Dr. R. A. Foxworth, FICC, MCS-P
As your members are discovering, today’s healthcare environment, with its ridiculously high deductibles and copays, means that many patients may no longer consider chiropractic as essential. Rather, they consider it desirable, but optional. If they can’t find a way to pay for it, some will go without or opt for treatment that is covered, even if that means surgery. Not logical I know! But, I’ve heard that from patients myself.
This is underscored in a recent study designed to better understand and address the challenges of the patient experience in today’s heavily managed care environment. Patients are moving away from their historical role as followers of doctor directives and into the roles of wary consumers. The study found, somewhat discouragingly, that 81% of consumers surveyed indicated they’re unsatisfied with their healthcare experiences. Read the full report here.
Furthermore, the study uncovered an extremely large gap between the experience consumers report receiving and what providers believe they are offering. In fact, the providers surveyed overestimated the overall quality of the experience they give patients by more than 20%.
A fully satisfying patient experience, it turns out, isn’t just about a good adjustment table-side manner. It’s also about feeling heard, and even more crucially, having a clear understanding of both the need for care and the financial policies of the practice. This is an area where many of your members, quite simply, need help.
Most of your doctor/members are solid on delivering a clinical report of findings. But where many doctors fall short is with the FINANCIAL Report of Findings (FROF). Some doctors/clinics don’t deliver one at all. Others assign this important task often to an undertrained CA. The patients leave the office either feeling unsure about whether they can afford care, or, worse, having made the subconscious decision that when their insurance runs out, they will too.
Patients aren’t just patients any more, they are healthcare consumers. The dollars and cents influence their decisions about whether to go forward with care, whether to continue with treatment once the immediate pain is gone, or whether to walk, or limp away altogether.
When your members skip over or deliver an inadequate FROF, they’re doing their patients, and their practices, a grave disservice. They could even be losing patients over it.
ChiroHealthUSA offers your members not only a compliant way to offer patients affordable care, we also make the FROF beautifully simple and stress-free. ChiroHealthUSA is network that works in conjunction with a Discount Medical Plan Organization that costs each patient and their family an affordable $49 per year often recovered in the first patient visit. There’s no cost to your members to become providers, and they get to set their own level of discounts, except in the state of Washington. ChiroHealthUSA provides a compliant way to offer any and all your members’ patients capped, discounted fees based on the practices’ actual fee schedules.
Help your members stay in compliance, keep today’s healthcare consumers from walking out the door, and deliver an effective FROF with a simple financial policy all by becoming ChiroHealthUSA providers. Click here for more information and free resources to help doctors lay a strong financial foundation.
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Why is the Discount Challenge prize amount $15,024? Because that is the average “per-occurrence” fine for Medicare inducements. That’s not $15,024 per patient, that’s not per provider, that’s PER VISIT. Stinks, doesn’t it? To us, the prize amount is worth the investment if we can help our profession better understand proper discounting.