There’s an Automation for That: How New Technology Can Save Time, Improve Patient Outcomes, and Build Stronger Patient/Doctor Relationships

Welcome to the Practice Upgrade Summit 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is doctor Bob Hoffman from the Master Circle Global, and I want to welcome you again to the Practice Upgrade Summit. Please take our paper and pen. I guarantee the information you hear in today's conversation with Doctor Eric Wilkie is going to revolutionize your thinking. It's going to change how you practice. It's going to make you much more efficient and much more profitable. Our guest today, Doctor Eric Wilkie, graduated Magnum Quality from Life University in 2011. He moved to Michigan with his wife and two children and built and opened up his own practice called Higher Health Chiropractic in Grand Rapids.

Their mission was to serve as many people as possible while making it efficient and affordable for an average family. With this mission in mind, they quickly grew their practice to get this to over a thousand visits a week every week in less than three years. Since that time, Doctor Eric has become a national speaker for chiropractic. He is on the extension faculty advisor to several and several chiropractic colleges. An Amped mastermind leader, and he speaks and teaches every week to students and doctors.

In 2015, Doctor Eric saw a need for a better system and developed Scared scared of virtual chiropractic Assistant and you are going to want to know all about that. Since its inception, Scad has changed the technology within chiropractic and has sent over a 55 million appointment reminders to hundreds of thousands of patients every month. Doctor Kowalski's previous career was in mechanical engineering, and with that education, he was able to bring mobile technology to the chiropractic profession to allow chiropractors to communicate with their patients through their mobile phones.

Doctor Eric and his wife, Shannon have six children and enjoy teaching chiropractors and chiropractic students how to serve people and love what they do every day. Eric. Welcome on. Thanks. I'm excited to be here. Sounds like I'm busy with all that. Well, you're apparently not that busy. You have six kids, so you find time for other activities.

Eric Wilkie's Path from Engineer to Chiropractor 2:25

But. But God bless you, my friend, and thank you for all you've done for literally hundreds and hundreds of chiropractors and tens of thousands of chiropractic patients, making it easier for them to get ongoing chiropractic care. So before we really jump into the interview, because I can't wait for the people watching this to really learn about skin and why it's cutting edge, and how many chiropractors are using it, and how we can transform their practice rapidly and sustainably. I just think people want to know a little bit more about you.

What what made you go to chiropractic college in the first place? Oh, it's such a great question. So, yeah, I was an engineer, a diesel piston engineer. Actually, I worked for Cummins, Diesel Engine Corporation, and I loved testing engines and getting them to work better. And, what I was, I was just talking with somebody earlier this morning about this, actually, I didn't have the human to human interaction. You know, as a chiropractor, you take care of people and you see their life transformed.

Do you see them have hope again to live a life that they never thought was possible? And the rewarding feeling at that is as as the doctor. And that relationship is just so priceless. And so as an engineer, I loved what I did, but I didn't have that interaction with people. And it was early on in my engineering career. I was I was working as an engineer for a couple of years, and I said, well, if I'm going to change professions, now's the time. I had a brother in law that was a chiropractor, a shattered his office.

I got to meet the people and just experience what it was like to be in an office and packed up and moved everything to Atlanta, Georgia, started chiropractic school, Life University. So basically, Eric, if I'm from hearing you right and I love it, every chiropractic, every healer has a story. Some of them know their story, some of them forgot their story. But we all have a story. Basically, you had an awesome job, but now you're following your calling. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I had I had even from a testimonial standpoint, I didn't have like anything that was life changing, which a lot of chiropractors do.

But, I had horrible allergy symptoms. And so once I got interested in chiropractic, as I was an engineer, I was the most skeptical of all skeptics. My wife kept trying to get me to go, and I said, there's nothing wrong with me. My back doesn't hurt. I don't have any problems. And I had horrible allergy symptoms. And finally, when I went into chiropractor, they explained to me the nervous system controls every function of the body and the brain connected to all of this, you know? And I learned about it and I was like, okay, well, that kind of makes sense.

I'll give it a shot. And then I started getting adjusted a period of time. But I didn't have any allergies anymore. And I was like, man, maybe there's something to this thing. Working with an engine in a mechanical system is is fun, but working with a human body that has the potential to heal itself is just a whole nother level. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing that. So let's dive right in. You've done a lot of research into this. You've dealt with, again, hundreds of thousands of patients.

Eric, what technology are patients? Not doctors, but patients looking for to make it easier for them to get into a chiropractic office, to get regular, ongoing chiropractic care. Yeah. And that's that's really it. As chiropractors, we're really good at what we do. And a lot of times we can get stuck in our systems. We know they work if if we can just get people into the funnel and just do the same thing we've always done, they've always work. But technology is changing so fast. People are looking for other avenues and we got to a point.

