Purpose is probably one of the most important things in a personal injury practice. In order to grow a practice, you need to have a clear purpose behind it.

Purpose is the reason why you do something.  It is sort of your gauge. It’s your North Pole. It tells you where north is. It tells you when you are off track and when you are on track.

Purpose is the thing that helps you to know if you are improving or not.

In a personal injury practice the desire is long-term rising growth.  Long-term ability to maintain and manage a great staff.  All of which makes your clinic viable and a great place to work, a great place to come to and a great place to recover from injuries at.

Before you can have those things, you must have the purpose to have an injury practice that produces excellent clinical results on your patients, to have excellent treatment results, to have patients that come off your treatment line, out of your treatment programs that are as close to possible 100% made whole.

Yes, they may still have physical derangements that cause impairments, but those impairments are not causing any problems. There are no duties unaddressed. There’s no loss of enjoyment of life factors. There are no activities of daily living that are negatively influenced currently by the patient.

That is the ultimate of what you want to create.

You want to create that as quickly, as efficiently, and as cost-effectively as possible because then you have something really to market.

You really do.

I don’t care if you want to market to attorneys, to medical doctors, to companies, or directly to patients.

If you can have a great purpose that drives great results, then you are what everyone in the market needs.

Neck and back injuries are the most problematic injuries in the market today. No questions asked.

The biggest problem is diagnosis. Ligament injury diagnosis is the number one problem.

Most doctors don’t know how to diagnose ligament injuries.

When you have basic purpose of getting great patient results, of course diagnosis is going to be prominent.

You have to know where the injuries are, you have to know how bad these injuries are, and you have to know what you’re doing with the injuries in order to get great results.

Whether you are a doctor,  an attorney, a lawyer, an insurance carrier, or a patient what is required of the professionals that deal with personal injuries is that the professional is committed to continued education.  

A person who is continually educating himself on the condition that he’s treating. Knowing how to better diagnose it, how to better treat it, all the different modalities that will help with it.

As a doctor, you have to stay on the cutting edge of these things. You must stay current with them.

That doesn’t mean you have to have every new thing that comes down the line because you also have to be able to differentiate.

You must understand the injuries that you treat. You must know what to look for.  

All modalities and all things that can be applied will not necessarily apply to how you are treating those patients.

Your primary purpose must be getting great patient results.

That is what everybody in the market needs.

If you stay on course with that, what it does is it helps you to avoid schemes.

It helps you to avoid things that are about making money instead of talking about patient results.

I listen in the market a lot, and I listened to a lot of leaders and a lot of speakers, and they are basically appealing to the greed of the doctor. They are not talking about better patient results.

A doctor’s job in the injury market is to reduce patient benefit needs, long-term benefit needs.

That is called results.

If a patient comes into your clinic, with a back injury, after they have gone to an emergency room, and nothing could be found, they did all kinds of testing, maybe a CT scan or X-Ray, nothing could be found.

Nobody’s looking at excessive motion for ligament injuries, all that is getting missed.

But the things that medically get picked up, they don’t have serious fracture. They don’t have a cord injury. That’s all been ruled out.

But they are in a wheelchair because they can’t walk. Nobody can figure it out.

They come to you and you diagnose, and treat, and six months later they can run a 5K.

The benefit need reduction is very apparent.

You’ve reduced the long-term benefit need of that patient. If that patient stayed in a wheelchair, their long-term needs would be much higher.

As the doctor, your job is to document in a way that allows the patient access to any benefits that they may be entitled to.

But the bigger job is, is to reduce benefit need, not increase it.

That is called patient results.

Now, when that happens, the insurance carrier’s happy. The patient is happy. The patient’s attorney is happy. Everyone in the market is happy.

That is what they are all looking for.

I’ve coached enough doctors. Some doctors think that attorneys want everything to be a large settlement, but that has not been my experience.

My experience is that most attorneys want to quickly resolve a claim. When you are able to do the things that make it best for the patient and do the proper testing and document well and simply, those are the things that make all the difference in the market.

