Have you ever wondered if your holistic practice needs a mission statement? Do you feel intimidated about writing one or are worried it’ll sound too generic? Fear not, we’ve got you covered.
Mission statements are a foundational element of your holistic practice’s business operations and help communicate an important message to your clients, both present and potential. This compounds to foster patient loyalty and boost your overall healthcare revenue cycle!
Writing a mission statement doesn’t have to be mission impossible for your holistic practice. Let’s dive into the components of a mission statement, why your practice needs one, and how to put it all together.
Why Is a Mission Statement Important?
A mission statement articulates why your practice exists in the first place; unlike other types of business writing, such as a Statement of Purpose or Vision Summary, the mission statement reveals the values of the business and should have an inspiring tone of voice.
Mission statements can be displayed and promoted in a plethora of ways, including:
- Reception area or waiting room
- Exam room
- Brochures and pamphlets
- Newsletters
- Stationary
- Website
- Blogs
- And more!
In addition to being a valuable piece of writing, your holistic practice’s mission statement is important for the following reasons:
Increases Patient Engagement
When patients understand the core reason for your holistic practice’s operations, they’re more likely to engage on a deeper level with your practice. Patient engagement is huge for your healthcare revenue cycle in terms of patient satisfaction, client retention, and word of mouth marketing.
Stands Out from the Competition
Anything, within reason, that your practice can do to distinguish itself from the competition is probably a good idea: crafting a succinct and compelling mission statement is one such manner to go about this! A little creativity and sincerity can go a long way to helping your practice stand out from the competition and make your operations more memorable.
Helps Your Patients Connect with the Core of Your Practice
Patients will have their own perceptions and expectations about your holistic practice from your online reputation, word of mouth recommendations, and other sources of information that don’t include your actual practice space. Reading your meaningful mission statement can help shape their perception and build a better relationship between your practice and your patients.
Core Components of a Mission Statement
Now that we’ve outlined the importance of a mission statement for your holistic practice and how you can leverage this piece of writing to promote your practice, let’s dig into the core components of a mission statement.
Brevity
Perhaps you’ve heard of the phrasing “Be brief, be bright, be gone” to illustrate the mantra for effective communication; the same applies here for your mission statement. It shouldn’t be more than about 100 words or a few sentences, which means you’ll want to refine it from a rambling story to a clear, concise piece of writing.
Philosophy of Care
Your holistic practice exists to deliver quality care to members of your community, of course, but how can you express this in phrasing that is relevant, compelling, and authentic to your operations? Brainstorm with your staff or even pick the brains of your patients to see how your practice manifests its philosophy of care in daily operations.
Guiding Principles
What are the core tenets and values that guide your holistic practice’s operations? Highlight a couple of them in your mission statement so that your patients gain a clearer understanding of your principles.
A Healthy Dose of Inspiration
Your mission statement’s mission is to inform and inspire all who read it, including yourself, your other staff members, and your target audience. As such, it’s important to utilize an inspiring tone when writing and to captivate the reader with an authentic message that reflects your practice.
How to Write a Mission Statement for Your Holistic Practice in 3 Steps
As we said earlier, writing a mission statement doesn’t have to be mission impossible: it doesn’t need to take days or weeks to put it together, just a little bit of creativity.
You can write your holistic practice’s mission statement in three easy steps:
- Define your practice’s purpose: articulate what your practice does to serve your patients and the community
- Describe your practice’s goals and objectives: briefly highlight what sets your practice into motion and guides your operations
- Be specific and brief: avoid using filler words or industry jargon that will distract your reader from your mission statement
Your mission statement can be effectively leveraged in a myriad of ways, ranging from your website presence to posting it in your office and including it in marketing efforts. This piece of writing is essential for connecting with your audience and distinguishing yourself from the competition in your area.
Another important reminder is that your mission statement can evolve over time. For example, perhaps you add another specialty to your practice, or you initiate a relationship treating the veterans in your community; these elements can and should be reflected in your mission statement!
