No matter the specialty of your holistic practice—whether you offer acupuncture, massage therapy, chiropractic treatments, or a combination—you’re there to provide quality care to your community. How do you know that you’re squarely hitting that target, though? What if there are some areas of your holistic practice that patients wish were a little more streamlined for them? That’s where a patient satisfaction survey helps facilitate effective patient communication.
Patient satisfaction surveys are a great way to get feedback on the perception your patients have regarding your overall holistic practice experience. Encouraging their feedback can lead to a stronger patient-practice relationship and optimize your overall practice to best suit the patient experience.
Why Is Patient Satisfaction Important for Your Holistic Practice?
The success of your holistic practice depends upon patients having a great experience, ideally from start to finish. Your patients, both new and returning, are the heart of your practice since they dictate the financial performance and are there to receive quality care from your organization. A negative experience, or repeated pattern of not addressing patient feedback, can lead to loss of business.
Implementing a patient satisfaction survey can help your holistic practice prioritize the feedback of your patients beyond delivering great care: simply initiating the conversation and asking for their feedback and taking steps to apply that feedback demonstrates great care for the relationship. A strong patient-practice relationship behooves you and your practice’s enduring success!
How to Write a Patient Satisfaction Survey
Writing a patient satisfaction survey for your holistic practice’s patients doesn’t have to take a long time—nor is it meant to be unchanging! It’s completely fine if you start with a few anchor points to ask them about but later pivot to ask about something else pertaining to your practice.
Start with these foundational steps to put together some questions that you feel best to apply to your patient population:
Reflect Upon What Might Need Improvement
Internally brainstorm for ideas regarding what might apply to your patients; is there a problem with the scheduling system? Do you often have issues with designating parking spots for your practice? Are you seeing patients return to your practice or do they visit once or twice but move to another organization? Jot down your practice’s internal points of interest to consider including on the patient satisfaction survey.
Listen to Your Patients
Some patients might be telling you what they think about your practice without having the official survey in front of them—picking up on what they discuss when making small talk can help give you insight into what is inconvenient to them or what they’d like to see more of.
For example, if you hear your patients ask if they’re okay to park in front of the business next door, then that might be a clue into what your holistic practice needs to address in your patient satisfaction survey. Picking up on these informal comments that share a theme or pattern is a great way to scope out what to include in your survey.
Determine Your Rating Scale
Your survey results won’t be as actionable as you’d like if your rating scales are inconsistent; your survey needs a measurable way to compare data to make it effective! There are many different ways to scale your patient satisfaction survey, but keep these points in mind when determining which to implement in yours:
- Try to avoid offering a “neutral” option since that won’t help your holistic practice yield specific results
- Stick to one rating scale method for all quantitative questions; for example, utilizing a variety of emoticons or a numbered scale for the survey will help keep your results comparable
Questions to Consider Using for Patient Satisfaction Surveys
If you’re ready to write your holistic practice’s patient satisfaction survey, consider including some of these questions to jumpstart discussion and select the best range that suits your patient population:
- How long did you wait for your appointment to start (beyond your appointment time)?
- How clean was the waiting room?
- How knowledgeable were the staff?
- Was the staff courteous?
- Were you informed of the payment options available to you?
- Are our appointment times convenient?
- How would you rate the parking availability of this office?
- Did the practitioner meet your needs?
- Did you feel you were treated as a top priority in this office?
- Will you return to this practice?
- Would you refer your friends and family to this practice?
You’ll notice that none of these questions are double-barreled—or, in other words, asking about two separate things in the same question. For example, asking if the patient will return to your practice is different from asking if they would refer their friends and family to your practice.
Be sure to also include some open-ended questions for your patients to share their free-form opinion and ideas for improvement. For example, ask the question “What can we do to improve your experience?” to demonstrate your holistic practice’s eagerness to hear from the patient directly about what can be streamlined for their experience.
Focus on Your Patients and Let Holistic Billing Services Handle Your Medical Billing!
The shaping of your holistic practice’s reputation is happening whether you’re directly handling it or not. Your prospective patients will make quick assessments about your practice based on the first impressions they get when searching the web, which includes patient reviews! That’s why creating an effective patient satisfaction survey is a core component for strengthening the relationship between your practice and your patients, and can be a great tool for attracting new patients.
Wish you had more time and energy to spend working on these questions and your patients? Partner with a medical billing firm to handle your medical billing and coding processes. Holistic Billing Services is here to help you grow your practice in a variety of ways and has been facilitating the growth of holistic practices since 1999.
Contact us today and let us help your holistic practice reach its potential!
Electronic health records systems are a huge resource to utilize in your holistic practice, no matter the size of your business. While it might seem easier and more cost-effective to just maintain whatever paper file folder system you’re already using, making the switch to an EHR system is an overall more efficient strategy for streamlining your operations, both in the short and long run.
EHR systems have the capacity to enhance patient care, further fortify your patients’ information and sensitive data, and can save you time by eliminating clunky workflows. Plus, EHR systems are scalable for your future growth—perfect for if, or when, you decide to add more holistic practitioners to your practice or include more specialties to serve another population within your community.
On the other hand, there are a few things to keep in mind when making the switch to an EHR system, including HIPAA compliance regulations and potential cybersecurity threats. Keep reading to learn more about electronic health records systems and their advantages to your holistic practice!
What Does An EHR System Manage?
