3 Essential Questions to Ask an MD- by The Evidence Based Chiropractor

Using the Socratic method during your MD Meetings is absolutely essential for success. The Socratic method is "based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas". In the context of an MD Meeting your goals are to gain insight and position your message.

There are 3 main questions that you should ask during your meeting. These questions will give you the information necessary to match your "message to the market".  When you message matches the market it creates a foundation necessary to fluidly build referral relationships. Let's take a look at the 3 questions.

1. Do they see patients with spine complaints in practice?

2. What specific complaints?

3. What are their current treatment protocols?

Believe it or not, the first question is often overlooked by most chiropractors! While most primary care physicians daily case load consists of 20-30% spinal complaints, there are some which do not see any spine patients. This could be due to a variety of reasons. For some, their partner physician may see all the spine patients.  Others may have an affiliation with a local spine group. In either case you can see why its important to first confirm that they see spine complaints in practice. 

Second, you will want to determine what complaints they are seeing practice. It will very likely be a broad range, similar to your practice. However, you will find that a substantial amount of docs will provide you additional information. It may be an increase in lumbar disc herniation because the snow birds are back in town. They may see a lot of cervicothoracic pain because they perform in-office trigger point injections. Any answer they give will provide you with additional insight to refine your message to their exact patient profile.

Finally, you will want to understand their current treatment protocols. We have found that 99% of the time medical doctors refer to physical therapy, other MD's, or treat in-house (meds) for spinal complaints. Thankfully, chiropractic has distinct advantages over all 3 of these choices. These advantageous are reviewed in detail in our free MD Meeting guide and my book, Marketing Chiropractic to Medical Doctors. By understanding their current choices you will be in the best position to fine tune your message to the market.

As you can see, asking 3 simple questions can give you a plethora of information to accelerate your marketing and outreach. Efficiency, affordability, and elegance.

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-The Evidence Based Chiropractor has assisted hundreds of chiropractors around the globe build interdisciplinary referral relationships.

Have you viewed our FREE Guides?  Download The MD Meeting and the 5 Secrets to MD Referrals today.

How Does a Chiropractic Adjustment Work? - by The Evidence Based Chiropractor

     Chiropractic adjustments are considered one of the most safe and effective health care treatment options available today. Research strongly supports the use of adjustments for low back pain, headaches, neck pain, and variety of other spinal conditions. Emerging research also has shown chiropractic adjustments may be helpful for non-musculoskeletal conditions. So, what are the underlying effects?

     Since the first chiropractic adjustment was given over 100 years ago there has been speculation regarding the mechanism of effects. Simply put; what is happening when an adjustment is given? In 2011, SPINE journal released an article which began to explore this question. They found that, "a spinal manipulative therapy force has been shown to stimulate peripheral afferents, altering central nervous system input, and enhancing motoneuron excitability." Essentially, when we give a chiropractic adjustment, we stimulate the peripheral nervous system which then stimulates the central nervous system. Our nervous system is the conduit for control of our entire body and is also responsible for our perception of pain. Chiropractic adjustments have the ability to effect our central nervous system which can result decreased pain.

     Decreased pain is great, but there must be more to an adjustment than simply decreasing pain, right? Let's take a look at another finding from their study. "We found a significant relationship between immediate post-SMT stiffness decrease and clinical outcome. This finding may suggest a relationship between stiffness change and outcome for thrust SMT that is not present if non-thrust mobilization techniques are employed." This finding is very interesting for a few different reasons. First, the researchers believe that adjustments decrease the stiffness of the spine (increasing free motion and range of motion). This has a very positive effect on our overall treatment outcome. They also found that mobilization (slow stretching motions) did not create this response; so it is exclusive to an adjustment with a thrust component.

     This study found that at least part of the positive effects of the chiropractic adjustment is by stimulating the nervous system and decreasing spinal stiffness. Continued research will provide us with additional information regarding the multitude of other ways in which the chiropractic adjustment "works". As we learn more chiropractors will continually be able to refine their techniques and improve upon their already fantastic results!

Preliminary Investigation of the Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Manipulation. SPINE. 2011

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-The Evidence Based Chiropractor has assisted hundreds of chiropractors around the globe build interdisciplinary referral relationships.

Have you viewed our FREE Guides?  Download The MD Meeting and the 5 Secrets to MD Referrals today.

The Essential Tool to Maximize Your MD Meeting- by The Evidence Based Chiropractor

For many chiropractors the thought of preparing for a meeting with an MD can send them into a cold sweat. Read that sentence again. See, its not the actual meeting which is daunting, but rather the preparation. 

Preparation for the meeting typically includes gathering research, examining their current treatment options, digging up statistics, sourcing high quality photography, highlighting interdisciplinary cooperation, and then wrapping it all up in an elegant and professional package. That sounds like a lot of work! No wonder most chiropractors find it daunting. 

Wouldn't it be much easier if you had a presentation which was elegant, packed with current research, and laid out your information in a logical and educational format?

Well, there is a solution. It is our fully editable, MD Keynote Presentation. Available in both Keynote and Powerpoint formats, this beautifully modern presentation has assisted chiropractors around the world present to their local Medical Doctors. 

Simply click here and download it directly to your computer. We have done the hard work of preparing your materials. Now you can focus on your time and energy on building your practice.