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to Streamline Your Operations!
Wish you could spend more time refining the various pieces of writing you need for your holistic practice? Do you often find yourself swamped with medical billing problems, rejected insurance claims, and generally at a loss for updated billing regulations?
Partner with the experts at Holistic Billing Services to take the burden of billing off your shoulders and empower you to focus more energy, creativity, and time into your practice. We’ve got experience in your specialty, and we can’t wait to see you optimize your operations! Your success is our success and we’re here with you for every step of your healthcare revenue cycle.
Running a successful medical practice involves a long list of components. In addition to actual patient care, there’s administrative work, insurance claims processing, and billing. Add to that patient support, marketing, and follow up consultations. It’s a full plate — enough to make it tempting to do what needs to get done right now, while putting everything else on the back burner.
Such can be the case with developing a healthcare strategic plan. Sure, you want to scale, but it doesn’t need to happen today, so pencil it in for later. Before you move on to the next task, take a minute to consider this further. At the end of the day, having a plan in place is what will ensure that you move in the direction you want to go — and that you have a tangible way to track progress.
What is a Healthcare Strategic Plan?
A healthcare strategic plan is an established process used to determine what are your practice’s goals, procedures to meet them, and the steps to take along the way to ensure that you’re on the right track.
While you can certainly implement short-term goals, the focus is on long-term planning, with specific milestones at certain intervals.
7 Benefits of Healthcare Strategic Planning
While it’s common sense to simply think that you want to gradually grow your practice, establishing a healthcare strategic plan means creating a blueprint with actionable steps for each stage of your growth. In doing so, everyone involved within your organization will reap the benefits, including:
-
Streamlined Processes
Establishing standard procedures ensures consistency and everyone on your team being aware of what to do and when to do it. It eliminates wasted time and resources going back and forth trying to figure out what to do or who’s in charge of doing what.
-
Better Communications
When you have processes for all elements of your practice, you eliminate the guesswork. It also ensures that each department knows how other departments conduct their own tasks, which better helps them align to work like a well-oiled machine.
-
Predictive Analytics
An essential part of having a strategic plan means using software that tracks your key performance indicators (KPIs). What these are may vary depending on your specific goals. For example, attracting more website traffic, engaging more users on social media, patient referrals, and determining whether you’ll have a surge in appointments during certain times of the year. By tracking past performance, identifying insights, and acting accordingly, you’ll be in a better position to gauge what is likely to happen next.
-
A Better Patient Experience
When you establish processes, train your team adequately, and provide your staff with the right tools and resources, a natural consequence is that patients will have a better experience as they interact with your practice — ease of scheduling, reduced wait times, efficient claims processing, timely follow-ups, appointment reminders, efficient customer care, etc.
-
Employee Retention
Employees are more likely to stay at a position where they are supported and provided with all of the tools they need to do their job. This includes planning for a large enough staff for busy times of the year, using software that is easy to use, and knowing where to find SOPs for any tasks they may be unfamiliar with. This makes it infinitely easier for them to conduct their responsibilities effectively.
-
Brand Awareness
Every long-term success plan incorporates marketing best practices. Developing buyer personas (in a medical practice’s case, this means identifying the patients you wish to attract), creating content that addresses their questions, and ads, where they can find them, is a great starting point. Combine this with word-of-mouth marketing from the excellent patient experience and it’s only a matter of time before your target audience starts recognizing your brand.
-
Patient Retention
When you’re intentional about making things better for your patients, they notice. And while quality care should always be paramount, so is a commitment to valuing their time, addressing their concerns, and making them feel that every single time they engage with your practice, they are the most important thing at that very moment. And none of this happens by chance. It’s all the result of well-executed strategic planning.
How to Develop a Medical Practice Strategic Plan
Now that you’re aware of all of the advantages of making strategic planning a priority, let’s take a look at how to create one for your own practice.