An electronic health records (EHR) system is exactly what it sounds like: a virtual, centralized collection of patient information and healthcare history. An EHR system updates patient information in real-time, which helps to deliver a well-rounded, patient-focused experience.
Additionally, other authorized parties or entities are able to see these real-time updates, which helps minimize friction in the patient’s overall wellness journey. Seeing multiple factors relating to a patient’s health in one spot enables a broader overview of their health overall.
Electronic health record systems can include:
- Medical history
- Diagnoses
- Medications
- Treatment plans and notes
- Allergies
- Lab results
- And more!
Even if your holistic practice doesn’t directly deal with labs or x-rays, it’s still quite helpful to have access to that information regarding your patients. For example, if you have a new massage therapy patient who recently got a sports injury, being able to review their x-rays will enable you to see how you can alleviate pain from the injury.
Plus, adding your holistic practice’s involvement with the patient’s wellness journey is beneficial for their other providers. This also ensures that the patient is following through on their healthcare journey so that they can achieve the best results possible with a well-rounded approach to their wellness.
Overall, EHR systems help streamline a patient’s overall healthcare journey and enable collaborative care across authorized providers and other medical practices.
HIPAA Compliance for EHR
As defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that requires the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.” Essentially, this Act establishes protections for the use and sharing of personal health information and secures a patient’s privacy.
To complement this Act and account for the rapid advancement of technology in the healthcare industry, the HITECH Act was later introduced. In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) was signed into law and determines technological requirements that align with HIPAA, such as encouraging the use of electronic health records to further secure sensitive patient data.
Furthermore, the HIPAA Security Rule, officially approved in 2003, also outlines a national set of security standards for safeguarding electronic personal health information (ePHI). This guarantees that all authorized parties are following good cybersecurity practices when handling sensitive patient information.
As defined by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Security Rule essentially declares that covered entities must:
- Ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all e-PHI they create, receive, maintain or transmit
- Identify and protect against reasonably anticipated threats to the security or integrity of the information
- Protect against reasonably anticipated, impermissible uses or disclosures
- Ensure compliance by their workforce
Ensuring HIPAA compliance includes maintaining compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule, which is crucial to protecting your patient data since the healthcare industry is constantly under attack. In 2021 alone, there were more than 700 healthcare breaches.
Benefits of An EHR System
Implementing an EHR system comes with a variety of benefits for your patients and your holistic practice, including:
Streamlined Collaboration
Since patients are taking their care into their own hands, they’re researching and selecting providers that they want to receive care from. This means they have a lot of freedom in where they spend their time and money—so it behooves you and your holistic practice to utilize an EHR system that enables streamlined communication between your patient’s other providers. In fact, a recent study revealed that 30% of seniors see an average of 5 providers each year.
Organized Patient Data
With a digital record, you won’t have to worry about digging through stacks of files or misplacing a patient’s record. Nor will you have to worry about illegible handwriting! An electronic health records system handles all of it in one centralized place. This optimizes your workflows and empowers you and your staff to work from the same file instead of compiling multiple points of information for the patient.
Enhanced Cybersecurity Protections
While, yes, you need to practice good cybersecurity habits when dealing with your patient’s sensitive information—and with your daily holistic practice operations, in general—an electronic health records system is built-in with digital protections and can offer some peace of mind when mitigating cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities.
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to Streamline Your Practice!
EHR systems are simply one component of your holistic practice’s operations—yes, they’re impactful in delivering quality care to your patients, but that’s not all it takes to run a successful practice. For example, your medical billing and coding processes. We know that the revenue cycle is a vital yet stressful part of your daily operations, and Holistic Billing Services is here to help!
Let our team of specialty-specific experts handle that responsibility so you can focus on what matters most: caring for your patients. Contact us today!
Your massage therapy practice is responsible for delivering great care to your patients through the many benefits of massage. If you’re looking to expand any specialty services that you offer, consider adding fascia stretching to your practice’s repertoire! Fascia stretching and fascia massage can help you grow your practice by speaking to physical pain points that your community might be experiencing. Keep reading to learn more!
What Is Fascia Stretching?
Fascia encompasses each muscle and connects muscles together both on the surface and on a deeper level. Fascia connects tendons, ligaments, and bones to form a whole-body network of tissue—it also connects to your organs and internal systems.
Since this kind of connection exists between nearly all parts of the body, both internally and externally, fascia stretching and fascia massage therapy can significantly improve the mobility and flexibility of your patients.
Fascia stretching and massage address the entire body, intentionally and subsequently. It’s all connected, so delivering treatment to fascia results in delivering treatment to the entire body instead of isolated muscle groups or static stretching.
Who Benefits from Fascia Stretching?
Anyone can benefit from fascia stretching and fascia massage treatments, including any patient who is recommended for this specialty by their physician, fitness enthusiasts, athletes, and more.
Fascial restriction, or the limitation or pain affecting fascia in the body, can be related to trauma, strains, injuries, a sedentary lifestyle, and more. These causes might include the following suspects:
- overuse
- repetitive movements
- injuries
- weak muscles
- poor posture
- physical, mental, or emotional stress
- extended periods of sitting or standing
- overall lack of physical activity
- misalignments and imbalances
As with any type of treatment plan, the best course of action for treating a patient with fascia stretching or fascia massage will vary from one situation to the next. Typically more than one session is recommended, and overall mobility is often improved after just one treatment!
