More Treat and Less Trick for You and Your Patients

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

October is more than just the month when you try to figure out if putting out a bowl of bite-sized Snickers is at odds with your Healthy Lifestyle workshops. It’s also the perfect time to close the year out on a high note and take on 2017 planning.

If you have patients who aren’t yet ChiroHealthUSA members, you have a great opportunity right now to talk to them about joining CHUSA. By this time of year, many of your patients who have chiropractic health insurance benefits may have run out of allowed visits. This is especially true of your Medicare patients, for whom many services aren’t even covered or, depending on your MAC, may be “screened” at a fairly low number per year.

In addition to current patient reach-outs, now’s a great time to get your ChiroHealthUSA scripting and outreach plans together for next year. The first quarter can be a challenging time. Patients who overspent during the holidays are paying that debt off and feeling that they need to cut their expenses to the bone, sometimes at the expense of their health. Chiropractic may be one of the budget items they consider optional.

Remember that you can re-engage those financially stressed patients as well as help new ones when you tell them that they can pay the same amount or less than their insurance co-pays through the end of the year and beyond, using their ChiroHealthUSA memberships. Patients who’ve seen their insurer’s Explanation of Benefits often assume that the fees they see is what they’ll have to pay out of pocket once insurance runs out. All too often, that “billed amount” has patients running for the door.

And it’s true. Without a ChiroHealthUSA membership, that is what they’d have to pay (or should pay) per visit. While they wouldn’t know about and don’t need to understand the intricacies of having a dual fee schedule, you and your front desk staff know that you should not offer one. Even if it isn’t against the law in your state to charge more to insurance than you do to cash patients, think about how that looks in the eyes of the patients. Every patient should be billed the same fee, and then IF you offer a discount, use the contractual network-based discount under ChiroHealthUSA. While it may not be the only way to offer a discount, it is one of the simplest, safest, and sanest way to help your patients.

Most patients can easily understand a membership discount. One, low annual fee up front covers them and their immediate families and, as you know, is usually recoverable in a single visit or two. They can get discounted chiropractic care usually for the same amount or less than their insurance co-pays in many cases.

Once you get your conversations on-point and consistent, the decision to become a ChiroHealthUSA member should be a complete no-brainer for your patients. They will save hundreds of dollars over the course of the year for their care, and you can keep patients from dropping out of care when their insurance runs out. It’s also the perfect solution for patients who are uninsured altogether and may believe they can’t afford anything but emergency care. Certainly you have patients who only call the office when they’ve injured themselves, right? ChiroHealthUSA is a great way to significantly help those patients understand and take advantage of the benefits of ongoing wellness care; the kind of care you expected you’d be providing back when you were in chiropractic college.

For front desk scripting and other ideas about how to make patient enrollment an easy, natural part of your patient financial conversations, visit your Provider Resource Page. We’ve got the tools you need to recapture patients who’ve exhausted insurance benefits for the year, but also help you gear up for your best year yet in 2017.