Develop Your Mission and Vision
This sounds cliché, but organizations do this for a reason. Why did you start your practice? How do you want patients to feel? What do you want to be known for? That’s your mission and should be the guiding principle in everything you do.
By the same token, your vision focuses on how you want to move forward. Is your goal to be the leading oncology practice in your area? Is it to be a pediatric dentistry clinic that’s accessible to all income brackets? Even if you move the goalposts, you want to have something to aim for.
Establish Your Core Values
What are the characteristics you believe are most important when running your practice? This could be anything that fosters a sense of trust (e.g. transparency, proactivity, integrity). Or it could be diversity and inclusion (e.g. ensuring you have people from different races, cultures, and backgrounds in leadership positions). What do you want your practice to be known for? Base your core values on that.
Prioritize Your Goals
Every organization has goals; but not all of them are equally important. For example, if your main objective is to aid underserved communities, you can start to develop ways to liaise with nonprofits, pro bono clinics, charities, and other community groups who share the same purpose. If you want your practice to be known for medical research, look for ways to work with clinical research scientists. If you want to be known as a practice with extraordinary patient care, look into the resources that will enable you to do so — such as a customer portal, healthcare CRM, employee training, etc.
Develop Action Plans
Once you’ve established your practice’s priorities, it’s time to make a list of actionable steps for how to get there. Identify who’s going to be in charge of what. Institute a budget. Establish milestones and deadlines for each of them. And make sure that everything aligns with your core values. For example, if one of them is transparency, keep everyone involved notified of what’s going on and how to communicate with you in the event of any hiccups or concerns.
Track Analytics
Change requires a common goal, everyone rowing in the same direction, and consistency. But since it happens so gradually, you need a way to gauge whether you’re moving the needle. Use software that enables you to create dashboards that reflect the metrics that are important to you. Depending on your goals, this could be marketing metrics, such as patient acquisition costs; or patient satisfaction metrics, such as average wait time; or total monthly revenue, or days each claim spends in accounts receivable. Doing so will help you identify what’s working and what needs to be modified.
Streamline Your Billing Processes for More Efficient Practice Management
At Holistic Billing Service, we’ve been assisting chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage therapy practices for over two decades. We are the nation’s largest billing provider for holistic healthcare, serving more than 2,500 practices across the United States.
By partnering with an experienced medical billing team, you can spend less time thinking about managing CPT coding and insurance claims, and more time scaling your practice and delivering high-quality care to your patients.
Contact us so that we can create a custom solution that aligns best with your practice’s needs.
The goal of your holistic practice, no matter the specialty you offer, is to deliver quality care and effective treatment to the patients in your community. Complementary treatments like massage therapy or acupuncture are proven methods for managing ailments such as chronic pain and are valid avenues to reduce widespread opioid usage.
One method for attracting new patients to your holistic practice is to network with medical practices in your community. These physicians—who likely have patients living with pain or other ailments—would be a great source for patients getting referrals for holistic treatments instead of prescription medications.
Networking in healthcare can feel intimidating if you’re not sure what to do or where to start; however, with just a few tips, your holistic practice can enjoy the benefits of networking and delivering great care to your community! Let’s explore some benefits of networking and how to get referrals from medical practices in your area.
5 Benefits of Networking in Healthcare
Networking, which is another word for professionally mingling, can provide a few benefits to your holistic practice and revenue cycle when it comes to making new connections and strengthening partnerships with other healthcare professionals.
Some benefits of networking for your holistic practice include:
Develop Business Connections In Your Area
Networking is about sharing information and resources with other healthcare professionals in your community. What naturally happens as part of this exchange is building and fortifying relationships within your city or town. Meeting and connecting with fellow healthcare providers can lead to a more engaged network, which leads to partnerships and opportunities in the future.
Get Inspired with New Ideas for Your Holistic Practice
With each venture into the realm of networking in healthcare, you’re likely to see new perspectives or creative marketing techniques as implemented by other healthcare professionals. Maybe it’s a catchy slogan, appealing graphic design scheme, or inventive manner for capturing information via QR code or raffle drawing. Alternatively, if you see the same monotonous patterns of the presentation then maybe your lightbulb moment is working out how to distinguish your practice from others.