2015 when our office was at 1000 a week, it was just myself. We had three team members, 1300 square feet. The phone would ring off the hook all day long, and we had voicemails being left on our answering machine in the middle of shifts, and I was like, well, we just can't keep going. There has to be another solution. Like, I can't do more than this. We want to we have a heart to serve people. Like we know there's more people in our community that need chiropractic care, but physically and like system wise, I just couldn't do it anymore.

And we started to look for solutions. Or like, there has to be a solution out there to help people because 90% of our phone calls, where can I come at 3:00 instead of 230? Can I can I bring my son with me today or I can come today. Can I come tomorrow? What time works and and we figure all those things out.

Why Scad Was Created to Solve Scheduling Problems 6:54

My man, it'd be so nice if there was an app on somebody's phone and they could just see when their appointments were, see what our availability is and reschedule those automatically. That has to exist out there. I didn't want to start a software company. I was a busy chiropractor. I what do I do about software started software company. And so we try to find a solution. And the best thing we could find was a two way texting service where, okay, I send you a reminder. You can't make it. You text me back.

Now I have to have somebody on staff that manages the texting platform, looking at our EHR and then confirming it and responding back. I mean, that doesn't save us any time. It just takes us from the from just a different medium. That's all. Exactly. And all these people are walking in the door and and your number one asset and as you see in your office is the person that's standing there smiling, greeting them, thanking them for coming in. Well, how can they do that if they're on a computer answering text or if they're on the phone?

All day long? And so that's where this app thing came in. And even if we when we started, we were like, if it only works for our office, it's going to be worth it's gonna save us so much time to create it. And so that's how skin really was born. Beautiful. Beautiful it. You know, innovation is the mother of invention right. And so is neat. So I just want the people watching this to get that. They don't have to see a thousand people a week in order to benefit from scan. Any size practice could benefit from scared.

Could you speak to that. Yeah, totally. And I, I there's very few people that have seen a thousand a week by themselves. Looking back, I don't know how I even did it, but everybody wants to improve and everybody in chiropractic wants to see more people and wants to do it better. Well, you can only do so much out of your own strength and your own ability. You only have so much time in the day. Even as a dad with six kids, I wanted to still see lots of people. But at the end of the day, I can't be in the office from 8 a.m.

to 8 p.m. five days a week, and still be a great dad and a great husband and, you know, and manage all the different things that I'm doing. And so shed is just one of those tools which we call it a virtual chiropractic assistant, because what it does now is so many things that are okay with you, but it frees you up to do the stuff that only you can do and allows it to be really efficient. If I was to hire Mary today to be on my front desk, I would say, okay, Mary, when somebody calls, don't schedule them here.

If they're a new patient, is there, don't put a reevaluation there. Don't put this therapy or that adjustment when this one is. And I'd have to train her on how to manage my schedule. And then she would be the only one that could do it that I would trust to do it. And that's it. Well, scared is created to do that. So in the back end of skin you just put in only allow this many patients at these times and these appointment codes allow this. And so it's just like you're training your. So if you're doing it with technology and now that person works for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Sunday afternoons we get almost 80% of our rescheduled appointments happen on Sunday afternoons because people are looking at their schedule for the week and they see, oh, Monday morning at ten doesn't work for me anymore.

Actually, noone would work well prior to skin. What are they going to do? They're not going to call you on Sunday afternoon, so they just don't show up at 10 a.m. on Monday morning when you open the door and then you have all these no show people, and it was just a problem that was like, man, we really need a better system. And we had the problem of people on the schedule and they just didn't show up. So even if you're at 100 a week, it might impact you even more. One person doesn't show up. That's a big deal.

Like you saved their spot. That's money that you're losing in your practice income. There's somebody else that could have taken that spot and received your care. That didn't because that person didn't show up. And so you can go two different ways with that. Number one, which we have a tendency to lean towards as well. Let's penalize them if they don't come in. But that can be a real negative to the patient, because what if they had a scenario that they couldn't help or it's just inconvenient for them.

So then they're like, well, I'm not even in a schedule if you're going to charge me money if I can't come in. So the opposite of that is, what if we just make it easier for them to make sure that it's correct and it's accurate, and we sync their appointments from your EHR automatically to their Google Calendar, their Excel calendar, whatever other calendar they're using. And so now we make it more efficient and easier for them with their lifestyle to make sure that their chiropractic appointments line up with their life, which in turn lines up with your office and fills in all the gaps.

