What are the three things as an injury practice business owner do you need to do exceptionally well in order to truly expand in the injury market and do it so that it’s easy? So that it’s not so stressful?

There are three basic skill sets that you must have. I’m going to lay those skill sets out today. They’re very simple.

The first skill set is that you, as a clinician, must be extremely good at what you do. You must be able to do a few things well.

• You must be able to diagnose all of the injuries that the patient has. And you can’t miss injuries and simple ligament injuries. You must understand that there is a disc herniation and then there is excessive motion. You must understand picking up both findings so that you can determine easily the severity and location of any ligament injury that the patient has. You must be able to diagnose these things incredibly well.
• Then you must be able to treat them incredibly well.  The first thing to treatment and treatment results is really having a sound understanding \ of what the underlying condition is that you are treating. The better you understand the underlying condition, the better your treatment results are going to be. You must be able to diagnose well, and you have to be able to treat well.

And today in the injury market, you’re in a medico-legal situation. You must document well.

• Your documentation determines the benefits that the patient is going to be able to have access to and potentially get.
• Your documentation determines whether the plaintiff attorney has a hard time or not.
• Your documentation determines whether the defense attorney has a hard time or not.
• Your documentation depends whether the insurer has a hard time or not.

You must be able to express yourself simply when in a deposition or a court trial setting.

• You, as a doctor, must be able to diagnose all the injuries the patient has.
• You must be able to get great treatment results with these conditions on a regular basis. And I mean great treatment results.

If a patient that goes through your treatment program, no matter how long it takes, they should not have chronic pain, any activities of daily living disorders, duties under duress, or loss of enjoyment of life factors.

If you can do this with a high degree of confidence and a high degree of predictability and routinely with patients, that’s step number one in your business because you are the person that produces the product and results of an injury clinic.

The second biggest thing that you must have is a well-trained team. Your team is super, super important and training your team is one of the highest returns on investment activities that you can actually do.

Everyone trains their staff, everyone trains the front desk staff how to answer the phone, the billing person how to code for bills, how to send out and make phone calls to insurance adjusters, and to follow up on denials. Everyone trains their staff to help your patient fill out the paperwork correctly ,how to route the patient to the room correctly, or how to schedule the patient correctly. Those are all routine things. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about now is the ability to train your staff to answer questions about the injury work that you do, as good or better than you do. When I say better, sometimes the staff are better because they’re simpler and they put things in layman’s terms much.

• Your staff needs to understand what a patient is going through. They need to understand the reality of the patient, whether it’s day one, which is one of your most important visits.
• What is that patient going through?
• When they first get into your clinic, what is the experience that they’re going to go through? What’s the experience with the first phone call?
• Routing them in, filling out your paperwork, gathering their insurance information,
• Introducing you, the doctor in their first visit.
• Your consultation, examination procedures,
• Imaging procedures of you do them internally.
• Treatment procedures.
• Information that you provide them with to take home.
• How they are rescheduled.

Every person in your staff needs to understand the high points of what needs to get communicated in each one of the visits.

• If you or your staff do not understand, or  you don’t have a team around, you’re seriously cutting the number of referrals you can get;
• you’re seriously cutting the amount of the reduction of problems that you would have with reimbursement;
• You’re seriously cutting down the results that you can get with the patients as far as their physical results;
• You are cutting down a lot of things that simply don’t need to be cut down.

Training your staff is one of the most important things you can do but training them specifically in what makes you unique as an injury provider is even more important. When patients leave the room and walk down the hall and suddenly have more questions, if they can’t go to anybody in your clinic and ask and get a great answer to the question, you’re seriously losing money, results, and causing yourself a lot unnecessary of stress. That’s simply because you haven’t trained your staff.

The doctor also must be able to market. Marketing is nothing more than determining how you want to be perceived in the market.

• You must ask yourself how you want to be perceived in the market? You want to be perceived as the best doctor a patient can go to.
• And what does that mean? It means that you are fast, effective, you don’t miss things, make the rehabilitation very easy and simple to understand, and you get great results.
• You document so that anyone that the patient is involved with, from a plaintiff attorney, defense attorney, their insurance carriers, to their state work comp carriers, has a lot easier time with it.

That’s how you want to be perceived. I want to be perceived as somebody who doesn’t miss injuries. If I’m going out to attorneys, I want to be perceived as somebody who documents so incredibly well that it makes their life super, super easy. If I want to be looked at by insurers, I want to be looked at somebody that’s honest, ethical, and highly professional. That’s how I want to be looked at. That is called a marketing strategy. Deciding how you want to appear to your market.

A marketing plan is deciding how you want to get that perception out to your community. Advertising is where you put that message on paid or unpaid communication lines. A paid communication line might be a radio commercial or a TV commercial, or you might do some sort of a newspaper ad. You might be doing all kinds of social media posts. You might be sending newsletters out to your patients, past and present. You need to communicate to your patient base on a regular basis. That’s called marketing.

When you accomplish these three things, it becomes very easy to expand. It’s easy to put associates in behind you. It’s easy to bring in new, well trained staff and retrain staff. If you understand how you want to be perceived and you’re putting that perception in the market, you’ve got it made in the injury market. And the injury market, in my personal and my professional experience, is the most fun market to be involved in because it’s a very high purpose game.

Patients that are injured have a 50/50 chance of never fully recovering, so they need the best doctors to be treating them. And that’s what made that game super, super fun for me because I wanted to be that doctor.

I run a program called the SmartInjuryDoctors programs and that’s why doctors are attracted to the program because that’s what they want to be. Marketing does one really neat thing; it repels what you don’t want, and it attracts what you do want.

You must decide professionally what you want to be in, how you want to be perceived. Because once you make that decision and once you start going down to that path, you will attract what you want to attract. Right now, if you’re getting things that you don’t like, you need to look at how you’re being perceived and what you’re putting out because that’s what you’re attracting. I like to always work with high level people. That’s what I like to work with, and I think you will too.

The three components of your business are you, your staff, and marketing. They are key things to being able to grow your injury practice now and for the next decade or decades to come.

For more information on Spinal Ligament Injuries please check us out at http://www.smartinjurydoctor.comor check out our SmartInjuryDoctors® Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher.

For information on spinal ligament testing by board certified medical radiologists go to www.thespinalkinetics.com