Ways to Increase Revenue in Your Practice

You may have become a chiropractor to help people, but a chiropractic practice is first and foremost a business. This may sound obvious and maybe even a tad cynical, but the failure to recognize this simple fact can be detrimental to generating the revenue you need to continue helping people, as you wanted when you got into this field. Fortunately, it isn't hard to increase revenue in a small chiropractic practice. All you need to do is commit to a few minor... adjustments. (No pun intended.)

Build the Best Team

A practice is only as strong as the team running it. Skills and experience are essential, of course, but they can only go so far. You also need the right attitude, culture, and commitment to patient care. Having the right team can make the difference between simply bringing in new clients and keeping them for the long haul. The right team can help you build and grow a thriving chiropractic practice that brings you steady, reliable revenue for years to come.

To recruit the best team possible for your chiropractic practice:

• Determine what that means to you. - What makes an ideal team member for your practice? Do they need to be computer savvy, bilingual, and experienced in health and wellness care?
• Focus on attitude. - You can always train skills, but you can’t train personality.
• Use all channels at your disposal. - Don’t just post job listings on Indeed and Facebook Jobs; solicit referrals from trusted sources as well.
• Ask the right questions. - Get to know the person behind the resume by asking them to provide some insight into why they do what they do and how their skills and experience can serve you and your patients.
• Test them on the job. - Call it a working interview, just be sure to keep private patient information away from them.
• Prioritize onboarding. - Once you hire a new team member, help to integrate them into your practice in such ways as training them in all your systems and building rapport with the rest of your team.
• Maintain team engagement - From new-hires to old vets, keep your whole team engaged with regular shows of appreciation, development opportunities, and a consistently supportive working environment.

Investing in the team you rely on to run your practice can yield huge returns in office efficiency and patient satisfaction, both of which translate into a bigger bottom line.

Optimize Pricing and Payment

A poor pricing structure can negatively impact bookings and revenues, as can an inefficient payment system. Do your due diligence to ensure your pricing accurately reflects the value your services deliver without limiting your competitive edge. This may compel you to make such tweaks to your pricing structure as implementing tiered pricing for certain services, offering multiple-session discounts, and providing package options.

Offering patients flexible payment options can also help tremendously with increasing revenue in a small chiropractic practice. For patients who struggle to pay for treatment up front, offer payment plans or financing. This can allow many would-be patients who wouldn’t otherwise be able to book with you to become actual, bona fide patients.

Add Supplemental Income

Offering an expanded range of services is a powerful way to increase revenue in a small chiropractic practice. Even better, by providing these services, you can increase your practice’s revenue while more fully meeting your patients’ needs.

There are many additional services a chiropractic practice can offer to its patients to complement their care. Picking a few of these to provide in your practice can help you to diversify your revenue streams and bring in extra income. A few of the most obvious of these include:

• Massage Therapy - Providing therapeutic massages to enhance a patient’s healing process can also encourage them to schedule visits more often.
• Nutritional Counseling - Providing nutritional advice or selling vitamins and health supplements can add an additional stream of revenue to your practice.
• Wellness Services - Offering complementary services such as acupuncture, reflexology, stretch therapy, and detox programs can help expand your practice and attract new patients.
• Laser Therapy - Offer your patients this cutting-edge treatment to help reduce inflammation, manage pain, and accelerate healing using low-level laser light.
• Shockwave Therapy - This increasingly popular, non-invasive procedure can be effective for chronic pain, tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, and other conditions.

You can help patients to fuel their at-home care regimen by providing exercise equipment and offering fitness partnerships. You can sell things like orthopedics, orthotics, e-stim units, massagers, cold and hot packs, and compression clothing. You can expand the ways in which patients can receive certain treatments or consultations by offering telehealth solutions. You can even offer group sessions and provide professional speaking services at events.

To choose the best of these products and services to offer your patients, pick the ones that best align with the overall philosophy of your practice. And be sure the ones you choose really do provide value to your patients.

Follow Up Fully

If you're looking at how to increase revenue in a small chiropractic practice, you also need to examine ways that you're currently losing revenue, so you can fix those gaps and prevent such losses in the future. No-shows and cancellations are detrimental to a practice’s revenue stream. According to researchers, they account for more than 20 percent of missed appointments and result in lost revenue of over 50 percent.

Not only are you missing out on the income these appointments would bring in, but you’re also experiencing underutilization of staff time and treatment delays, too, both of which can also take a chunk out of your bottom line. Taking a few small but critical steps to improve how you follow up with patients can help tremendously reduce no-shows and cancellations and create lasting relationships with them.

Personalize Your Messages

Are your follow-ups too generic? Perhaps you’re relying on a "set it and forget it" strategy, which usually yields poor results, if any at all. Perhaps your staff is just too strapped for time to give it the proper attention it’s due. This leaves your patients receiving impersonal template-driven messages that most people are quick to send to the trash. Moreover, blatantly generic messages are generally viewed as unimportant, and therefore, people are typically quick to delete them.

Your patients want to feel valued, not like simply another number. A simple bit of personalization in your messages can go a long way toward helping patients feel a sense of connection and belonging with your practice.

Use your patient’s name in correspondence with them, reference their most recent visit, and include a specific detail about their personal treatment plan. Replace impersonal calls to action like "Book Now" with ones like "How’s it Going?" And close with a relevant tip or success story to trigger an emotional connection with your practice.

Be Consistent

Haphazard, sporadic communication with your patients suggests you only care about them when you want their money. It gives them an easy out to lose interest in your services and abandon their own ongoing care.

Perhaps follow-ups have slipped through the cracks of marketing, administrative tasks, and patient care. If you don’t have a patient-communication system in place, all your correspondence becomes reactive rather than proactive. Without consistent touchpoints, your patients can start to figure they’re not a real priority to you.

Besides, the more patients are exposed to your messages, the more familiarity they feel with you, and familiarity breeds trust. Furthermore, patients often appreciate your check-ins because they help prevent the insidious "out of sight, out of mind" mentality that can lead them to fall behind on their proper care.

Consistency is key in your follow-up communications with patients, and there are several ways to help create it. Implement a specific schedule for automated communications to stay top of mind without coming across as overbearing or excessive. Create reliable communication channels, such as weekly email newsletters, monthly check-in texts, and quarterly phone calls, to elicit feedback and make the conversation two-way. As much as possible, automate these communications with revenue-focused communication solutions for clinics to minimize their consumption of your time and resources.

Be Less Salesy

If all your communications seem to be focused on getting the patient to book their next appointment, you’re going to lose their interest fast. Avoid pushing your patients away by keeping your need to close the deal in check. This is an easy trap to fall into when your business measures success by bookings rather than relationships. But if you’re too revenue-focused when devising and distributing these messages, they can come across as transactional.

People don’t like to feel pressured and value their freedom of choice. Make yourself a trusted resource without seeming to put your needs ahead of their own. Provide value and let them decide to take the next step with you on their own. Educate people in ways to improve their lives before you invite them to take action. Provide success stories, testimonials, and other social proof to inspire them. Focus your messages on how they’re feeling rather than the nature of your services.

Improve your communications with patients and reap the benefits for your revenue stream. Contact us today and start a conversation about implementing service levels for medical practice growth in your small chiropractic practice.

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