Chiropractic Practice: The Hidden Revenue Generator in Your Practice, Part II

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This episode is called The Hidden Revenue Generator in Your Practice. As we’ve learned from the Lifetime Patient Formula, building a practice of committed, responsible, wellness oriented patients requires three components.

A foundation of optimal chiropractic care, coaching on optimal lifestyle habits, and an optimal program of health and wellness modalities and technology. When these three elements are in proper balance, patients receive the greatest benefit from your services. In Part 1 of the Hidden Revenue Generator, we talked about how building patient compliance and retention was the first step toward optimizing your profitability.

In Part 2, we’ll explore how to integrate your modalities and technology into your fee policies so the additional services improve your patient’s well being and also generate more revenue for your clinic. That extra capital can be applied to training staff, upgrading equipment, enhancing your office aesthetics, or maybe even a bonus for you and your team.

So let’s talk about how to fairly and properly monetize your back end services to amplify your core service of offering the finest chiropractic care. Obviously you have an ethical responsibility to choose a program of care that is in the patient’s best interest. And then see how you can make that profitable rather than the other way around.

There’s more than enough money to be made in a well run office. So you never have to step outside the boundaries of decency and common sense. Choose fair and reasonable fees that are a good fit with your target audience and implement your policies with compassion as well as efficiency. Make your fee schedule consistent from patient to patient, except under unusual circumstances.

Match your decision making with the patient’s values. The better you understand and respond to your patient’s needs, the more decisive you’ll become with your recommendations, both for chiropractic care and the ancillary services you offer. To develop specific fee policies, evaluate the costs of buying, staffing, and using these modalities and then add the desired profit margin.

Let’s look at some examples of this on some common healing technology so we can see how the finances work. Let’s say you purchase a handheld laser for 6,000. What should you charge each time you use it? Let’s assume that you typically schedule 25 visits a day and about 8 to 10 of those patients would need the laser.

If you have office hours four days a week, that would be 35 to 40 applications per week, say about 150 laser visits per month. So if you charge 20, whenever you use laser 150 visits a month would yield 3,000. So after two months, you’d make your money back and be in profit. But watch, if you charge 40, instead of 20, 150 visits a month would cover your investment in the first month.

And you’d be in profit twice as fast. You can see that paying the equipment Paying for the equipment may happen quickly, but what happens after that? If you charge 20 and pay off the laser in two months, then each month thereafter, you would earn 150 visits times 20 bucks a visit or 3000 a month.

Something like giving yourself a 36,000 raise over the next year, a six to one annual return on your investment. If you charge 40, then the same 150 visits per month gives you a return of 6, 000 each month. Something like giving yourself a raise of 72,000, a 12 to 1 annual return on your income. Adjust your fees so the result is the profit margin you prefer.

Now, some lay reserves cost considerably more. But the reasoning on developing your fee schedule is the same, just scale the numbers accordingly. If you spend 30, 000 or 50, 000 on your laser, clearly that equipment gives you a clinical advantage that you’re paying for and therefore you need to charge properly for it.

Many doctors with these more exotic lasers charge 100 or more, sometimes much more, for each visit. Let’s look at another handheld device. The ResiMax. At a modest price point around 600, you can invest in several and use them simultaneously on a patient, or work on several patients at once, or even rent them out.

The accessible purchase price makes it available to any practitioner with any size practice, and also offers significant latitude on fee. But most doctors seem to be charging 20 or 25 per application when they use it during a chiropractic adjustment, or 40 or more when they use it exclusively. So, if you charge 20 with an adjustment, and you do that 25 times a day, 4 days a week, that would be 20 times 25 visits is 500 a day, times 4 days a week is 2, 000 per week, so over 50 weeks, that would be a 100,000 annual profit cent.

Again, adjust your fee schedule to match your desired profit mark. Let’s look at one more example. I bought a pulsed electromagnetism device for my own use at home, which cost about 5, 000. But you can spend 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 or more depending on the potency and the features of the machine you choose.

While the handheld laser might only take a few minutes to use, PEMF is usually dispensed in parcels of 15, 30, or 60 minutes. So you may only be able to fit six or eight visits per day into your schedule. And with PEMF, the patient is planted in a room on a table or in a chair for the duration. With these guidelines, if you spend 30,000 on a unit and you want to make back your money and get into profit within a few months, work the same process.

If you can see about six to eight PEMF visits per day, that’s about 25 a week or a hundred a month. If you want to get into profit by the fourth month, You need to cover 30,000 over three months or about 10,000 per month. If you plan to do that in a hundred visits, then 10,000 divided by a hundred visits gives you a per visit fee of a hundred dollars.

Once the unit is paid for, you’d earn 10,000 a month for 120,000 annual profit set. Do you get the logic of this? No matter what modality you use, there was a purchase price. There’s a time frame over which you’d like to recoup your investment, and there’s a number of visits per day to help you figure out how much to charge.

There are, of course, other factors that need to be taken into account. Does the modality require dedicated space that cannot therefore be repurposed? Is it an attendant therapy that takes a teammate away from all other responsibilities or requires a new dedicated CA? Do you need materials, equipment, the latest computers or technology?

These costs, among others, must also be factored in to develop a fee policy that brings you the profit you project. Many doctors increase revenues by stacking modalities together. For example, the patient could use BrainTap while lying on a PEMF pad or receiving frequency specific microcurrent. Utilizing these brain based wellness modalities is consistent with the progressive thinking our profession and our patients need.

Become aware of your options so you know what’s available to help guide people past pain relief toward becoming truly healthy. These revenue generation systems were developed by analyzing what successful practitioners are doing right now in real time. They’re business systems, so of course you must comply with the regulations in your area.

If you need expert advice on compliance and fee policies, we usually recommend Sam Collins from Cairo Secure. All of these tips and pointers are designed to help you discover the hidden revenue generators in your practice. You can use these modalities and others to help your patients with pain and inflammation, but learn about the wellness advantages each one offers.

So patients can go beyond asymptomatic to being healthy and eventually well, you can be both a great doctor and a skillful chiropractic entrepreneur, running a profitable business that serves both your neighborhood and your And the greater good. If you want to learn more, scan the QR code on your screen to go to the six essentials landing page, or you can leave your questions below and I’ll gladly respond.

Thanks for watching. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman for The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching.

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