As a follow up to yesterday’s Putting the “Alternative” in Alternative Medicine, I thought it would be interesting to look at the term complementary from a business strategy perspective.
There are some deeply entrenched camps on this issue. There are many who view the term complementary as subservient to the allopathic medical community. It’s the “either-or” attitude, and it’s not right or wrong, it’s simply an opinion. There is a growing mountain of evidence that multi-disciplinary approaches to health care (read: professionals complementing each other) are great for patients. Whether you want to believe the data or not is up to you.
The phrase alternative health care is often interpreted in the context of the modality used by the CAM practitioner. For example, instead of pharmaceuticals, a patient might choose the alternative of supplementation.
While that’s technically true, there’s great value in expanding your concept of alternative to include the way you offer your services, and present your business to your clients. Consider your business as an alternative to not just the treatment offered by the allopathic medical community, but to the level of service.
The Mackinac Centre for Public Policy has an interesting piece on the “myth” that free public health care empowers the poor. I’m not here to debate the public versus private issue (not today, at least) but it does raise some interesting questions.
They claim that paying for health care is more empowering, since it forces the system in question to treat you as a customer to be satisfied, and therefore leads to a higher level of service.
A little follow-up to the post on valuing a practice.
It’s surprisingly difficult to get CAM practitioners to consider buying patient or client files. To me, it’s a no-brainer.
There’s surprisingly little help for CAM startups online (hence this site, I suppose…). However, the Canadian gov, and a few of the provinces, have specific info for starting your alternative health practice.
A fair bit of it’s Canadian-specific, but it’s worth a spin through. Some interesting industry stats, too:
“I’ve got an opportunity to buy some patient files from another chiropractor, but I think the price is high. How do I know how much to pay?”
Good question. Let’s assume for the moment that buying files in general is a good idea. (I think it is.)
Here’s the dilemma, as submitted by a CAM doc:
“I had a new patient call looking for an appointment as soon as possible. My new patient visits are an hour long, and even though I wasn’t even close to fully booked that week, I couldn’t see the patient until the following week. My book was full of 15 and 30 minute gaps in between visits.”
I call these gaps “islands” and they can bring a busy practice to its knees. The problem is widespread among CAM practices – my feeling is that it’s a bad habit that practitioners fall into when they first start out. On startup, you need a little time between patients to chart, get prepared, de-stress. And the time is generally available, because you’re not that busy yet. So you (and your staff) fall into the habit of leaving little gaps between patients.
A doctor once told me this great piece of wisdom: “Don’t set any office hours you don’t want to keep forever.”
It’s tempting when you start up to open weekends, nights, early mornings – anything that will get new patients in the door. Although offering this flexibility to your clients seems like a good idea, it presents a few challenges:
It’s hard on you
Working all those hours is a lot of…well, work. It means you’re seeing patients all the time (if your practice is booked solid), or you’re at the office all the time, but not generating revenue. If you’ve got friends or a family – hell, even if you’ve got a parakeet – it becomes draining. You have no life. And if, like most CAM practitioners, you promote life balance as a means of creating health, then you’re not practicing what you preach.
