Hi, Don here. Welcome to Podiatry Practice Mastery. I am going to go over my one page report for August 2025. I like to do this every month. I kind of go over what's working, what's not working and I like to share everyone kind of behind the scenes, both in my practice and in my personal life. So I, I like to, a lot of times not only show what good things are going on, but I think sometimes we learn more from the bad things that are going on in life.
OK, so this is the goals I was working on in July and then any of the progress. So we're on the third month in our new EMR with Mod Med and we are getting used to it. Good, bad and ugly. After about 3 months, my scribe, he is up and running so thankfully like all my notes are getting done. I actually think it has a better billing software. I think we get paid faster and it is certainly a lot less expensive than Athena, albeit the actual templates are more challenging to use.
I think the protocols are a little bit better, but the templates are a little bit used. I feel a little more restricted, almost like handcuffed into having it do their way and and look like those those templates. A couple of things I'm really struggling with and I've had a hard time with are trying to get good reports because frankly, I don't know how to make them. And I would like to know like how many in tracking, like tracking attribution tracking for my marketing?
So for example, are my patients coming from Facebook? Are they coming from LinkedIn? Are they coming from other places, other primary cares? And it has a little question mark, but it's not obligatory to answer. So I have to figure out how to turn that on. So it makes it obligatory. Also, my reporting isn't as good as Athena. Athena had really good reports. Like these reports were excellent each month. And it was really easy for my staff.
Like they can check new patients, follow up patients, billing, but they have a hard time on like shockwave, orthotics, other types of things like that. So I'm still struggling a little bit with that. I met with a like a person, a consultant that was going to help us a little bit and then she kind of ghosted us. I'm finding I get more of this ghosting stuff more and more, and she was even referred from someone else, like a friend of
mine. But I just find that this ghosting thing is, I don't know, people just don't communicate or they're not getting emails. I'm not exactly sure which one. I still find it a little bit challenging to sign off on documents. I came back from vacation and I'd like all these documents to sign.
So in Athena, it was really easy to sign off on like physical therapy orders or the physical therapy things that did sign off, the reports and signing off on for like diabetic shoe, like they ask for subscriptions or signatures and stuff like that. So it's really hard to sign off on stuff. And so it got to a point where I just printed things off and I said I'll just physically sign it and had my staff re fax. It makes it easier for me, frankly.
And it uses a piece of paper and I don't have a ton of stuff I have to sign off on. And so I'm actually thinking about printing stuff versus doing it that way. I've talked to some other doctors, they do that. They're not like deal Breakers, but they're just frustrations. And then the other frustration frankly was Athena came back and they're like, hey, you know, we, we miss you. Did you by the chance want to come back like, and I told them, hey guys, I love, I love Athena. I loved it.
I was like a Rep, not a Rep, but I like talked to other doctors about Athena and they paid me money and not a whole bunch of money. If anyone wants to know, it's like $500.00 an hour and you can someone talk to me. Which it wasn't all that often. It wasn't breaking the bank, but I, I love the product. But the problem was like with their percentage, we were just getting like hammered.
And so with this new one, Athena offered something where we would have saved maybe like I think 40,000 in this Mod Med would have saved us like 70,000 per year. And and also Modmed was cutting out all the cash payments, which I like the most. So orthotics, shockwave cash payments don't go through Modmed's billing. And so we get all the benefit versus them taking a percentage of that. And that's what the main, like the main reason was money. The main reason we switched was,
was money. So that was the kind of the issue. So they came back to me and said, hey, we'll get you a better deal. But now when they came back to me, really the deal wasn't any better. It was the same deal they had given before and it wasn't. And so there's no incentive for me to to go back. So Murali, my scribe is is doing better, getting better with the new system.
I actually had to just I do a lot of nail care on Friday mornings and I had to sit down actually with my office manager and she had to like walk me through like baby steps here of of getting. I know you might be great at diabetic foot care coverage. I'm not. And so she had to go in and just review all my notes with me, like 30 notes on a Friday and just say, OK, Dom, this, these aren't getting covered. I'm tired of getting the kickback. So you have to fix your notes.
So I did that. I had a good trip to Brazil. So my wife is from Brazil. I lived at some time in Brazil. I was a Rotary exchange student 30 years ago. Can you imagine that? I don't even feel 30, but it was 30 years ago. We had a nice vacation, we had a good beach day to Rhode Island the Monday before. So I've been taking during the summertime, some Mondays off to be with my kids because they're on summer break.
And I find that during the school year, it's the, the school doesn't like it when I take them out just on personal days to enjoy days off with them. So it kind of restricts us. So I'm trying to take more time off during the summer. So we enjoyed that. Brazil was nice. My, I went to, we went to a little church camp and called the Mahanayeem, which is in the, in the, in the mountains. It was a little cooler there. We're there for four days where there's a church retreat.