Fascia stretching results in decreased stress, improved sleep, and significant relief from pain in just a few sessions.
Why You Should Add Fascia Stretching to Your Practice
If you’re wanting to grow your massage therapy practice by expanding the variety of specialty massages or treatments that you offer, consider adding fascia stretching for the following reasons:
Attract New Patients
Want to attract new patients? Consider adding fascia stretching and fascia massage services to your practice’s list of offerings. Potential clients in your community might be looking exactly for that service—or be recommended it by their physician or athletic trainer—which provides an excellent opportunity for your massage therapy practice.
It Complements Other Forms of Holistic Treatments
Fascia stretching doesn’t have to be a standalone form of holistic treatment for your patients; it dovetails quite nicely with other forms of massage therapy treatments, acupuncture treatments, and more! This means that your holistic practice is able to furthermore offer comprehensive, integrated care for your community.
Top 3 Benefits of Massage Therapy
In general, massage therapy can help provide relief for a variety of conditions and ailments, including:
Repetitive Motion or Strain Injuries
For those suffering with pain from repetitive motion or strain injuries, or other related issues that negatively impact the muscles and joints, massage therapy can greatly improve mobility and reduce the pain associated with these injuries. Sensations like tenderness, throbbing or sharp pain in movement, tingling, etc. can be the result of overusing a group of muscles, staying in a particular posture for an extended period of time, heavy lifting, or another factor. Massage therapy can help reduce these feelings and restore mobility.
Chronic Pain
Massages have an inherent attachment to ideas of relaxation and gentle unwinding—and for good reason! Massage therapy facilitates relaxation which makes it a surefire way to reduce painful, chronic conditions. Whether caused by surgery, injury, or simply chronic ailments that induce pain, massage therapy can help your patients experience a lighter breath with reduced pain because it promotes blood flow and circulation while releasing the body’s natural painkillers.
Mental Ailments, like Depression
If your patient is experiencing depression, massage therapy likely won’t cure the condition alone—but it will relieve the physical symptoms associated with it, such as lethargy, back pain, joint pain, muscle aches, and more. By encouraging blood flow and promoting relaxation on a physical level in the patient’s muscles and connective tissue, they’ll become less stiff or rigid which might be contributing to their pain.
Why Effective Massage Therapy Insurance Billing Matters When Treating Patients
When massage therapists deliver treatments, such as fascia stretching or fascia massage, the medical billing process ensures that they receive reimbursements for delivering quality care. While medical billing is an integral function of the reimbursement process, it can be very complex; the slightest error can delay payments for weeks, if not longer. Ensuring the most accurate medical billing allows massage therapy practices to spend more time doing what they love: delivering care to their patients.
As an experienced billing provider for holistic providers, including massage therapists, Holistic Billing Services can help your massage therapy practice navigate the medical billing process to minimize denials and delays so you can increase revenue. With an expert partner by your side, you can focus more on treating patients to help your practice grow rather than worrying about insurance billing. To learn more about our massage therapy billing services, talk to one of our billing and coding experts today.
A recent consumer study found that 88% of respondents reported massage therapy was beneficial to their overall health and wellness. Want to offer massage therapy services to the veterans in your community, but aren’t sure how to manage billing the VA? We’re here to help you understand this process better so you can deliver quality care to veterans at your holistic practice.
There are numerous methods of massage therapy, including:
- Medical massage
- Hot stone massage
- Swedish massage
- Reflexology
- Trigger point massage
- Thai massage
Each method implements a particular set of movements that target muscles in order to increase blood flow, promote relaxation, alleviate physical pain, and encourage overall wellness.
Does the VA Cover Massage Therapy?
It depends on the specific circumstances and location. Some VA facilities may offer massage therapy as a form of rehabilitation for veterans, but it is not a widely covered service under VA benefits. It is best to check with your local VA facility or speak with a VA representative to determine if massage therapy is covered in your area.
Benefits of VA Massage Therapy
Massage therapy has been proven to treat a wide array of conditions veterans might be suffering from, including:
- Chronic pain: Massage therapy treatments help stimulate blood flow to parts of the body experiencing pain, which helps promote the release of natural painkillers; since massage therapy results in relaxation, overall chronic pain conditions can be managed with treatments. This is an especially timely holistic approach in light of the ongoing opioid epidemic.
- Depression: One study found that 11% of veterans were experiencing elevated levels of depression; massage therapy can help alleviate the physical symptoms of this mental condition, such as back pain, body aches, sluggishness, and more.
- Anxiety: A 2016 research study demonstrated that Swedish massage therapy treatment was successful in reducing the symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Veterans often experience complicated symptoms of anxiety linked to PTSD and homelessness, which can increase the risk of suicide; incorporating a massage therapy treatment plan into an overall wellness plan can help mediate these symptoms.
How To Start Treating Veterans at Your Massage Therapy Practice
The US Department of Veterans Affairs recognizes clinical massage therapy as “one of the evidence-based, complementary and integrative health (CIH) approaches within the VHA Whole Health System of care” and covers the cost of this care when deemed necessary. Follow these steps to start treating veterans with massage therapy at your holistic practice!
Apply for Your National Provider Identifier (NPI)
A National Provider Identifier, or NPI, is a 10-digit identification number issued to healthcare providers in the U.S. by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Your massage therapy practice will need to apply for an NPI if you are a HIPAA-covered health care provider or if you bill insurance for your services.
