Charging for Speed in Podiatry: Boost Patient Satisfaction

Hey guys, Don here, welcome to Podiatry Practice Mastery where I'm helping you sharing what's kind of working for me to get my practice to the $1,000,000 mark and beyond. Hopefully some of these tips will will help you in your practice. So I'm going to go over a Friday. So the first Friday in our office each month we have an office meeting in the afternoon so we only see patients in the morning.

And Fridays for me are the days where we just do routine care. So each doctor has their own day that all they do is nail care. We found that in our experience, this is the best way to be most efficient with nail care versus interspersing them with all the other patients in the practice. In the past, we used to have

like regular patients and the nail care patients and a lot of times we were running behind on for a certain patient and then all of a sudden the nail patients wait like 30 or 40 minutes. Also these nail care patients don't take a lot, a lot of time unless we're doing like an exam or newer exam for them. And so we could put a lot of them double booked. And then we also have a nail tech Marjorie that's helping me. So it was a, it was a busy day.

There were, I think there were a couple of new patients. So I did office visits for some of these new patients and that was the most kind of the most important thing as, as you know, we are switching from medical records.

And since we're switching to the switch in this new record, I asked Murali, my scribe, if, if I could start doing my, you know, yearly diabetic foot exams or yearly, you know, the vascular studies. The, the challenge with doing them isn't so much scheduling. The problem is there are so many things to look at when we're swapping things over. So what what I've decided is I'm going to try to push all of that

stuff back about three months. And the reason for that is I'm having to transfer everything from Athena over to mod met all these patients and each patient is basically new, a new patient in there. And then on top of that to look, you know, when their last diabetic foot exam was or when their last ABI was, it just adds additional time when there's so

many patients. I think if we had less patients or if we could go through it like before to figure that out, I think that would be more efficient. But you don't, I don't have that privilege there for someone that can kind of do that. So I'm waiting to get past the three month line, meaning where all the routines starting to come back and then I can start getting more, more thorough kind of with the patients. I want to talk about a couple of

fun things here. There was a patient that came in and she gave me a little nickname. She called me Doctor Wonderful and I and I just thought that was so funny. Doctor wonderful. It seems like I don't know something you would see somewhere else than than in in a doctor's office, but that was kind of a fun thing. One thing I was I was learning about, I was I still like listening to Alex Harmozi.

He's like my favorite podcast and he talked about something that might be beneficial to us. It's it's something that's charging for speed. So if patients want things done faster and that's something we can charge extra for, we shouldn't always think of it as a burden. So what are some things that patients want quicker? So they might want their orthotics quicker So we can add a fee to that we can charge, we can charge for that.

If patients want, you know, their records quicker, you know they can, they can, you can charge a fee for that. Something filled out right now versus in a couple of days, you can charge for that. If they want to maybe moved up

in the surgical schedule, you could also charge for that. I, I find that the speed of, of implementation and the speed of getting going for patients tends to give them a better experience in general. And a lot of times they're

willing to pay for that. So for example, when patients come in for, for heel pain, a lot, a lot of times what I used to do in the past, I used to do it step wise, like everyone had to have anti inflammatories and icing and then come back in three weeks and see if that worked. Now in, in my experience, very few patients ever got better with those initial treatments. And so a lot of times and the

same thing with nail fungus. A lot of times I would do a nail sample and then have them come back three weeks later and I'd go for the nail sample, but it didn't really affect my treatment. So I offered to patients, I'm like, well, if you want to speed things up here, we can just skip the nail sample and you won't be billed that by your insurance that that nail sample. And you know, if it's, if it's

not working, then we can do a sample or then we can just switch to something else else. If I'm really unsure if it's like maybe a traumatic nail, then I'll do it. Same thing with with plantar fasciitis patients. I'll say, you know, we could start the icing an anti-inflammatory, but very few patients do I find that ever get rid of their pain with that. Or we could just jump right to the ultrasound and then to the actual treatments that work.

And I find my patients appreciate that, that we we jump into it for treatment and you get them better faster or at least you start the treatment. So their perception of getting treatment or getting better faster is speed speeded up even even many times I'll say, hey, I can check if we have time to do the shockwave this first day, unless they've been on an anti-inflammatory, but in which case we could just kind of start

the shockwave. So I think paying for speed or even having that increase the value of what you offer to patients can be better. And, and I find the best way, the best patients I find that want to speed things up are really the ones that have consumed a lot of my educational information online, like my YouTube videos or they've gone to the site, our website, and they've watched the videos and everything else that's related to their condition.

So I feel like a more educated patient, they know kind of what's next and they know what to expect. And like, ideally, if I could get all of my patients before they come in to watch or to look at one blog post based on that condition, then they would be all set up because they know what to expect. I haven't figured out how to do

that. I've thought about using Clara, our, our new like patient communication tool. If you could somehow say, OK, we could do it based on a diagnosis and then based on that diagnosis, they would get something to look at. And I know not everyone's going to look at it, but those in my experience that tend to be the patients that are most motivated and they're the most willing to accept the, the treatment recommendation.

So that was the first thing is, is charging for speed. The 2nd update is I'm going to tell you about our nail tech. She is doing really well. It has been, I think she's been six months now. She's been with us and now she's I'm very confident with her doing toenails on her own. She's starting to do some callous. She's not as confident with that. We still tend to help her. She has her own schedule that she works with us as the doctors and she is starting and we are

OK with this. She's starting to kind of like steal patients, meaning she has her own little nail salon and some of the patients are going to see her in the nail salon.

We we are OK with that. She's also opening it up to do some home visits. So she's, I think she's charging like $75.00 for the home visit plus whatever travel time that she does. So these these things, I think they're both good for her because she feels valued, but it's a really win, win for our practice because there was really no one doing home visits here.

Now, she doesn't normally do calluses, which is I think it's out of her scope a little bit, but under under our scope, we are, we're working with her. So just wanted to give you guys the update of, of things that are going on in the practice. Once again, if you want to learn more, I have a lot of other patient information on Podiatry practice mastery.com, go there.

There's a free course on there to kind of, I want to give out kind of my road map of everything that I would do and what I did in practice to help get to the $1,000,000 mark and beyond. Hope you guys enjoy this. I'm Don Pelto once again, Thanks for thanks for listening.