And then we went to my in laws in the interior part of Miniat ice and we, and he's a coffee farmer now. So I got to go look at the coffee in the morning and the evening and drank the coffee and I ate way too much. So my only complaint was we stayed like 7 days at one location with my in laws. So you can't like leave, but it was, it was fun. Otherwise returned, I was refreshed and I was really able to disconnect from work. I don't really don't do any work or any business reading or
anything like that. Now I do use my my travel days as buffer days. Like I I tend to work when I'm travelling just because there's nothing else to do when I'm travelling. So I'm usually working on new ideas. I'm continuing to do YouTube Shorts and I'm taking the winners. And I made an ad for that and I made an ad and we're doing that
for our urgent care. They're people that are coming in. I'm really still struggling a little bit with attribution check tracking, like tracking if patients are really coming from the urgent care. I can see it on my schedule. And there's a new cool way with Clara, which is with the Mod Med where I can make appointments just for urgent care appointments. So they can get any time with, with any doctor. So it makes it a lot easier. So these videos are going well.
I'm still doing a video a day with YouTube Shorts and it's sending it everywhere else. It's like sending it to TikTok, to Instagram, to X, which is Twitter. It sends it everywhere else. So if you want to know how I do that, just shoot me an e-mail. Don don@podiatrypracticemastery.com love to share that little protocol with you. It works really well for making content. I just do content when I'm seeing patients in in in the treatment room.
That's all I really do. I try to do 1 short a day. I probably do multiple a day, but I kind of like put them all together and then I make one short a day that publishes through my virtual assistants. They publish everything. We are still having our our phone guy. We have a new virtual phone Podiatry person that answers phones. He's still messing up on some answers. Like he says someone asked, well, can I send a picture and he said no. Well, it's definitely on our website.
You can send a picture to us via HIPAA circuit texting. Like there's just simple questions that he's not answering all that well. So it's probably our fault from not training him. So for May, my billing was at 1:20, a 120,000, a little bit higher. I think also only because of the new medical record, like some of my previous billing was held back. I don't know how many shock waves, orthotics, Swifts, or amnios I've done because I don't know how to track that.
We've got 17 reviews which were really down, so I'm switching. I'm thinking about switching back to Swell. It's a different company to get online reviews. We were doing a lot more 102 downloads, so we're getting a lot more downloads on our website and our free lead magnets. So different type of updates. I've been doing these videos daily shorts with my VA. If you want to see them, you can certainly go to my YouTube channel, YouTube slash Doctor Belto.
Our urgent pay urgent care page is doing well, getting a lot of patient visits and it's filling up the the newer Dr. here that's not already busy. I got asked to do a biopsy workshop for a local Podiatry meeting. So I'm kind of excited about that. I enjoy doing those things, so that should be fun. My dad went on vacation. So when we went on vacation, my dad who's dealing with a little bit dementia, he went on vacation with his sisters and it was such a nice break.
Like it was a good family dynamic and we are looking for a place for him. I really feel almost like guilty and sad saying this, but it's such a hard family dynamic with a nine and an 11 year old at 9 at home with with dad there as well. Murali, my scribe is up to date with mod Med. He's getting better with notes and I really feel like life is getting better. So frankly, life sucked for the first three months with the mod
Med or with any EMR. It's not mod Med specifically, but it's it's tough and now it's getting better. Next there's a new ChatGPT that I've been using. It's if you look up under specific chats, it was Alex Harmozi, HORMOZI. If you like Alex or if you like marketing, you could you just ask questions to his ChatGPT. He has a paid version for like $200 a month, but I think the free is sufficient. I made my dumb phone, so I made
my smartphone into a dumb phone. I have a couple little tips where basically I delete everything from all my pages, all my home screens and I only have the first screen is totally empty and black. The second screen has only a couple of icons that I use and then the next one has like my 2 point verification stuff. And I also have learned on my phone. Anyway, the one I have, if I click the right button three times, it makes it black and
white. So it's a lot less incentivizing to look at anything when it's black and white. If it's color it, it just you want to look at it more. And then finally, I started out some new titles on my Podiatry practice mastery. I don't know if you guys noticed this, but if you're listening to this, you might be. I started to do actual titles based on interesting patients I've seen during the day or things that I've learned or I want to talk about versus just like the $1,000,000 minute.
I used to call everything the $1,000,000 minute, but I learned from Alex Harmozzi. It's probably better to have a more tantalizing title. So I've been fixing the titles. If you don't listen to this podcast, I don't know how you're listening to this, but listen to it. So what's my focus for August 2025? Focus on improving my urgent care page and make a patient referral request card to the urgent care.
So basically a patient referral. So something that I can give to patients in the office, like all my patients to refer their friends for our urgent care appointments. I want to make a special web page for a sneaker store offering priority access to their customers for visits in our office with an e-mail submit well offer book as well offer a book on common foot and running injuries.
So basically doing a page for us, but looks like their website with like a book for like we have a local sneaker store called Sneakerama. I want to put a book on there that I've done previously that they can give to their patients, their customers that come to the office. But also it would offer our urgent care if they have any urgent foot issues. And then finally print out referral cards for a sneaker store and ask them to give out
to their patients. So that was the day once again, I hope you guys found this one one page overview for August beneficial. I'd love to hear what you think. Send me an e-mail don@podiatrypracticemaster.com. Also, I'm putting together a six month challenge to help you get your practice to the $1,000,000 mark. If you're in the six to six to seven $100,000 mark, you want to get to the million, let me know. OK, Happy to have you be part of that challenge. OK, thanks. See you tomorrow.