But that alone will not get attorney referrals.

So I train doctors on how to get attorney referrals.

One of thing I teach doctors to say in presentations is “Look, we’re a clinic that if you or someone you cared about or loved was in an injury, and they had … Let’s say they had migraine headaches. Your son or daughter had migraine headaches, and now they’re throwing up. They get an aura, they get dizzy, and then they throw up. And they’re doing this like, I don’t know, two or three times a week because they got an upper cervical ligament injury that’s causing the migraine headaches. I am the clinic.  The clinic that’ll find and figure out what’s causing the problem, and then we’re really good at treating the condition.”

If you or your son, your daughter, your family member, when they’re in an injury, the first thing you’re not thinking about is, “Well, gosh. How much money are we going to make?” That’s not what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about, “Oh my God. I have a loved one that’s in serious trouble, and I need to find the best.” “That is us.”

That is a SmartInjuryDoctor. That is what I train doctors to be. That doctor, that clinic.

 You don’t want referrals because you are good at running patients through a mill.

You want referrals because you’re good at getting incredible results with patients. That is what you want to be running.

That is purpose, and that is a purpose-oriented practice.

Because 50% of the patients that have a soft tissue injury, a ligament injury, are not going to fully recover according to statistics, and 30% of those are going to have some serious problems. That is not a patient problem.

That is a doctor problem.

I’ve said many, many times an injured patient should never go to somebody in the middle of a bell curve.

They should always be striving to find a doctor that is at the head of the bell curve, front of the bell curve, top 20%, top 10%, top 2% if you can find them, right?

Reminds me of a story when I was in private practice. I had a patient that I treated on and off for years as a chiropractor in a chiropractic practice. She had had an injury, and she’d come into me. It was about three months after the injury. She was in an auto accident, and she had badly side impact as I recall

She had fractured her leg and hip in the accident. It was that bad. She was waiting for that to heal up before she came in and started to see me.

I asked her who she was doing rehab with for the hip. She was doing it with a physical therapy center that was very close to her home. It was very convenient.

But, it was a geriatric Medicare PT center. They didn’t have any experience with those kinds of fractures.

So I located  a PT program clinic that she could go to that handled those types of injuries because I made it clear to her that even though she’d have to drive farther that her rehab was something that was going to affect the rest of her life.

You needed to find the best of the best.

You need to be the best of the best

That is what you want to strive to be. That’s your North Pole.

That is what tells you, when you look at your marketing, “Hey, if I’m going to do marketing, is this marketing?”

Remember marketing is how you’re perceived in the market. Does this marketing I am doing improve that perception of me in this market?

Education. You want to continuously strive for education.

There’s a lot of different education programs on personal injury.

You can spend weekends at seminars. You can go online. You can go on courses such as the one that I have. You can go to courses with other injury providers. You are going to gain something from every single one of them.

But, your North Pole has got to be, can they help me get better results?

Can they help me get faster results?

Can they help me get more economical results?

Is that their purpose?

In the Smart Injury Doctors program, that is our purpose.

Our purpose is to educate you.

To help you to be able to think with and to be able to maintain that North Pole.

The purpose in a personal injury practice is a great one.

You got to have the right purpose in order to achieve greatness.

I’ve met doctors where I immediately went, “They don’t have the right purpose.” What they are about is the money.

But I know for a fact, the money will come, and it will stay, and it will be very, very large for those that are doing things for the right reasons.

The right purpose

It really will.

That’s been my total experience.

Here is my topic for today, purpose.

I take a short topic and talk about it.

It gives you an idea of my position, of how I teach, how I train in the Smart Injury Doctors program. Thank you for your time

I ask you this, what are you struggling with in personal injury?

Personal injury is the most purpose-driven.

It the most fun.

There is a bit of negative things about it. But, there are negative things about everything in life.

But, it is the most purpose-driven portion of my practice.

But so rewarding.

It really can be.

For more information on Spinal Ligament Injuries please check us out at www.smartinjurydoctor.com or 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