’t know my schedule next week. And in fact, I might just not go in for a while and see if I’m doing okay.
And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so funny because this is something that we focus on a lot. The appointment’s not sinked with her normal calendar. She can’t see the current availability today. So if there was a way for her to see the availability today, so she had an appointment at two o’clock. She told me, so she could have made it earlier in the day, but she would have had to call and find out if there’s an availability and schedule that it was too much of a hassle or induced.
So she just canceled altogether. But if there was an app where she could see the availability today, she could see what’s busy and what’s not busy that there’s an opening at 10 or nine 50. And she can move the appointment from two to nine 15, and then show up to that appointment. And there’s a text message that reminds her, that links her to that app to show her the availability that also links those appointments with her Google calendar or apple, I felt calendar or outlook calendar, so she can see how that works with our meetings.
So she never misses. That would be amazing. And that would be way more convenient for her. Then forcing her to call the office for that. And so that’s what we created with skin. So if you’re not using a software system that allows the patients to schedule a reschedule, see their appointments, see their kids’ appointments, sync those appointments to their normal work calendar and their life calendar and family calendar.
You’re missing the boat this year. You’re stuck in an old way that. Costing you, people it’s costing you retention cost senior referrals. I can’t tell you how many people would come into our office and yeah, my, my friend Mary says, she just loves coming here. Cause you guys make it convenient for her life.
She can swing in, get adjusted. She can make sure the wait times aren’t that long. So convenient for her that it makes it part of her life and she can stick to this long-term and that’s how we’ve been able to retain so many people for 10 plus years is we make it easy for them to make chiropractic part of their life.
In today’s day and age, it’s not so much that they can’t afford it. It’s not so much that they don’t really have the time to do it. It’s that they can’t fit it into the routine of their life. So your job is to not allow. Share the value and convert, and they get lifetime family wellness care, but usually we stop there and we just expect them to show up and haul their six kids all the way across town, every single week forever.
And it’s just not happening. It’s just not gonna. We live 25 minutes from my office and I’m not going to drive 25 minutes every single week with, I can’t even get all six kids in the same place at the same time, in my own house, let alone calling them all the way over to the office and I value chiropractic care.
I’m the chiropractor. So you gotta make, it can be. Yeah, will allow the parents to see the schedules and it all does that through this get app that we created scan.life. So if you haven’t seen it or heard about it, please check it out. It’s going to be a game changer for your clinic. Or if your EHR does something, you got to use a system that makes it convenient for people in your office, help them schedule their appointments, have somebody on your team.
We have Rachel on our team. She’s the lead experience coordinator is her role. Her job is to make everybody’s experience in the office. We hired her and she’s trained to just make everybody’s experience. Awesome. Make sure that they have their appointments scheduled, make sure that they work when they leave their next appointment works.
If they’re having a bad day, she gives them a bad day mug. She does everything to make their experience. So making their experience great and making it convenient, probably the two biggest levers that you could pull in 2022 to make a difference in grow your practice. We grew 35% last year and visits and collections.
And I can tell that was it making it convenient and experience. Hopefully I beat that. To a lot. So you really get it for that one, but I hope you love seeing kids. I hope you got something out of this. You can take back to your practice implement right away. Kids are the future of our world and chiropractic care is essential to raising healthy.
Children and in today’s environment, they need less nerve interference. They need you, they need chiropractors to be bold and to be educating and communicating and adjusting specific subluxations and improving their health because this is the next generation that’s gonna just take over everything and we need them to be healthy and not sick adults.
Go serve the masses. Thanks so much. We’ll see you guys in.
Today’s pediatric show Look To The Children was brought to you by ChiroSecure.