Learn What’s Available in Your Community
They say knowledge is power and that you don’t know what you don’t know. Networking in healthcare helps you learn what practices, resources, people, and programs are available to your community. This information can be pivotal to share with your patients and can help inform you and your staff of other professionals in your community. Exploring what your community has to offer can help you empower your patients and, in some cases, help you see what might be missing.
Put Your Name Out There
A cornerstone of networking and building relationships within your community is simply showing up. When you put yourself and your holistic practice out there, other practices and professionals will take notice! Don’t underestimate the power of a conversation or the opportunity to meet new people in the healthcare field.
Boost Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle
There’s no doubt that networking in healthcare has the potential to grow your business and attract new patients to your holistic practice! From this perspective, networking is a huge resource to boost your healthcare revenue cycle management strategy and enable you to boost revenue with new customers.
3 Tips for Networking with Medical Practices
Ready to reap the aforementioned benefits of networking in healthcare and connect with medical practices in your community? Start with these 3 tips for networking in healthcare, which include:
Connect on Social Media
Networking doesn’t have to be accomplished in-person—social media platforms are a wealth of information and have a ton of resources that can help you connect with medical practices in your city.
Consider making a business account for your holistic practice on Instagram or Facebook and share helpful content for your followers and patients. This is a great resource for you to also engage with the medical practices who also utilize Facebook or Instagram—you can Like, Comment, and Share their posts, when relevant, which results in them noticing your profile and connecting with you.
Another method for connecting on social media is to leverage LinkedIn; use your profile to interact with other healthcare professionals and share useful content on the site. This is an effective way to keep you and your holistic practice top of mind when medical practices and their physicians are looking to refer patients to complementary providers.
Leverage Your Patients’ Word of Mouth
The patients who visit you for holistic treatments likely have a traditional medical provider that they see—therefore, they’re a perfect bridge for connecting you and the medical practices in your area! When appropriate, asking about their physician can lead to the perfect networking opportunity and help you gauge where your patients are coming from. This information can help you target specific medical practices in addition to broad networking efforts with other healthcare professionals in your community.
Organize an Open House
Instead of—or, in addition to—networking efforts that take you out of your holistic practice, consider hosting an open house or networking event at your office!
Bringing other healthcare professionals and potential patients into your space gives you a chance to demonstrate how clean and comfortable your practice is; plus, it can help them geographically place your holistic practice in relation to their home, practice, gym, and other spots that they frequently visit. You can entice people to visit and participate in your networking event by offering a raffle or drawing for a gift card.
Wish You Had More Time for Networking? Let Holistic Billing Services Handle Your Revenue Cycle!
Marketing efforts, organizing events, traveling to professional events, and more all take time, energy, and creativity. These resources can be strained if you’re constantly dealing with mountains of paperwork or having to rework rejected claims that cost your holistic practice money.
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to handle your medical coding and billing needs so you can focus more on what matters most: delivering great holistic care to your community! Our experts have extensive experience in whatever your specialty is and we’re eager to help your practice thrive.
Contact us today to learn more!
Employee onboarding entails all the tasks and procedures that empower a new hire to adjust to your holistic practice environment, their position, and new set of responsibilities. On the flip side, offboarding ties up any loose ends between your holistic practice and the recently departed employee. Whether you’re welcoming a new staff member or saying farewell to a colleague, there are certain measures you should take to onboard—or offboard—members at your holistic practice.
The Importance of Smooth Onboarding and Offboarding Procedures
Employee onboarding practices help set the tone for a new hire at your holistic practice. You’ll want to provide a smooth onboarding experience for new employees so they feel welcomed to your office and can quickly navigate their position and the responsibilities entailed. Establishing a standard onboarding process further demonstrates professionalism at your holistic practice as well as consideration for the new employee who doesn’t know the particularities of your practice.