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-The Evidence Based Chiropractor has assisted hundreds of chiropractors around the globe build interdisciplinary referral relationships.

Have you viewed our FREE Guides?  Download The MD Meeting and the 5 Secrets to MD Referrals today.

What No One Tells You About Documentation- by The Evidence Based Chiropractor

Fact: Chiropractors leave millions of dollars on the table due to incorrect third party payor denials each and every year. Unfortunately, chiropractors also return millions of dollars each and every year due to incorrect coding and billing. It goes without saying that patient care, billing, and coding should always be executed with the highest amount of integrity. However, it is foolish to not be paid for your hard work due to inadequate documentation.

For instance, did you know that time is NOT a primary determining factor in your examination coding?

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The 3 Criteria for Properly Coding Chiropractic Examinations

1. History

2. Examination
3. Medical/Chiropractic Decision Making

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Compliance experts like John Davila have helped hundreds of chiropractors sort out their documentation standards and create a playbook for success. Some chiropractors are not in need of a full internal compliance audit, but simply need improve day to day documentation to substantially increase their bottom line and decrease medical denials.

So, you spend X thousands of dollars on a new EMR system. Then you implement your intake, examination, and daily soap notes based on your previous forms or you grab a template from a friend.

Let me ask a 3 simple questions-

1. What determines the inclusion or exclusion of information on your forms (clinical, educational, required by law,required by documentation standards)?
2. Did the form creator just "make it up" or develop it off of coding guidelines?
3. Are you confident in your documentation to bill the appropriate examination, or do you just try to fly under the radar?

If you just attempt to fly under the radar you are more than likely leaving money on the table. If you are unsure of the requirements to code (and bill) for a examination at 99203 then you may be putting yourself at risk for denials due to incomplete records. Either way is potentially detrimental to your practice. The good news is that you don't need to spend 100 hours learning the ever changing documentation standards relating to examination coding. We have created a simple, easy to follow guide to the documentation standards necessary for billing and coding examinations. It comes free with our Chiropractic Office Forms set. For docs that may need a little more help, we even offer a Professional Package with one-on-one implementation. For docs that need just the basics we offer a Basic Package. 

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-The Evidence Based Chiropractor has assisted hundreds of chiropractors around the globe build interdisciplinary referral relationships.

Have you viewed our FREE Guides?  Download The MD Meeting and the 5 Secrets to MD Referrals today.

Why Investing in Industry-specific SEO is Important for Chiropractors- by Patrick MacNamara

Why Investing in Industry-specific SEO is Important for Chiropractors

When was the last time you actually leafed through a paper phone book to find a local business or service provider? If you’re like most of your potential patients, it’s been years since you even considered using that once common method to select a new service provider. 

Today, most patients look online to find whatever they need, so it’s vitally important for the health of your chiropractic practice that you appear at the top of local search results. The only way to accomplish that is to have a robust chiropractic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy in place to ensure that your page ranks high with Google and other search engines. 

Most consumers never look past the first few items returned by the search engine, so if your site isn’t in the top two or three sites on the results page, you are probably losing business to your competitors. 

Many people think the key to ranking high is to pepper the site with a specific word or phrase (aka keyword stuffing), but this is actually detrimental to your objective since Google and most other search engines would consider this the hallmark of a spam site. 

Common words that have little to do with chiropractic will not help your site rank well when patients are looking for a new chiropractor, so using industry-specific words is crucial. However, patients may not always search using proper terminology, so you need to strike a balance between common usage terms and chiropractic terms. 

Using phrases rather than individual words may be helpful as well. You also need to be certain that the terms you select for your SEO keywords are different enough from your competitors’ terms to help you stand out while still common enough that consumers are likely to search for them. Achieving exactly the right mix of industry-specific keywords requires careful research and analysis. 

Effective SEO is actually a careful balancing act that mixes industry-specific key words and phrases, local data to ensure that nearby patients can find you and strategic links both within your own site and to external sites that help lend credibility to your site. 

Search engines consider keywords, their location on the page, the quality and variety of the site’s content and site links in their proprietary algorithms to arrive at a page authority for a specific site in any specific search. 

In addition, since most search engines, including Google, revise their search engine algorithm at least once or twice a year, strategies that once worked well may not provide the same results over time, so you need to revisit your SEO strategy frequently. 

There are hundreds of SEO consultants and “how to” books available, but very few have insider knowledge of the chiropractic industry that can help you when choosing the correct keywords. Typical SEO firms expect you to spend time teaching them about chiropractic and supplying potential keywords and phrases for them to test. 

In contrast, using an SEO firm like DCRank that already knows and understands the chiropractic industry inside and out allows you to bypass that lengthy education process and go right to content creation and testing to improve your search engine results.

You spent years becoming a chiropractor, and you want to devote your energy to helping patients and building your practice. Using industry-specific SEO practices can help you achieve more visibility in your local area without wasting time and resources on ineffective methods. 

Industry-specific keywords, both on your page and on linked pages combined with local data should form the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy to ensure high visibility and a steady stream of new patients for a healthy business.

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Patrick MacNamara, DC, is an Apple aficionado, blogger, chiropractor, public speaker, web designer and WordPress consultant. He writes extensively over at Next Generation Chiropractor, a blog that teaches chiropractors how to successfully market their chiropractic practices using the Internet and social media.