Membership Does Have Its Privileges

Dr. R. A. Foxworth, FICC, MCS-P

Your members went to chiropractic college in order to be of service and to make a positive difference in the world. Not surprisingly, they’d also like to make a living doing it. And that’s harder to do than ever before.

Payscale, a company that uses both crowdsourcing and big data technologies to create what is now the world’s largest database of 54 million salary profiles, puts the average chiropractor’s income at about $60,000 a year. That barely covers the cost of living for the the average household, let alone the average doctor’s repayment of student loan debt.

Experience, as well as broadening areas of specialty and services offered, can boost your bottom line. But there are even more factors that threaten it; from fiercely negotiated Medicaid and third-party payer reimbursement to the substantial risks inherent in doctors not understanding how to abide by today’s strict rules.

Common practices such as offering a longtime patient a discount to help him get maintenance care or offering time-of-service discounts to make it easier for patients to pay on time can put doctors and their practices in danger of audits, fines, recoupments, and worse if you aren’t careful and mindful of the rules. It’s so easy for well-meaning docs trying to keep their heads above water to inadvertently or unknowingly create illegal dual fee schedules or fall into inducements by enthusiastically trying to promote their practices with a deeply discounted offers.

Your docs are struggling to understand the rules. Many of them are struggling to stay competitive. And most of them don’t know how to reconcile the two.

At ChiroHealthUSA, we talk with doctors all the time who are frustrated, challenged, and taking unnecessary risks without even realizing it. Many of them have never heard of a Discount Medical Plan Organization (DMPO), or if they have, don’t know exactly what one is or how joining can help them.

But once explained, the benefits of a DMPO are obvious and a welcome relief to a beleaguered doctor’s ears. ChiroHealthUSA is a provider-owned network that works with a DMPO and is designed with doctors in mind. Our network model allows your members to offer legal, network-based discounts to cash, under-insured and “out-of-network” patients who become ChiroHealthUSA members.

Members covered by Medicare and federal programs are eligible for discounts on non-covered services. The network approach to discounts reduces the risks of compliance and OIG violations related to inducements, improper down-coding, dual fee schedules, and potentially inappropriate time-of-service discounts.

Your members are working longer hours and often for less money than ever before. They are simply too overwhelmed and too numb from paperwork to take in more information, no matter how helpful it may be.

Your member doctors can accept a lower fee from their patients who become ChiroHealthUSA members, and without insurance company restrictions on what’s covered and what’s not. In other words, ChiroHealthUSA helps your doctors offer their patients affordable chiropractic care, especially that critical maintenance and wellness care that insurance companies and Medicare won’t pick up.

And that means that uninsured patients who simply don’t come in for care because they consider it discretionary and underinsured patients who walk once their insurance runs out will, instead, become patients who stay and pay. That’s huge.

There’s no cost to your doctors to become a ChiroHealthUSA providers. The patient pays $49 a year which is easily recovered in the first visit. And, that fee includes their entire family.

Direct your members to chirohealthusa.com, where we offer free webinars and other resources that allow doctors to learn exactly how to put ChiroHealthUSA provider status to work for them.