It’s important to note that onboarding practices should be established in addition to offboarding procedures. Whatever the reason may be—whether it’s due to termination of employment or the colleague is moving to another state or something else—over the course of managing your holistic practice, you’ll have employees leave.
Since it’s an inevitable part of working with people, it’s essential that your practice’s offboarding measures are established and followed. Many of these measures are in place to secure your holistic practice’s patient information and fortify cybersecurity measures, which helps to keep your patients’ personal health information safe. The last thing you’ll want to worry about is whether or not a former employee still has access to your electronic health record system weeks after their last day at your holistic practice.
Best Practices for Onboarding Holistic Practice Staff
Congratulations on growing your holistic practice! When outlining an onboarding program for your holistic practice, consider a few different ideas, including:
Encourage Questions
If they express feeling self-conscious or hesitant to ask for something, then challenge them to ask at least 20 questions by the end of the day. Being steadfast in your openness to questions will help put them at ease and overcome any sense that they might be bothering you too much.
Assign All Relevant Training
Working in an environment where personal health information is stored, managed, and handled means your new hire will need to be HIPAA certified to ensure they know how to properly work with this sensitive information. This secures your patients’ data and keeps your holistic practice in HIPAA compliance, which is crucial in the healthcare industry. Be sure they also are trained in healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse, and cybersecurity best practices that include strong password efforts, etc.
You’ll also want to train them on your holistic practice’s electronic health record system and outline their limitations regarding transferring protected health information on external storage devices, such as thumb drives.
Write and Provide an Employee Handbook
One of the best resources you can provide to a new employee is an employee handbook that features a variety of information and outlines important components of their job. This document will serve as a handy reference for them over the course of their employment at your practice and also functions as a helpful way to discuss in-depth or legal-related information relating to their role.
When putting together an employee handbook, consider the following:
- Your practice’s history, mission, vision and goals
- Your practice’s core values and culture
- Human resources and legal information related to employment
- Your practice’s policies
- Employee benefits
This will ensure your new hire is on the same page as your holistic practice and can further facilitate questions.
Best Practices for Offboarding Staff
Offboarding practices are just as important as onboarding procedures at your holistic practice; a colleague can leave for a number of reasons so it’s crucial your practice is prepared to offboard an employee.
When establishing these practices for offboarding staff, consider the following:
Secure Your Practice’s Data
A survey from 2018 reveals that 72% of departing employees admitted to taking company data within the 90 days before leaving their employer. Obviously, this is especially heinous in the healthcare world that deals with sensitive patient information and other protected health information. That’s why it’s particularly important that you revoke an employee’s access to your electronic health record system immediately upon their termination and consider restricting their access upon their submission of a two-week’s notice.
Routinely Delete and Remove Access for Former Employees
Be sure to remove the former employee from any user accounts, like emails or shared servers, and deactivate their access to programs or software your holistic practice might use. This includes restricting their physical access to your holistic practice, including key cards or updating building access codes. Get in the habit of routinely verifying all personnel with access to various components of your holistic practice because this will allow you to clear out old files, accounts, and delete inactive users from your systems.
Ask for their Feedback (When Appropriate)
Obviously this tip won’t apply to employees who have had to be terminated and therefore are likely to be disgruntled, but in situations where the employee is leaving on amicable terms, consider asking for their feedback. Put together an informal kind of questionnaire to get their experience and any suggestions for improvement regarding the onboarding process, their time working with you, and anything else you feel is relevant.
The offboarding process, like onboarding, should ensure a smooth transition out of the practice for you and your employee.
Streamline Your Holistic Practice Management with Holistic Billing Services!
Wish you had more time or resources to bring on additional staff at your holistic practice? The employee onboarding process can be extensive and time-consuming; let Holistic Billing Services handle your practice’s medical billing and coding to optimize your revenue cycle and spend more time growing your holistic practice.
