Our office has been with Integrity Doctors for the past 1 and a half years. It really doesn’t matter where we have been, because for the past 16 years, I have had a mixture of some practice management as well as no practice management. Some systems had nice features, that helped wrap my head around the “what” I was doing in practice, but it really did not have the desired effect of helping the patient understand “why” they were doing what they were doing in our office. And it certainly did not help us in the goal of turning on more people to chiropractic care. Usually at these points, I was happy to leave the management group and “be free” and do it on my own. Looking back, what really was lacking was a system. I know that word gets thrown around a lot, but that is what was missing: a system of systems. Not just one system, but a system that correlates and contributes to other systems. This is where Integrity is different. Of course, coming on to Integrity during the loan-a-coach period, I really did not know this. To me at the time, Integrity seemed to be another management company that had the appearance of being better. How? I really did not know. Other than the coaxing of my friend and Integrity client who urged me to try it over the previous year, I did not know much. Looking back, I now realize the magnitude of the systems’ importance and how important each one is to another system. Integrity has challenged me more than any other management group. It’s a necessary challenge. It’s not easy. It’s work, but necessary work. Our coach is challenging, yet wonderful and sincere. She is a practicing doc just like me. Though I do not view her as my peer, but as a teacher, I feel that I can still relate to her as a practicing chiropractor too. I have found that the Integrity systems have helped patient care much more than my old ways, simply because the patient now has a greater understanding of chiropractic and its role in their healthCARE than what I was doing communicating with them before. Of course, I was happy before with the way I was communicating chiropractic, but apparently the patient was not. It’s not about what makes me happy with my communication; it’s about what the patient hears and understands.
It’s interesting. I knew we started to implement many new systems in our office, but it really didn’t hit me just how much of the systems we incorporated until I started verbalizing out loud to an associate candidate recently all of our systems. I seemed to go on and on about Report of Findings, and How to Stay Young classes, and Wellness Reports, and New Patient Trackers, and Stat Reports, and Marketing Planners, and on and on. All the while, he seemed more and more impressed with the organization of such an office. So, I suppose it is akin to the Wellness Report. I (like the patient) was surprised to hear all the stuff in the “Where You Started” category. It’s easy to forget just how far you have come when you keep looking ahead at how much more you have to do. We have to keep moving forward, but it’s also motivation to see how far you’ve come. We’ve got a lot more work to do to reach our 5 year goals, but we have the systems in place to get us there.
Dr. Michael Bennese
Enola, Pennsylvania