Determine Your Region
The VA Community Care Network (CCN) is divided into six regions that cover the continental United States in addition to Hawaii, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands. TriWest manages the western networks while Optum handles the eastern regions. Find out which region your practice resides in.
Get Credentialed
In order to provide quality care for veterans at your holistic practice with massage therapy, you’ll need to be credentialed with the region’s third-party administrator. This process typically takes at least three months to complete. Depending on your region, contact the following to get started with the credentialing process:
- Region 1: 888-901-7407 (Optum)
- Region 2: 844-839-6108 (Optum)
- Region 3: 888-901-6613 (Optum)
- Region 4: 866-286-4174 (Triwest)
- Region 5: 877-226-8749 (Triwest)
The VA has not officially contracted with an agency for Region 6; contact information is pending for that region.
Complete Registration Paperwork
Upon completing the credentialing process, you’ll need to submit the necessary paperwork to become fully registered with the network. This paperwork is submitted electronically and will include details regarding any final requirements that must be met in order to finish the credentialing process.
Receive Patient Authorizations
Once your holistic practice has been verified and authorized by the VA’s network, you’ll start to receive referrals to treat veterans who are approved to start massage therapy treatment. Your CCN administrator will provide the patient’s authorization letters before the patient’s first visit to your practice.
Checklist for Initial Claims Processing
When submitting an insurance claim to the VA for the first time, you’ll need to submit all the authorization letter pages together with the claim. Make sure you transmit all the following information with your massage therapy claim to avoid a denial:
- A cover letter
- The date range for services
- Authorization numbers
- The total number of visits authorized
- The patient’s demographics including address, date of birth, and social security number
- Documentation and CPT codes of treatments administered
By following this checklist, you can ensure your Veterans Administration insurance claim will have all the accurate information it needs for a smooth billing process.
Maximize Your Reimbursements for VA Insurance Claims with Holistic Billing
As a medical billing provider with a special focus on holistic and integrative health practices, such as massage therapy practices, Holistic Billing Services can help you get credentialed by your region’s CCN and help you start treating veterans right away. We have plenty of experience navigating the unique VA billing guidelines, which allows us to maximize your reimbursements and keep your practice’s revenue flowing.
To learn more about how you can get started providing acupuncture for veterans and active service members without worrying about having your VA claims denied, talk to our massage therapy billing and coding experts today!
When evaluating the success of your holistic practice, where do you start? It’s too short-sighted to worry only about keeping the lights on, but planning for the future on a broad, subjective scale can feel intimidating or overwhelming. That’s where tracking top healthcare KPIs can benefit your holistic practice. Healthcare KPI tracking can provide a tangible record of your operations across a variety of categories and aspects.
What Are Healthcare KPIs?
KPIs, also known as Key Performance Indicators, are metrics that can objectively measure various components of your holistic practice over time so you and your team can reflect on how the practice is performing and make educated decisions for the future. There are dozens of potential healthcare KPIs to track at your holistic practice, but try not to feel overwhelmed by the amount of data you’ll be collecting—each facet of your practice can be analyzed and optimized, but it doesn’t have to happen all at once. To start, select a few of the most important metrics that need immediate attention, then expand to measure other aspects of your operations.
Common Healthcare KPI Examples
As mentioned above, there are a variety of healthcare KPIs track that may or may not apply to your particular holistic practice, with categories including:
- Operations: These metrics focus on how efficient and effective your practice is at delivering care
- Finance: KPIs related to the financial performance of your practice measure the top and bottom line of your practice—your cost of operations and how much is returned
- Internal: Metrics relating to your internal operations track staff performance and administrative efficiency
- Public health: These KPIs reveal how your practice is impacting your community, whether in terms of child immunization doses, vaccine clinics, or educational seminar attendance numbers
- Emergency: In an emergency healthcare environment, it’s crucial to monitor how effectively your patients are receiving care, average wait time, patient mortality rate, and more
- Care quality: By keeping tabs on how many providers you have in relation to the number of patients you serve, patient satisfaction survey results, and more, you can evaluate how well your practice is serving your community
Why Are Healthcare KPIs Important for Your Holistic Practice?
It takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to operate an efficient and effective holistic practice. How can you be sure you’re succeeding in every aspect of your practice? Key performance indicators are your best bet to gain a comprehensive insight into your operations, finances, public perception, and more. These figures can help you understand the current status of your practice, observe historical trends, and make informed decisions regarding how to improve or further grow your practice.
The Best Healthcare KPIs and Metrics to Track For Your Holistic Practice Management
There are numerous key performance indicators you should consider tracking when evaluating the performance of your holistic practice; be sure to consider the specificity of your holistic practice, community, and overall operations when outlining which healthcare KPIs to monitor. The following breakdown is a foundational place to start and is by no means a comprehensive list of potential metrics to keep track of:
Patient Experience Metrics
The goal of your practice is to deliver quality care to your patients; after all, your practice can’t sustain itself without them! When measuring patient experience metrics, consider the following factors:
- Patient satisfaction: Utilizing patient satisfaction surveys can tremendously benefit your holistic patient care because you can solicit feedback or points of improvement from the very people you’re trying to please: your patients. Plus, by implementing a method of communication regarding their perception of your practice, you demonstrate how important they are to your success. When you establish an objective manner of measuring subjective components of your practice, such as ease of scheduling follow-ups or how comfortable the waiting room is, you can gain valuable insight into your practice’s performance.