Our team of experts have extensive experience in your specialty, and your success is our success. Contact us today to learn more!
More Americans than ever before are embracing holistic healthcare over conventional medicine with nearly 40% of adults using some form of alternative patient care to date. Whether it’s to alleviate chronic pain, reduce stress, or for other benefits, there are countless holistic patient care approaches to prevent, treat, and manage almost every condition or illness.
What is Holistic Care?
Holistic patient care refers to the provision of care based on a mutual understanding of the patient’s physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. In addition, holistic care emphasizes the partnership between nurse and patient and the negotiation of healthcare needs that lead to recovery.
Holistic healthcare is a form of medicine that treats the “whole person,” treating not the physical self, but also the emotional, spiritual, and mental facets as well. Whereas conventional medicine seeks to provide treatment for pain or the ailment, holistic healthcare focuses on both treatment and prevention. For example, if a patient has an ailment and turns to holistic therapy for help, the holistic practitioner will seek any underlying causes, including the patient’s stress levels and diet.
Conventional vs Holistic Patient Care
Conventional healthcare is an approach to medicine that’s based on modern science, and which evaluates the human body, its disorders, and medical treatments in purely biophysical or biochemical terms. Common treatment methods include drugs, radiation, and surgery, for example. Additionally, conventional medicine often utilizes the most statistically likely diagnosis and treatments that work on larger populations through scientific studies, over individualized or specialized methods.
Conventional medicine and holistic healthcare differ in three primary ways:
- Treatment of Illness: Holistic treatments often incorporate medication, natural solutions or supplements, or diet and exercise regimens, like yoga. On the other hand, conventional medicine often includes formal tests and standardized treatments for every patient based on the illness. Treatments often include medication, with brief suggestions for lifestyle changes rather than concrete emphasis or direction to make those changes.
- Cause of Ailment: While conventional medicine looks at physical components, such as corporeal symptoms and genetics, for the causes of illnesses, holistic healthcare looks at the overall wellness of the patient. This includes any possible imbalances, such as issues with mental health and diet, and discussion on how to level out imbalances.
- Insurance Coverage: Until recently, many holistic practitioners were not covered by insurance or were out of network. One survey by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health found that Americans pay more than $30 billion per year on alternative medicines out of pocket. With trends like these, insurance companies are taking note and are moving to be more inclusive of holistic healthcare.
5 Benefits of Holistic Medicine
There are numerous benefits to utilizing holistic healthcare in your wellness journey, ranging from the practitioner’s approach to their overall goal of treating you as a whole person rather than the symptoms of an illness.
Such advantages include:
- Practitioners who offer safe, natural, and effective medicinal treatment options that include lifestyle and self-care, and who use alternatives to traditional prescription drugs and invasive procedures whenever possible
- Aiming to treat the underlying cause of disease or condition, instead of just managing the symptoms; holistic providers will take time to understand their patients as a whole and treat them as such as opposed to just treating individual components
- Prevention is the primary goal, as well as helping the patient unlock their innate healing abilities; patients are seen when they’re well and when they’re sick, which helps the patient and practitioner form a plan for continued well-being and disease prevention
- In part due to the growing popularity of holistic medicine, more Western medical practices are adding supplemental holistic care – making it more accessible for patients. Hundreds of healthcare centers, including hospitals affiliated with Duke, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other top medical research centers, are also offering holistic therapies, including acupuncture, massage therapy, meditation, Chinese herbal therapy, and more.
- For patients increasingly dissatisfied with the minimal time they receive with doctors and with physicians who seem to prescribe a pill for every woe, integrating their conventional treatments with holistic therapies or completely choosing a holistic approach to medicine offers a refreshing new take on care.
