Episode 1: Welcome to The ChiroPractice Pro Podcast
In each episode, you’ll find a free resource here. In future episodes we have SOAP note guidelines, example exams, and ways to dominate search results in your area. Look for it in this section in future episodes.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Welcome to episode one of the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. In this episode, we discuss what ChiroPractice Pro is, how integration works and what is in store for the upcoming episodes of the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. Today’s guest is Peter Eldridge. Peter is an engineer who has developed the software behind ChiroPractice Pro. He is a co-founder and a member of the original team. Quick fun fact about Pete, when I was two years old, he spun me around the kitchen, tripped, fell on top of me and broke my right femur. I was in a body cast for two months.
Part of the reason Pete helped me get started with ChiroPractice Pro was because he felt bad about this and felt he needed to help me and continue to pay penance for the injury, just kidding about the penance. Pete and I have been friends for a long time, and we both have a passion to bring the best technology to providers in their offices as we become partners with those using ChiroPractice Pro. For more information and to see the show notes for this episode, visit us at chiropracticepro.com/episode1. Now here’s our guest, Peter Eldridge. Alright, Pete, welcome to the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. Glad to have you on board.
Peter Eldridge: Good to be here.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Tell me about the origins of ChiroPractice Pro and how it got started.
Peter Eldridge: About 2004, you just started a new practice or took over a practice and were looking to find a way to expand and to get a digital office system into your practice. You came to me and were trying to figure out how to do that. You’d researched online and had seen what was out there. There was a lot of expense involved, some of it didn’t do what you really wanted it to do. You really came to me and said, “Hey, how can we do this?” So we kind of talked about it and discussed it and came up with sort of a plan on how to do that.
We started implementing it, and I think during that time, a gym had come to you and said, “Hey, we want you to come expand and service some of the clients that we have in the gym.” We weree trying to figure out how do we make this mobile? How do we make it so that wherever you have internet access, we can have access to our data in our program, and be able to share notes and schedules across the internet? That’s kind of how this all was born and really out of necessity, and a drive to see something that could really be used and that was affordable.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I think one of the biggest issues that I was having was technically, it’s a HIPAA violation to take written notes in between facilities unless you have them secured properly and I had no real way of doing that. That was one of my biggest problems to start was just like you said, just practical and definitely came up with some good solutions. Tell me a little bit about what the purpose of ChiroPractice Pro is, and why are we here? What’s going on?
Peter Eldridge: We had a great tagline when we started. It was, “The best office system at a price you can afford.” And that’s what we want to be. We want to be the very best office system that we can be, and we want to be something that’s affordable so that everybody can use it. One of the things that I look at when I see the different doctors who come in to and ask us for help is that there are different programs out there, but what I want our system to be unique in doing is it needs to be efficient for you, and it’s got to be something that you can use that will help you, that will save you time, it will save you money. If it doesn’t do that, then you shouldn’t be doing our program or any program that’s not saving you time, making you more efficient with your office and your staff and your client.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Yeah, I think that goes right into our next question. What’s going on with ChiroPractice Pro, and what’s new? What are some of the ways that you’re taking that vision and we’re implementing it into the new ChiroPractice Pro?
Peter Eldridge: Yes, we’ve been in a process over the last few months of launching this Windows X program. What it does, it gives the user more control over the data and how they see the data. We’ve moved away from the standard web design, and it’s really the way of the future for us. It’s being able to control your data, see your data and use your data in the most efficient way.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: On that note, as a doctor and I’m doing notes, I don’t necessarily want to get involved with what the front desk is doing when I’m actually seeing patients. When I’m seeing patients, I want to be focused on seeing patients. I don’t want have to worry about running credit cards and getting involved in rescheduling and things like that. My goal is to just see patients so the way that we have the new Windows X set up is that when I’m in there and I’m logged in, I see exactly what I need to see when I’m seeing patients.
Now, when I step back and I want to be that doctor that’s taking a look at my practice overall, now, I can bring up other of those windows to see what’s going on as far as reports and maybe communications. But I think that’s the coolest part of that is when I’m in there, and I’m doing my job as a doctor, I can focus on that and I can see exactly what I need to see.
Peter Eldridge: Yeah, and what we’ve done is taken all clutter away from the user, so that you can focus exactly on what you want. The front desk doesn’t have to know how to take a note. The front desk doesn’t necessarily need to know all the reports that you’re going to want to see as a as a doctor and as a business person. You can isolate what people are viewing and you can isolate what you’re viewing so that you can see exactly what you need to see.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: What are these windows? How do they function, and what do they look like?
