Three Ways to Expand Your Practice
PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
Michael Carberry
There is a well-known rule of business that may even be a natural law, and it states, “If your business is not expanding, it’s actually contracting.” This rule suggests that there is no staying the same—things either get better or they get worse.
If this makes sense to you, and you believe it to be true, it means that you only have one option, and that is to expand your practice. Even if you aie not sure that this statement is true, it’s not a bad concept to adopt as truth because it will cause you to look for ways to expand your practice instead of becoming complacent.
■ " All of the policies of your office, all of the orders you give as the owner, and all of the actions your team takes should either directly or indirectly lead to greater patient volume, even your clinical work treating patients. ï Ï
Once you adopt this viewpoint, the next thing you need to do is figure out the best direction of expansion. This brings us to another rule of business. There are three ways to expand any business:
1. Increase your fees.
2. Increase your patient volume.
3. Increase the number of services that you offer.
All three methods of expansion are valid and should be applied at one time or another. In fact, since you’ve decided that your business must continually expand, it should become obvious that, at any given time, you should be working to expand one or more of these three factors.
If you are a seasoned business owner, you know that reversing the decline of a shrinking business can be very challenging. Once it staits to contract, a momentum needs to be overcome. It’s much easier to help an already expanding business continue on its way because, in that case, there is positive momentum.
Increasing fees is not something most businesses can do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Under normal economic conditions, it’s a strategy that is appropriate to utilize occasionally, but likely not more than one a year.
The second way is to increase the patient volume of your practice, and, of course, this strategy is most appropriate to employ nearly all the time. All of the policies of your office, all of the orders you give as the owner, and all of the actions your team takes should either directly or indirectly lead to greater patient volume, even your clinical work treating patients. For example, if you provide the most incredible clinical care, it will indirectly help increase patient volume because happy clients may tell friends and family, and most likely will consider using your services in the future.
There are many ways to increase your practice’s patient volume. In fact, that is the focus of most business consultants, practice-building seminars, and practice-growth strategies. However, increasing patient volume is not the focus of this article. The focus is practice-expansion option number three— increasing the number of services offered by your clinic.
When you increase the number of services offered by your clinic, you increase the following two factors:
1) The number of people who can benefit from your services (potential customers).
2) The number of conditions that your clinic can treat for any one customer.
These two factors not only expand your clinic, but they directly benefit your patients. In fact, while there is nothing wrong with increasing your prices, and there is nothing wrong with seeing more patients, both of those practice-expansion options do not directly benefit your existing patients. That does not mean that those first two options should be ignored. On the contrary, they aie completely valid and necessary.
What is true about the third way to expand your practice is that by adding additional services, you not only benefit your business, but you also provide a real and tangible benefit to the existing patients. Everyone wins when you offer more services. When you add more services it benefits the patients, the business, and the business owner, and it makes the healthcare system more efficient since that same patient does not have to go to two separate locations to receive what he or she needs
Almost all studies on improving the healthcare delivery system show that an integrated practice is part of an improved future. Why not become that future now?
‘ ‘What is true about the third way to expand your practice is that by adding additional services, you not only benefit your business, but you also provide a real and tangible benefit to the existing patients. 5 5
When it comes to adding additional services to a chiropractic practice, one of the limiting factors is the scope of practice. Although it varies from state to state, a chiropractic license is relatively narrow in scope compared to a medical provider (MD, DO, NP, PA). This means that there are only a few services that a chiropractic clinic can consider adding. This should not stop you from adding those services, though. The point is that you only have a few options.
Medical practices, on the other hand, have a nearly unlimited scope of practice. For the most part, a medical provider can do or deliver just about any healthcare service. This means that if you want to provide a wide range of healthcare services to your community through your business (not personally as a DC), it is most practical in a medical office setting.
Many chiropractors/business owners have recognized this fact and decided to transition their chiropractic practices to an integrated medical center, which includes chiropractic along with other complementary services delivered by medical providers. This transition is easier than you think, and it affords you the opportunity to deliver a more comprehensive healthcare service to your community.
What does an integrated medical center look like? That depends on a lot of factors, but most importantly, your vision of the ideal healthcare center. It’s really up to you to decide, within the scope of regulations, what services to provide.
The most common integrated medical practice built by an owner with a chiropractic degree is a physical medicine office. This is usually a medical center that employs at least one chiropractor, one or more medical providers, and possibly a physical therapist, along with all of the other traditional support staff, both administrative and clinical. The medical services that are offered highly complement the work of the chiropractor, and may allow for conservative medical management of conditions that are past the point of being able to be fully handled with chiropractic alone. A simple example is knee degeneration. It’s a common problem that plagues a huge portion of the population, and it often gets little to no attention in most chiropractic offices. However, there are very simple, conservative medical services that can be offered by a medical provider that do not conflict with a traditional holistic philosophy.
Integrating your practice broadens the scope of your business, but not the scope of your chiropractic license. This is an important factor to remember and is at the core of why some chiropractors who own and manage integrated medical clinics have found themselves in hot water with regulatory agencies.
Since the medical license is so broad, it allows the business owner to construct his or her vision of the ideal healthcare center. Although becoming a medical center is not a requisite to using practice-expansion strategy number three, it is a great option.
Regardless of your current practice style, and even if bringing medical services into your clinic is not for you, make sure to successfully apply all three practice-expansion strategies to grow your business and become the best healthcare center in your community.
ry Michael Carberry, DC is the President and & founder of Advanced Medical Integration (AMI), a consulting group which assists practice owners to integrate medical services with chiropractic and Am. rehab services. To learn more about AMI visit http:// www.AMIdoctors. com. Dr. Carberry first brought medical services into his original chiropractic practice in 1995. Since then, Dr Carberry has owned several medically integrated clinics in multiple states. Dr. Carberry also lectures nationally on business systems and chiropractic philosophy. You can contact Advanced Medical Integration at 888-777-0815