What to Look for When Choosing a Holistic Practice
When seeking to incorporate holistic medicine into your overall wellness plan, there are a number of qualities to consider. Here’s where to start: 
Understand Which Specialty – If Any – You Need
First, determine if you’re trying to address a particular ailment or if you want a generalized holistic approach. For example, searching for an acupuncturist might take you down a different path than an Osteopath who can treat all the same ailments as traditional docs (coughs, UTIs, you name it), but they are especially helpful for migraines, back and neck pain, period aches, arthritis, and digestive woes.
Ask Them About Their Approach to Holistic Medicine
This is inherent to whatever your goal is with exploring the many benefits of holistic medicine but essential to know how the particular practitioner approaches treatment. Do they lean more on herbal remedies or energy healing? What’s their background in this type of holistic healthcare? Learning more about the practice and holistic provider can help inform your options when moving forward.
Be Sure They’re Open to Integrative Care With a General Practitioner
While holistic healthcare can offer tremendous benefits and alternatives to conventional medicine, you’ll probably still want to utilize your conventional medicine provider for some situations. This is why it’s important to know if your holistic practitioner can coordinate care with your general practitioner for an overall holistic plan.
How Can Holistic Billing Support Holistic Practices?
No matter what type of holistic practice you’re running, your medical insurance billing processes could use some help. Medical billing is especially complicated for holistic practices and can possibly overwhelm your business as you focus on growing your practice and provide care for your patients. By outsourcing your medical billing, you can leave the responsibility of insurance enrollments, credentialing, and medical billing and coding to the experts – saving you time!
As an experienced billing provider for holistic practices, Holistic Billing Services can help your practice navigate the intricacies of insurance billing claims to minimize denials, increase your revenue, and grow your practice. We understand the unique needs of holistic practices, as well as the common obstacles you face when it comes to medical billing and coding. With a knowledgeable partner by your side, you can streamline your billing and increase your revenue cycle management! To learn more about our services, talk to one of our billing and coding experts today.
More Americans than ever before are turning away from conventional medicine and embracing holistic healthcare. Whether it’s to alleviate chronic pain, reduce stress, or for other benefits, studies are showing that more people are trading in their conventional doctors for holistic practitioners, or complimenting their conventional care with holistic therapies.
In a survey of more than 89,000 adults and more than 17,000 children, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that nearly one out of three people in the U.S. are seeking holistic healthcare solutions. So, why the shift to holistic medicine? There are several reasons responsible for the ongoing shift towards holistic healthcare.
What is Holistic Medicine?
Holistic healthcare is a form of medicine that treats the “whole person,” treating not the physical self, but also the emotional, spiritual, and mental facets as well. Whereas conventional medicine seeks to provide treatment for pain or the ailment, holistic healthcare focuses on both treatment and prevention. For example, if a patient has an ailment and turns to holistic therapy for help, the holistic practitioner will seek any underlying causes, including the patient’s stress levels and diet.
There are many different types of specialties under the umbrella of holistic medicine, including:
- Massage therapy
- Chiropractic care
- Mental health counseling
- Acupuncture
- Homeopathy
- Nutrition counseling
- Meditation
- Yoga
- Western herbal medicine
By focusing on prevention and health alongside treatment, holistic healthcare has helped millions of people manage their own wellbeing more effectively.
Western Medicine vs Holistic Medicine
Many holistic healthcare specialties have their roots in Eastern medicine. Compared to Western healthcare, Eastern medicine attempts to look at overall imbalances in a person’s life. This focus can be seen throughout all the holistic specialties. There are some key areas where holistic healthcare and Western medicine deviate from one another.
Insurance-Coverage
Until recently, many holistic practitioners were not covered by insurance or were out of network. Even still, many holistic practices may find it harder to be covered by insurance. On the contrary, Western healthcare and treatments are more likely than not covered by insurance providers, and as a result more accessible to Americans.
Cause of Ailment
While Western medicine looks at physical components, such as physical symptoms and genetics, for the causes of illnesses, holistic healthcare looks at the overall wellness of the patient. This includes any possible imbalances, such as issues with mental health and diet. For holistic practitioners, environmental and emotional influences are just as equal factors in the wellbeing of a patient as physical components.