- Referral mix: This healthcare KPI indicates what type of patients your holistic practice is treating and who referred them to your practice. Tracking this metric helps you understand which patients are finding you from word-of-mouth recommendations, which in turn affirms the success of your holistic practice’s mission of delivering quality care.
- No-show patients: It happens. Patients forget appointments or simply ghost your practice and never return your calls or attempts to reschedule. However, when this becomes a pattern at your holistic practice, do your best to get ahead of it and monitor these behaviors. If you find that a significant number of your monthly appointments are no-shows, it might be time to implement a no-show policy to discourage that!
Staff Performance Metrics
Your team is a reflection of your practice and keeps your practice running smoothly for your patients; when gaining insight into your staff performance, consider the following:
- Staff-to-Patient Ratio: Do you have dozens of weekly appointments for only a handful of providers at your practice, resulting in faster burnout or longer patient wait times? It’s crucial to consider how much time and attention your providers can give to patients for top quality care. If they’re stretched too thin, it’ll catch up to your practice sooner or later and you’ll have to hire additional staff to manage.
- Trainings and Certifications: When working in healthcare, it’s absolutely essential that your staff is HIPAA certified and follows best practices when handling patient information; it’s also beneficial that each member of your team have certifications in their pertinent areas of service.
- Mistake Events: This self-explanatory metric simply refers to the frequency and type of mistake or error made, whether administrative, related to medical billing, patient confidentiality, or another type of mistake. This metric can provide insight and help you determine the best course of action to correct the problem, preventing it from becoming an internal pattern.
Medical Billing Metrics
How well do you know the details of your holistic practice’s finances? If you’re only measuring the short-term successes of paying your monthly bills, there’s a lot you’re missing! Dig into the many facets of your financial performance and learn which areas to improve moving forward, including:
- Days in Accounts Receivable (A/R): This metric reveals how many payments remain outstanding at your holistic practice, either due to insurance reimbursement processing delays or out-of-pocket services. Ideally, the average time a bill spends in A/R should be about 30-40 days—the less time spent waiting for payment, the better. By tracking this metric, you can identify friction points along the payment cycle, such as billing and coding errors or not following up on claims, and redirect your efforts to streamline this process.
- Net Collection Ratio: One key financial metric to monitor is the net collection ratio, which calculates how much potential revenue your practice nets after insurance adjustments are made. While the exact figure will fluctuate from specialty to specialty, aim for collecting about 95% of potential revenue for services, whether by patient payers or submitting clean claims. If this healthcare KPI falls consistently dips below 90% then that tells you something needs to be addressed in your revenue cycle.
- New Patient Ratio: You can probably guess which figure this metric tracks; part of overseeing the financial health of your holistic practice is to sustain and grow your practice, which means a certain percentage of your patients are first-time visitors. When monitored over time, this healthcare KPI can help you determine if your holistic practice offers a desired balance of services for the price. Like with many other metrics, the exact figure to aim for can change from specialty to specialty; however, for general wellness practices, new patients can make up about 25% of visits, while specialty care practices could see up to 50% new patients each month.
Transform Your Medical Billing with Holistic Billing Services
By creating a monthly summary sheet to track healthcare KPIs, you can begin to identify and resolve problem areas in your holistic practice that are holding back growth and revenue.
Our experts here at Holistic Billing Services believe our success is your success. From handling medical billing and coding to offering consulting services and much more, our team is dedicated to making it feel like we’re in-house. With a focus on holistic practices, insurance background, and proven consultants, our team can effectively ensure the financial success of clients, allowing your medical practice to focus on what it does best: treat patients.
Our expertise is rooted in professional, technical, and global billing for hospital and stand-alone holistic care practices. To learn more about how outsourced medical billing with Holistic Billing Services can empower your practice, contact us today. We’ll work with you to build a customized solution that meets the specific needs of your practice and allows you to get back to treating patients.
How well do you know how your patients experience your holistic practice? Of course, you’re providing the best care for them, but are there metaphorical pain points that you might not know about? By utilizing patient satisfaction surveys, you can open this conversation up between your patients and your holistic practice, resulting in stronger dialogue and better rapport to serve your community even better.
Charting the course of patient feedback can seem daunting or maybe even awkward, but patient satisfaction is obviously one of your holistic practice’s top priorities—it ensures the short- and long-term success of your practice! Just as your practice is one of the most important resources available to your patients, your patients can be one of your practice’s most important resources, too.
Why Is Patient Feedback Important?
Ultimately, the only way to keep your patients coming back to your holistic practice is to make sure they’re satisfied with the experience they receive from you. That experience is about far more than just the patient-provider relationship and the effectiveness of a given course of care; it includes patients’ perception of your office, their interactions with your staff, and dozens of other factors ranging from scheduling availability to the reading materials in your waiting room.
Don’t assume that just because your patients aren’t complaining, they’re happy. The only way to truly know how satisfied your patients are is to ask them directly and often. The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) has found that over 80% of practices regularly use patient satisfaction surveys to measure, evaluate, and improve their operations. If you neglect to use patient satisfaction surveys, you’re missing out on a valuable tool that can help you gain insight from your patients and improve your practice’s performance.