Peter Eldridge: Think of your desktop on your computer, your PC or your Mac, and you’ve got different programs that reside in different windows. What we’ve done with our system is take the different functions of ChiroPractice Pro. We’re talking about the patient data, the reports, the schedule, the notes, the communication, got us a couple new windows that we’re introducing, one that shows you your practice in a glance and shows you all your alerts and reminders and those things all in one spot so that you can see those. Each one of these windows talks to each other as well. So you get this integration throughout the whole system, so that you are focusing on what you need to do and letting the program do what it does which is keep track of all your data.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite parts about the new windows. Everything talks to each other. It’s so quick to do a SOAP note as far as the doctor goes. I can see what’s coming next, I can see who’s checked in, but it’s all just right there and in real time. I don’t have to click around through a system, and it’s not clunky which is great. Just on that note that I find fascinating about ChiroPractice Pro is its ability to integrate with different parts of the system. Can you give some of the ways that you’ve seen as far as ChiroPractice Pro really shine with integration maybe for a practice, and then also in between these windows, how they can integrate, or in between the exam and billing, what are some great examples?
Peter Eldridge: Let’s talk about exams and billing. There’s a lot of integration between exams and billing, so that when you’re a doctor taking a note and you’re prescribing the plan that you have for your patient, whether it be a CMT or whether it be modalities or even further than that, X-rays or whatever, when you’re taking your note, clicking on those buttons that say, “I’m doing an X-ray right now.” That will go directly into the billing so it that shows up in the patient’s ledger that you’ve done an X-ray today, or that you’ve done modalities, or you’ve done your manipulative therapy.
That’s the power in that so that you’re not doing it twice, you’re not filling out a super bill, you’re not doing that. Then the front desk’s got to take that, and do some things. A great example of another area that we do, this is with reports and communication. We had a client who came to us and said, “We’re doing this travel card, but it’s taking so much time every day to generate these travel cards.” So one of the things we did was we took a report, we generated a report based on who they were seeing that day.
We were able to give that to him in a printed form, so all they had to do is run that report, push it to the communications area, and then immediately print all that stuff so that they could immediately have their travel cards. It had all their information that they had on there. The last visits that they were there, the insurance company that they were doing. It made something that they were taking hours a day to do, this integration across the windows between the schedule, the communications and the reports made those hours worth of time a day into minutes and seconds.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I think that gets into the next part, in case people are thinking that all of our clients print notes and things like that, that’s not the case. But we’re big into customization for each office. How does that work, the customization, and how are different doctors using the system differently? Do you have some examples of that?
Peter Eldridge: Sure. We have lots of different clients who are using specifically Notes. Notes is a great way. When first started, we thought, “Wow, okay. We’re going to publish a SOAP note, and an exam and everybody’s just going to use that.” But we found out that people do things just a little bit different. Whether it’s by training or just by their experience, they’ve grown to be able to do their business and their care in a certain way. What we wanted to do was be able to capture that. What we did early on was integrate this optimization and customization for a specific clinic. With Notes, the way that you take the notes, so if you want to see a bunch of buttons down the side, we can do that. If you want to write out text or even talk to the computer and have the computer dictate to you, that’s another way that’s possible through the system. Also, the way that you view the exam.
Once the documentation is done and the exam is complete, how you view that. Some people like it more verbose type documentation where it’s in sentences, we can do that. Some people like it concise and to fit on a small little table that just shows exactly what they’ve done, so it just got an S and O and A and a P, and it shows each one of those just concise. What we try to not do is dictate the way that you’re doing your business. What we want to do is become a partner to you and say, “How are you doing things? How can we help you do what you’re doing more efficiently, so that you can spend more time caring for your patients and not worrying about how the system works and making what you’re doing fit with the system. We want the system to kind of coincide with what you’re doing and fit with your business.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: And hopefully as we go along too, we’ve learned a lot of different things from different offices. We can also help you understand how the system works. That’s part of our training is just to help you get started the right way with ChiroPractice Pro and understand how it works as well. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do too.
Peter Eldridge: Yeah, let me touch on something else as far as customizations go. The other thing that we say is our reports are fully customizable. What we try to do there is take reports that you have or things that you need to see out of your system, whether it be scheduled data or billing data, employee data, all of these things that are in the system and being kept tracked by the system can be output in a form that you can use, and that you can see every day. These are living and growing reports, so it’s not a static report. It’s growing and knowing exactly what you’re doing throughout the day, and at the end of the day, and the month, and the year that you have. It’s a powerful part of our program is the customization ability of it.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Along with doing the customization and trying to be a partner with chiropractors and other providers as well, we have more than just chiropractors onboard. Why are we so upfront with the pricing? How does that work, and what does our pricing look like?
Peter Eldridge: We’ve got several tiers of pricing that we do. We’ve got a price structure for a doctor coming straight out of college. We’ve also got one for an established doctor, we’ve got one for the more advanced doctor as well, somebody who wants all the bells and whistles and and everything that we can offer as far as customization, so we break it up into tiers. What we do is we tell you, “This is our price, that’s it. There’s no additional cost for transferring data, there’s no additional cost for customization, there’s no additional cost for training, there’s no additional cost for support.”
