SoundPractice.Net has a free podcast on finding the right office staff. It caters to the MD crowd, but there are few interesting points in the 20-odd minutes.
Perhaps even better, there are over 100 free podcasts on the same site…
CAMLAW has a new post on the “acceptance” of complementary and alternative medicine by the AMA.
While I’m sure many of you didn’t need the blessing, it does provide more ammunition for getting more referrals from MD’s who have been reluctant to “buy in” to your modality, or who are nervous for liability reasons.
At E-Myth Worldwide, you can complete a short questionnaire that ranks your business on a few different scales.
While the results are generally geared towards getting you to buy E-Myth products and services, the questions themselves and the simple results might get you thinking.
It’s one thing to understand the types of referrals, but quite another to know which type is growing your practice. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but I want to stress it further.
Tracking your referrals is actually pretty straightforward, but often neglected. For the most part, it’s a front-line job, and needs to happen the first time a patient arrives. The easiest way to do it is to make it part of your intake form. It’s very difficult and far less accurate (and less likely to happen) later on in the patient cycle. The great thing is that it’s easy to implement - if you’ve got staff, just make it part of the new patient process. That’s it.
The AANMC has a series of interviews with Naturopaths that’s pretty interesting. One of the ND’s featured actually has an income in the top 1% of ND’s, DC’s, and acupucturists, and once held the record for the most money borrowed to attend Bastyr University…
What’s the difference between CAM, alternative, holistic and integrative, you ask? Daryl Kulak has a great article on The Holistic Economy describing the difference between industry terms that tend to be used interchangeably. I’ve been thinking for a while I should do this, but Daryl’s done it better already…
ExamineYourPractice.com offers comprehensive practice evaluations using “mystery shoppers”. Likely best for checking the performance of your staff, but you could always get a self-review…
Mystery Shopping - Medical Mystery Shopper - ExamineYourPractice.com
If the post on why you should raise your CAM practice rates has convinced you that the time is right, here are a few tips on how to make it painless for you and your patients.
Plan It
So here’s the dilemma: Inflation’s always there, and as a result of it (and other good reasons) you want to be raising rates. But you don’t want to do it too frequently. Plan at least two rate hikes in advance – the current one, and the next one. That’ll help you plan the amount of the rate hike, and also help with some of the next steps below.
Few business decisions is more feared, ignored and avoided than raising prices. But while we’ve all hoped the issue would go away, it hasn’t. So, on the count of three, we’ll all (including me) pull our heads out of the sand, and face the day.
Here are a few reasons you should be raising your prices:
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