The knowledge of your patient’s opinions of their experience in your office is invaluable. It is, in many ways, just as important to the success of the practice as a correct treatment plan is to manage a chronic condition. When used properly, the patient satisfaction survey can truly serve as a diagnostic tool for the practice because patients have the opportunity to indicate points of friction or reveal blind spots of inefficiency in your holistic practice that you wouldn’t otherwise be aware of!
How To Request Patient Reviews
Asking your patients for reviews—whether on a public platform like Google or via anonymous feedback on an internal survey—doesn’t have to be awkward or feel like an imposition for either party. When you initiate the conversation about patient satisfaction, consider the following:
Inquire About Their Experience With Your Practice
For 87% of physicians, interacting with and helping patients is the most gratifying part of their profession; requesting patient reviews can provide you with real-time feedback that can strengthen your patient relationships and help you provide better care.
At the end of the patient’s visit to your holistic practice, try asking questions like “Were you able to easily schedule your appointment today?” or “Have I addressed all of your concerns?” If the feedback is positive, ask them to share their experience with others by writing a review. Take note of any constructive criticism and use it to improve the patient experience at your practice.
When one patient provides a suggestion for improvement, it’s likely to be helpful to a majority of your patients! For example, if a patient says it would be helpful for the scheduling system to have more filters to narrow down the best appointment time, that might be a small annoyance easily solved which benefits all of your patients.
Remind Yourself That Writing Reviews Is Commonplace
You might feel a little awkward about asking your patients to review your practice, but it’s probably no big deal to them. When consumers are asked to leave a review, 72% follow through and do so. Your patients are likely already reviewing for other businesses in the community, so writing one for your holistic practice won’t be a hassle at all. To get a feel for the process yourself, try writing a few reviews for businesses you frequent to understand the simplicity of the process so you can assure other patients that it isn’t difficult to navigate.
When you’re confident about the quality of holistic medicine you’re providing, asking patients to review your practice shouldn’t be too nerve-wracking. After all, patients who are asked for feedback are 2.3 times more likely to proactively submit an online review. People—including potential clients doing research on the holistic practices in your area—put a lot of weight in online reviews, so as long as you’re confident in the care you’re providing, don’t second guess yourself about requesting their honest feedback.
Address It All
The most important areas to cover with your survey are the ‘key three’: quality, access, and interpersonal concerns. But going into more general topics can be just as valid, since asking other types of questions can illuminate issues you may not have thought of. Consider including opportunities for feedback about the “non-essential” factors of your holistic practice, such as parking availability, overall office appearance, staff and physician professionalism, and costs.
Keep It Simple
Deliver your survey in the means most likely to get patients to complete it; if your clientele isn’t the most digitally savvy, stick with pen and paper. Try to avoid any instinct to overcomplicate things and be sure to write your surveys with clear, concise language and stick to yes/no options or “How satisfied are you with X?” questions that correlate to 1-5 ratings. Standardizing the range of answers will make data collection and internal assessment easier. Of course, include space for personalized feedback and comments, too.
How Patient Satisfaction Surveys Can Boost Your Holistic Practice
Your survey results are useless if you don’t take action on them; don’t waste your patient’s time. Cull new goals and objectives from your survey results—e.g., aim for 10% improvement in a given area by this time next year—and hold yourself accountable for following up.
Plus, your patients will feel validated when they notice you’ve implemented suggested feedback. This further affirms the patient-provider relationship and maintains open communication, which is crucial for patient satisfaction.
The shaping of your holistic practice’s online reputation is happening whether you’re handling it or not. Your prospective patients will make quick assessments about your practice based on the first impressions they get when searching the web, which includes patient reviews!
After all, word of mouth is incredibly important and the first place you will see the impact of this is in the form of online reviews. 91% of 18 to 34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
With these essential basics of patient satisfaction, we’re sure your holistic practice will thrive! Holistic Billing Services is here to help you grow your practice in a variety of ways and has been facilitating the growth of holistic practices since 1999. Contact us today and let us help your holistic practice reach its potential!
Today, holistic care is a $37 billion-a-year business. That’s a huge number—but how are patients navigating the ever-growing market of options available to them to find the provider that best fits their needs and budget? Known as “healthcare consumerism,” patients are shopping around for their holistic wellness providers in the same way they find the best deals in the grocery store.
Why Does Patient Consumerism Affect Your Holistic Practice?
Americans spend an estimated $14.7 billion out-of-pocket for visits to complementary and integrative health practitioners such as chiropractors, acupuncturists, and massage therapists. Although there have been recent legislative developments to broaden coverage, holistic medicine is largely not yet covered by health insurance policies. As such, patients who utilize holistic medicine as a component of their overall wellness plan are compelled to shop around for the best quality at an affordable price.
Essentially, this is “patient consumerism”—the term used to describe this pattern of patients behaving more like shoppers than ever before. In order to be so discerning and cost-conscious about their care, patients are putting more proactive effort and research into their care options and associated costs, especially since they’re personally paying for it.
Holistic providers need to continue focusing on improving the patient experience, building their brands, and operating more like a retail business in a highly competitive market. While this trend of patient behavior isn’t as jarring in the holistic health world as it is in the conventional medicine market—where health insurance was once wholly relied upon to cover the cost of care—it’s still important for holistic practices to emphasize the experience of the patient in their practice from start to finish.