We found that that’s unique in this space that we’re in. There’s a lot of programs out there that will tell you this is how much it cost, but on the back end, they start feeding fees into you that you don’t know about. Everything that you get with ChiroPractice Pro comes with the price that you pay. There’s nothing additional to that. Here’s an anecdote that we had earlier on. We did our research and we called 20 different companies out there that were doing medical records and medical office systems. We wanted to find out what the competition was like. We came up with a set of 20 questions that we could ask each one of these.
It was funny to see at the end of the test that we had calling all of these systems, we found that there was a lot of hidden fees in a lot of places. In fact, one company actually threatened to sue us if we publish the data that we had. That was shocking to us that they didn’t want what they told us to be published.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I have a friend that’s using this system. I think it’s actually that same system. He told me he had to purchase the server, and then he had to purchase the actual program which was over 10 grand, and then he has to pay a monthly fee. We’ve got our communication and you can process credit cards through our system, you can do all of those really cool things that integrate in with the practice. Each one of those, if he wants to do them, cost an additional amount of money. Then he got hacked last year which anybody can get hacked, but then he had to pay another $10,000 to the hackers to get his system back. It was just amazing that that’s what he was doing.
Peter Eldridge: Yeah, and that goes to a second part of this. We’re required by HIPAA as the doctors are, to secure this data. We have several methods of securing the data through different protocols, security protocols that we have. There’s obligations on us. If you’ve got your own server inside your own clinic that you’ve got to maintain, that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of effort to upgrade and maintain that. We take that out of your hands, it’s a cloud-based system so that you can access your system anywhere that you have internet access. What we want you to know is that we’re taking obligation on too as far as HIPAA goes, but we also understand that it’s saving the doctor and the clinic a lot of time and effort.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Absolutely.
Peter Eldridge: With the pricing, we’ve been talking about making sure that we can get our system out to other chiropractors. What are some things that you’re doing with the marketing effort and how are you getting ChiroPractice Pro out to new doctors.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Absolutely. Some of the stuff that we’re trying to do from a marketing standpoint is to start adding value back to the chiropractic community. What I mean by this is our goal is to make it easy for providers, just like we’ve been talking about the ChiroPractice Pro system. We want our marketing to go along with that. One of the things we don’t do is we don’t do flashy ads, and we don’t cold call offices. It’s not what we’re about. We’re trying to start adding really great information. Practicing is hard enough, but when you don’t have the answers, it can be even tougher. If you’re coming out of school and you’ve only written SOAP notes in school and you’re seeing your first patient, we want you to know that SOAP notes that you’re doing, that you’re going to get paid for one, and second that you’re going to meet the legal standard.
Some of the things that we’re trying to do with our program is to give people information to make sure they know how to do all these things, not only good, but be the best at it. That same doctor that I talked about the server, one of the things that he always says to me is, “I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I don’t know if I’m doing exams right. I don’t know if I’m doing SOAP notes right.” to meet the legal standard and in case he gets audited. What we want to do is we want to help you know that you’re doing it right and to be the best at it.
Some of the stuff that we’re trying to do is we put together podcasts for our community. It’s to help you not only excel in documentation, but also in marketing. In our fifth session that we’ve had, we sat down with a guy, his name’s Dr. Derek Baron from The Doctors Marketing Source. He talked about dominating Google Search. I was just blown away about how simple he made this seem and how simple it is. He just laid it out step by step. The other one that we had in our first episode, Dr. Warren Jan, was he talks about making your SOAP notes shine. He gave us a practical guide to daily documentation.
This is a great way that you’re going to be able to do your notes, and again meet the legal minimum standard that you need to do, and make it shine. As our goal as a company, what we’re trying to do is give you the best possible information to make your practice a success. We just think that on top of this, that ChiroPractice Pro is a great partner in this. A lot of things that we talk about in our podcast, it also links up with the system. It’s really kind of cool how ChiroPractice Pro helps to integrate a lot of these practical steps that we talked about on the podcast.
That’s one of our main things that we’re doing now, and this is the introduction of that podcast. We’re glad you’re here listening. If you’re finding this someplace else, and you want to listen to the rest of the podcast, head over to chiropracticepro.com/podcast and you can listen into those. That’s kind of our main focus from our marketing is giving back to our chiropractic community and other provider communities as well that need to learn about some of these basic functions of being a doctor, but putting your mind at ease and doing it right.
Peter Eldridge: I agree with you in that what we’re trying to do is bring a system to the market that is efficient, it saves you money, it’s going to save you time and also brings a lot of value to the community, to your practice, to the people you care for.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Yeah, that sounds great. I know that we’ve already talked about doing some other practical podcasts coming up in some future episodes. Pete, look forward to having you back on in the future and looking forward to kicking this podcast off so that our community can see amazing things in their practice and their future. Thanks for joining us.
Peter Eldridge: Thank You.
Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Thanks for joining us on the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. To find out more information, make sure you visit us at chiropracticepro.com/episode1 to find the show notes and more information. Join us next time right here on the ChiroPractice Pro podcast as we talk to Dr. Warren Jan about doing the best SOAP notes possible. Thank you for joining us and we’ll see you next time right here on the ChiroPractice Pro podcast.
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