Treatment of Illness
Holistic healthcare also differs from Western healthcare in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. In holistic practices, identifying the disease is not as important as in Western medicine because illnesses are viewed as effects of the patient’s individual lifestyle, and so treatments will vary per person and are not as clearly identifiable. Holistic treatments will often incorporate medication, natural solutions or supplements, or diet and exercise regimens. On the other hand, Western treatments will often include formal tests and standard treatments for every patient based on the illness. Treatments often include medication, with suggestions for lifestyle changes.
3 Trends Impacting the Rising Shift to Holistic Medicine
While there isn’t one single reason for the growing popularity of holistic healthcare, there are several trends that may be held responsible for the rising shift of consumers choosing holistic practices.
Growing Skepticism About the Medical Industry
More Americans are growing wary about healthcare institutions and general medical practices. Based on data from an international health care survey, Americans were found to have growing distrust in medical professions. While more than three-fourths of Americans had strong confidence in the medical field in the mid-1960s, currently only 34 percent trust the current medical system. Part of this skepticism can be due to a variety of motives. While many patients have been wary to trust medical research due to the motives being possibly compromised by funding, there is also the perception that key players in the healthcare industry pursue profits at the expense of patients.
There is also a growing public perception that Western medicine may be over-reliant on medications. While people are taking more medications than ever, doctors are also prescribing them on high doses – with some reports indicating that many of these pills are doing more harm than good. While nearly 7 in 10 Americans are taking at least one prescription drug each day, nearly nine in ten (89%) adults 65 and older are on prescription medicine. The most common prescriptions make up antidepressants, antibiotics, and opioid painkillers. One of the attractive aspects of holistic healthcare to many Americans is its lack of medications. For people trying to find less-medicated treatment, holistic medicine seems like a positive solution.
Greater Accessibility
In part due to the growing popularity of holistic medicine, more Western medical practices are adding supplemental holistic care – making it more accessible for patients. Hundreds of healthcare centers, including hospitals affiliated with Duke, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other top medical research centers, are also offering holistic therapies, including acupuncture, massage therapy, meditation, Chinese herbal therapy, and more. While it’s likely the vast majority of hospitals will have alternative medicine options, this is a far cry from two decades ago when just 14% of hospitals were reported to provide complementary holistic therapies in 2000.
With greater acceptance of holistic therapies in hospitals, clinics, and research centers, more people looking for alternatives are finding them easier to access. While many of these therapies are supplementary and made to complement Western treatments, they are allowing patients access to acupuncture, massage therapy, and even more alternatives.
Wide Range of Ailments Treated
One of the additional driving forces in the growing popularity of holistic healthcare is the wide range of illnesses that alternative therapies can encompass. Since therapies, such as massage and medication, focus less on the exact illness and more on the overall well-being of the patient, people with medical conditions that are not easily treated with conventional medicine are turning to holistic practices for relief.
For patients increasingly dissatisfied with the minimal time they receive with doctors and with physicians who seem to prescribe a pill for every woe, integrating their conventional treatments with holistic therapies or completely choosing a holistic approach to medicine offers a refreshing new take on care.
Prepare Your Holistic Practice for the Future With HBS
With the growing demand for holistic medicine, your holistic practice needs to be optimized to handle growth. Medical billing is especially complicated for holistic practices and can possibly overwhelm your business as you focus on growing your practice and provide care for your patients. By outsourcing your medical billing, you can leave the responsibility of insurance enrollments, credentialing, and medical billing and coding to the experts – saving you time!
As an experienced billing provider for holistic practices, Holistic Billing Services can help your practice navigate the intricacies of insurance billing claims to minimize denials, increase your revenue, and grow your practice. We understand the unique needs of holistic practices, as well as the common obstacles you face when it comes to medical billing and coding. With a knowledgeable partner by your side, you can streamline your billing and increase your revenue cycle management! To learn more about our services, talk to one of our billing and coding experts today.