Patient acquisition is one of the most important components of running a long-lasting holistic practice, and it is a cornerstone of your revenue cycle. As more Americans are turning to holistic healthcare than ever before, your holistic practice has the opportunity to bring in new patients and serve more members of your community. Recognizing the underlying psychology of the patient as a consumer can help your practice effectively engage new patients by speaking to their journey of shopping around for holistic healthcare.
5 Tips for Patient Acquisition at Your Holistic Practice
When it comes to patient acquisition, your marketing efforts are aimed to give the patient enough information and motivation to go to your clinic for service. This marketing is highlighting the best parts of your holistic practice and makes a compelling argument for someone to make a choice.
Here are five actions to take when considering the potential consumer’s relationship with your holistic practice:
Develop Your Brand
Part of what will set your holistic practice apart from the competition is developing your unique brand. This includes your message style and overall mission statement. You’ll have to address what kind of approach you’ll take to market your practice to the public and what tools you’ll use.
All of this will influence your message tone. For instance, if you’re marketing massage therapy to the elderly, you would use a different tone, style, and content than if you were attracting a millennial client base. Or, let’s say you’re focusing on delivering acupuncture services as an opioid alternative for patients recovering from addiction or surgery. You would use a distinct tone of voice in your marketing that speaks to their specific needs than if you were trying to attract a more generic audience.
Get Technologically Savvy
Patients who booked healthcare appointments ran three times more searches than those who didn’t, which means that enhancing your holistic practice’s online options and overall digital presence is key to success in a patient-first landscape.
If possible, add a chat feature to your website that connects customers with members of your staff to answer quick questions. Additionally, flesh out your practice’s digital appointment-booking options and make online medical records and payment options as accessible as possible.
Provide Price Transparency
Posting cost information online can make a big difference to patients, as well. Make the prices of any services you provide to patients readily available on your website, as well as inside your office. This further informs your patients about what to expect to pay and sets the foundation for dialogue about payment options, etc.
While you’re at it, consider expanding the type and amount of options of holistic care you deliver. For example, you could add a pediatric acupuncture specialist to your acupuncture practice to attract new types of patients and provide additional services to your community.
Deliver Patient Education Resources
Patient education resources are essential to a well-rounded holistic practice because they help empower the patient. When receiving literature from a trusted wellness provider, the patient can learn more about their diagnosis, condition, treatment plan, and further their own understanding and use this information to do more research, if needed.
This can lead to a healthy dialogue between patient and provider, as the patient can ask more informed questions about their health and feel more empowered in their healthcare journey.
Partner with a Medical Billing Firm
Every holistic practice aims to deliver excellent care and customer service, but juggling everything on your practice’s plate makes it difficult to meet all your patients’ expectations. Your support staff is always going to be responsible for managing scheduling tasks, executing patient check-in and check-out, keeping the books, and handling clinical concerns. By outsourcing medical billing, you’re freeing up your staff’s time to better attend to patient needs, resulting in higher satisfaction rates and better patient retention.
The experts here at Holistic Billing Services believe that our success is your success. From handling medical billing and coding to offering consulting services and much more, our team is dedicated to making it feel like we’re in-house. With a focus on holistic practices, insurance background, and proven consultants, our team can effectively ensure the financial success of clients, allowing your medical practice to focus on what it does best: treat patients.
Our expertise is rooted in professional, technical, and global billing for hospital and stand-alone holistic care practices. To learn more about how outsourced medical billing with Holistic Billing Services can empower your practice, contact us today. We’ll work with you to build a customized solution that meets the specific needs of your practice and allows you to get back to treating patients.
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As a holistic billing company, we focus on integrative health and billing insurance for holistic providers, but we are often asked by our clients for recommendations on how to promote their practice. In our experience, your acupuncture practice can gain new customers and strengthen your current client base with the right marketing.
Learn more about how your holistic practice can develop the most effective acupuncture marketing strategy for overall enhanced revenue cycle management!
Why Marketing Your Acupuncture Process Helps You Stay Competitive and Drive Additional Income
The importance of successfully marketing your acupuncture practice cannot be understated. Even if you have some of the best delivery of care to your patients, your new patient acquisition will be low if you can’t get your name out there! With the right marketing strategy, your acupuncture practice can stay competitive and continually bring in new clients—which means more revenue.
Staying competitive is crucial to driving additional income in an increasingly saturated holistic market. More people than ever before are turning to holistic medicine to maintain and restore their health. The global complementary and alternative medicine market is predicted to have an over 22% growth rate from 2021 to 2028 – eventually reaching over $ 400 billion by 2028. As more and more people turn to holistic medicine, your acupuncture practice must adopt competitive marketing techniques to stand out from the crowd.
Developing a marketing strategy for your holistic practice starts at the basics: delivering the right message. Since more people are turning to holistic medicine to alleviate their back pain and other ailments, cultivating your unique treatment approach that is both authentic to your practice and helps answer the questions clients are looking for will also gain you not only new patient acquisition, but committed clients who keep returning for more.
Acupuncture Marketing Best Practices
In such a growing market saturated with competitors, it may seem difficult to stand out from the crowd. By adopting these best practices, your acupuncture practice can better market to new patients as well as maintain existing relationships with your current client base.
Develop Your Brand
Part of what will set your acupuncture practice apart from the competition is developing your acupuncture clinic’s unique brand. This includes your message style and overall mission statement. You’ll have to address what kind of approach you’ll take to market your practice to the public and what tools you’ll use.
