Chiropractic Practice: Reducing Friction In Three Key Areas

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. The topic of today’s Thrive in Five is reducing friction in three key areas in your office. Now, why is it important to reduce friction in the first place? Because friction is resistance. Friction holds you back, it makes what you do that much more difficult and challenging and eliminating friction is guaranteed to make things go more smoothly in your office. So today we’re gonna be talking about reducing friction in three key areas, and you’ll get what the three areas are in a moment. The first area I want to talk about is the doctor. The doctor is frequently the prime source of friction because doctors are very skillful at being doctors usually, but less skillful at being office managers, entrepreneurs and business people. So it’s really important for the doctor to recognize whatever friction points come up in his or her experience.

For example, if the doctor loves taking care of people but doesn’t love doing paperwork, well guess what? You can only grow as great as your weaker areas will permit. So while you’re wishing you were spending your time doctoring, the paperwork is stacking up. And guess what happens when the paperwork stacks up? The work grinds to a halt because the team can’t do what they need to do to collect the money, keeping records and being able to send them the place they need to be. That disappears. So it creates a constant source of friction. Another place where the doctor experiences friction is in the adjusting room. Doctors who are too chatty and conversational end up creating a sluggish or inefficient office procedure. 

So that creates friction by making it impossible for the patients to flow smoothly in and outta the office so that the doctor can take care of the most people possible.
So there are many aspects of doctor friction and the best way for you to address them is with a saying that I learned from my esteemed partner, Dr. Bob Hoffman. He said, proper planning prevents poor performance. So it’s important if you recognize doctor, that there’s some friction in some of the things that you are doing well, you wanna do a better job planning to make sure to eliminate and reduce any unnecessary friction. Now, the second place you’re likely to experience friction in your office is with the staff. Now, likewise, the staff also needs to have proper procedures in order to be able to churn out the paperwork that they need to do in order to be able to manage the patients, to gather and release patients effectively. So if you see that there’s friction in your staff, then you’re gonna have to get with them and mastermind on how you can reduce that unnecessary resistance.

Now obviously the third place where you’re likely to find friction is with the patient. And patient friction is much harder to deal with because you have control over what you do and don’t do. You have some degree of control over what the staff doesn’t, doesn’t do, but you have less control over what the patient does or doesn’t do. So the antidote to friction with patients is having proper policies. When you set policy effectively, the patient learns the rules and standards of the office and therefore it becomes possible for them to comply and reduce any resistance that they might create in causing your practice to grow smoothly. Now, obviously friction is an impediment to growth and success. It prevents you from being able to do all the things that you need to do in order to have the smoothly running, efficient, and effective productive office that you always wanted.

So the willingness to address friction is a critical key. And what you may wanna know is that at SuperConference coming up October 5th-7th, we have one of the world’s experts in dealing with friction, Roger Dooley coming in to explain his methodology. This is something that you want to take note of. Now when we talk about friction, friction is one of the six essential strategies, or reducing friction is one of the six essential strategies that all successful business people and all successful chiropractic entrepreneurs need to learn. If you want, you can go to the uh, landing page that talks about the six essential strategies and you can learn not only about how to reduce and eliminate friction, but other key aspects of practice management that may or may not be going as smoothly as they could in your office. You know, is a good chance that you are in a town where you take care of people and that there’s probably somebody in town who sees more people than you do, and probably somebody in town who sees less people than you do.

Well, why it’s the same town? It’s because of the willingness and the ability to detect friction that resists your normal growth and flow. And once you master these six essential, uh, strategies, you’ll find that it’s that much easier for you to generate the kind of practice that you really want. So this, uh, QR code that you see on this sheet, you’ll also be able to just run your camera over it, your take out your phone. If you haven’t done this already, scan this QR code. You’ll see it on the page on the next page. In a moment, scan that QR code so that you have access to the six essential strategies. You see it right there, right next to me. Go ahead and run your camera over that. It will pop up a link so that you can get to learn what the six essential strategies are and what you might need to do in order to effectively deal with them. 

You know, most of us want to help as many people as we possibly can, but unless we’re willing to be something different than what we currently are, growth is impossible. And once we recognize where those changes have to be and make them growth is inevitable. As usual, it’s my pleasure to be here with you on Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman from The Masters Circle Global, where legendary practices are built and legends are made. Thank you for watching.

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