COLUMN BUSINESS TALK It’s about time I Making the most of a precious resource BY ANTHONY LOMBARDI slot for table preparation. A one-hour massage costs the patient $85, while five 15-minute chiropractic appointments cost patients $50 each – which means they would be earning $250 in the same amount of time. Time can also reflect quality of treat-ment and how valued your associates feel. Our physiotherapists spend 30 minutes with each patient – that’s two patients per hour. In addition, only the physiotherapists (not assistants or kine-siologists) spend time with the patients, and the treatment is always one-on-one. One established physiotherapist told me that jobs are quite easy to come by in their field. However, finding a good job that involves mentorship, reasona-bly long treatment times, and fair pay is more difficult. He said in his experi-ence, a therapist may be paid $35 per hour and be pressured to see four to six patients an hour in a full day. In my practice, I make sure our physios see two patients per hour in a relaxed work environment, while they work on incen-tive percentage rather than salary – so the more patients they see the more money they earn. It’s important that your clinic employees receive enough “time” as well. Naturally, time can be in the form of paid hours at work, but even more significant is providing time for them in the form of meetings and communica-tion. Frequent interaction with your employees ensures the growth and development of your practice and the nurturing of the employer-employee relationship. In my practice, I meet with every member of the support staff individually for five minutes per week so that duties and responsibilities are clarified and understood. Clearerthinking.com calculates that Canadians put a value on their time that amounts to an average hourly rate of $27.75 after tax dollars. During times that I run behind schedule at work, I often think about this statistic because not only does it motivate me to stay on time but it motivates me to give my patients the best treatment experience possible – when it’s their turn. I respect my patients’ time and the fact that they chose to spend it in my office. I make it a point to demonstrate this through quality assessment and treatments that produce outstanding results. What if you could decrease your time while increasing the time of patient visits? This way, people would perceive a high sense of value associated with your services along with the high quality of your clinical treatment. This can be accomplished through refined assess-ment and pinpoint treatments – which complement the core of our profession. became a chiropractic student in the fall of 1999 and graduated in the winter of 2002. I started my own practice six weeks later. Ever since, I have been finding ways to use and manipulate time to improve the quality of treatment I deliver and enhance the overall patient experience. For me, time is power. Power to get people better faster and differently than what they are used to. This is powerful because it allows me to have distinc-tion, which gives patients something to talk about when engaging others with similar problems – and this leads di-rectly to referrals. It’s also power be-cause it attracts other chiropractors and therapists who wish to work with me and help me help more patients. It’s basic physics: power=work/time or P=W/T. I am able to manipulate this formula in different ways to ensure each treatment is a powerful one. Dur-ing my assessment, my functional ap-proach allows me to reduce the amount of time it takes to find the problem. By reducing the time variable during as-sessment, the power value increases. Because I can spend more time on treatment, I can do much more work on the soft tissue and peripheral nerv-ous system, and this, in turn, further increases my power variable. For my associate therapists, time can mean money, and time can also reflect the quality of their work. For instance, chiropractors who have RMT designa-tion begin to realize that once their practice begins to grow they shy away from doing massages because they can make significantly more money seeing chiropractic patients. For example, a one-hour massage requires four 15-min-ute time slots and one 15-minute time Assessment I use the EXSTORE assessment system. I find this effective because it can be completed in about three minutes, which allows me more time to spend on treatment. Acupuncture Acupuncture, electroacupuncture or medical acupuncture allows you to provide restorative aid to inhibited mus-cles, normalize neurogenic inflamma-tion and control the autonomic nervous system, while allowing you to be omni-present in more than one room at once. Multiple rooms DR. ANTHONY LOMBARDI, DC, is consultant to athletes in the NFL, CFL and NHL, and founder of the Hamilton Back Clinic in Hamilton, Ont. He teaches his fundamental EXSTORE Assessment System and conducts practice-building workshops to health professionals. Visit exstore.ca for information. 14 Canadian Chiropractor February 2016 The more rooms you have at your disposal, the easier you will be able to clone yourself (and your treatments) within the universe of your clinic. Usu-ally, I have three to five rooms available so I can assess or reassess patients and www.canadianchiropractor.ca
Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor February 2016: Page 14