All of this will influence your message tone. For instance, if you’re marketing acupuncture to the elderly, you will use a different tone, style, and content than if you were attracting a millennial client base. Or, let’s say you’re focusing on delivering acupuncture services as an opioid alternative for patients recovering from addiction or surgery. You would use a much different tone of voice in your marketing that speaks to their specific needs than if you were trying to attract a more generic audience.
Grow Your Online Presence
In today’s digital age, building an online presence for your acupuncture practice is a must. This includes an optimized acupuncture website so your business can be easily accessible to those online. A successful website is one where you have the basics, such as your location, contact information, and a bit about who you are and your practice. However, you can add increased value to your website by including what makes your acupuncture practice unique – such as your treatment philosophy, team bios, and FAQs about acupuncture itself.
You also have to make your holistic practice easy to find online as well. Claim your Google business profile so local customers can help locate you in the “acupuncture practice near me” search results. Consider also adding your practice to review sites, such as Google Reviews and Yelp, for customer feedback. Since prospective patients like reading online customer reviews, these can be valuable platforms to highlight your holistic practice.
Utilize A Wide Variety of Digital Marketing Tools
Mastering omnichannel acupuncture marketing is key to reaching a variety of audiences. There are so many options out there now for reaching new customers that you don’t want to just stick to one digital marketing tool!
What digital channels you choose to market on should reflect on the audience you’re trying to reach, as well as the voice of your practice. Some digital marketing tools for your acupuncture practice can include:
- Social media marketing, including using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Content marketing, such as providing useful content like blogging on your website.
- Email marketing to stay in touch with established patients.
Regardless of what digital marketing channels you use, or how many of them, the messaging on all platforms should remain consistent. This helps deliver the authentic image and message you want about your acupuncture practice to potential new clients and established ones.
How to Create a Google AdWords Campaign to Drive New Patient Acquisition in Less Than One Hour!
A Google AdWords campaign is by far the fastest and most cost-effective way to get your site to appear at the top of Google search results. Google‘s AdWords is a pay-per-click system where you pay only when a prospective patient clicks on your ad. When rolled out effectively, Google AdWords campaigns are a great way to drive new patients to your website, and ultimately help you generate more new patients.
By following these six easy steps, you can have a killer Google AdWords campaign for your practice in less than one hour!
Step 1: Set Up a Google AdWords Account
Go to www.google.com/adwords. Setting up your account can be completed in a few minutes.
Step 2: Create Your Campaign
Once you have set up and logged in to your account, you will want to create a new advertising campaign. Campaigns should be organized by the various services you want to advertise (such as chronic pain, cupping, and manual therapy). You will later create “Ad Groups” under each campaign to target specific services.
- Set the campaign name. If you want to promote “accepting insurance,” set your campaign name accordingly. Tying your campaign name to services you want to market will keep you organized and help you identify appropriate keywords and ad groups.
- Specify a geographical location for your ads to appear in. By clicking the “Let me choose” option, you can specify the city, region, or zip code so your ads only appear to your targeted audience. Limit your locations to keep your budget manageable.
- Set your daily budget. Depending on the keywords you choose, a single click can range from 20 cents to $14 or more and will vary by location. To determine your daily budget, decide how much you are willing to spend on a campaign each month and divide it by the number of days in the month.
Step 3: Create Ad Groups
Ad groups are a collection of ads under a campaign that corresponds to a group of related keywords. Creating ad groups enables you to further segment your campaign to focus on specific products or services you want to promote.
Step 4 Generate Ad Text
After you create ad groups, you will need to set the headlines, descriptions, and URLs.
- Headline (25 characters): Write a brief statement that includes the related keywords. For example, a good headline might read “Acupuncturist Accepting Insurance.”
- Description: Next, create a two-lined description (35 characters or less) that emphasizes the benefits of your practice and includes a clear “call to action” to encourage potential patients to click, call, or contact your practice.
- Add URLs: You will add your display URL (your web address) and the destination URL (the page a patient will be sent to after clicking your ad). The destination URL should lead to a page on your website that describes your services to help prospects quickly access information on the topic for which they searched. An example could be:
Headline: Acupuncturist Accepting Insurance
Description Line 1: Acupuncture treatments for back pain.
Description Line 2: Call for your free consultation!
Display URL: http://www.acupractice.com
Destination URL: http://www.acupractice.com/services
Step 5: Choose Relevant Keywords
Choose keywords that relate to your ad group title. When brainstorming keywords, make sure you use terms and phrases that people might search for on Google to find your practice. We recommend you use the AdWords keyword tool to help you build your keyword list.
Step 6: Add Corresponding Text into Your Website
If you are advertising a special offer or particular treatment, make sure your ad links to a page on your website that displays this information to help prospective patients immediately find what they are seeking. Edit your webpage to include your keywords, the title of your ad group, and the title of your campaign.
Remember, Google is the search engine for 87% of all web queries. By creating an effective Google AdWords campaign, you can drive immediate visitors to your website and convert these online search users into new patients.
Drive Revenue to Your Acupuncture Practice With HBS!
At Holistic Billing Services, we deal exclusively with holistic healthcare practices providing acupuncture, massage therapy, and chiropractic treatments. Whether you have questions on acupuncture insurance billing or other methods to enhance your revenue cycle management, feel free to contact our team today and let us know how we can help your acupuncture practice.