So when we show up on Monday morning, now we know the people on the schedule. They're actually going to show up because they want to be there and they know what works with their schedule. That's beautiful. And listen, there isn't a doctor watching this as you are aware of, Eric, that hasn't had challenges. You know, we affectionately sometimes refer to that as a staph infection. You know, you you train them well, you continue to train them, but they sometimes forget and they sometimes feel pressured from a patient and they squeeze them in, you know, or they make excuses or patients fall through the cracks.

They just don't show when we don't even realize that they didn't show up. Occasionally you see Amy go on vacation or be out sick. And then what do you do with those times? So we're not trying to replace the car. What we're trying to do is replace the system to make it more efficient. And, you know, one of the things that you and I, of the many things you and I have in common, is we're systems guys. You know, to me, system is an acronym that stands for Save Yourself stress, time, energy and money.

And scared does that. It does that beautifully. Well it's automated it it's systematized. It's simple. So where did even the name scared come from? Oh, that's a great question too. Well, we we created this software before we even named it because what we wanted it to do was Mrs. Jones at home has three kids. She wants to open an app, look at the schedule, see what appointment time she wants, change it, and it syncs real time with our EHR. Literally, you can sit at the front desk and watch the appointment change in your electronic health record system instantly.

And a couple people are like, oh no, it's impossible. It can't exist. And then I found the right guys that could make it happen. And scared actually stands slain for schedule and it stands for scheduling. And we're like, well, I kind of sounds cool. And it aligns with what we're trying to do. The inherent core of Scad is improving efficiency and scheduling. So we call this good I love it, I love it, by the way, for the people watching this, Scared and Doctor Eric are one of our select few sponsors of the Practice Upgrade Summit.

So I am really, really grateful and appreciative of and please, you're going to learn all about this in a few minutes,

Retention, Compliance, and Better Patient Engagement 13:53

but you definitely got to go check out skin, and you got to go to their website and their landing page and learn all about it. So let's let's continue with this. You know, I think there is a pathological focus in chiropractic on more new patients, more new patients, more new patients. And yes, everybody wants I agree with we need more new patients. But the real key to practice growth is compliance. You know, I often say that more new patients add to a practice, but retention multiplies a practice.

So why is patient engagement patient compliance. Patient retention so critical today. And why is it going to be even more important in the weeks, months and years coming. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's really brings a joy in practice. But you look at the chiropractic practice that, you know, we opened August 1st, 2011. We just celebrated, a husband and wife that started here August 25th, 2011. And they're still under care. I don't have to convince them. Every visit they come in that they need chiropractic care.

They get it like they're easy. I love seeing them. They get it. They refer people. They participate in all of our stuff. It's joyful. Like, I want to go in and see people that I know. They're part of our core family and so without those people, chiropractic practice can get become more like a job than it is something fun that you just love and live to do, because you always have to go get the next person, and then you feel like you're convincing them, you know, about this thing. And it's it's a lot of extra work that's always needed.

And so the retention game makes it just so fun and it just brings natural referrals. But even like Covid stuff that we just went through, you saw external marketing go to zero. I mean you're not go and doing community talks all this stuff. If you were active in your community like that is zero. So if you don't have a base and people referring people internally, then you lost a lot of new patients. And so part of that internal referral, I feel like a lot of new chiropractors, think it's asking for it.

It's like, hey, can you refer somebody in and that that gets you like almost not maybe 5% actually come in because you ask them to tell somebody, right? They tell people because their experience is extraordinary. Either they had a, you know, they had a great testimonial or you all have had it. And people refer people in when, they haven't even gotten adjusted yet. You know, they just came in, they got the tour, they got your, your objective analysis, and they go tell people and they refer people because they're they have hope and they're excited.

And their experience was great. And so how do we leverage technology to give them a great experience in the office and through scandal, they say, and he makes it so easy for me, I can schedule my appointments through this app. You know, I can see my care plan. So, Bob, that was the other question we were getting is people would be, you know, three times a week. They would start out for however long and they transition to twice a week and they forget and they wouldn't know. How am I supposed to be at twice a week right now or three times or I missed last week, so should I care more?

And they don't know. And oftentimes the office doesn't really know because we don't have a good system to track it. So now instead they can open up their app and they can see they're supposed to have three appointments this week. They only have two. And it's prompting them to schedule that third one and come in. And it just solves the problem of them not knowing. So now they know when their appointment is. They know how often they're supposed to be there. You know, you talk about compliance. And now if they're not showing up, it's not I forgot or I didn't know.

It's a value thing. So it really uncovers problems. Maybe in the office on am I building enough value in what we're doing. And it allows you to work on those things and fine tune them to just improve the overall practice and get more referrals. Now, with the hundreds of docs that are using scared, I've got to imagine it's had an impact on each of those practices. PBA expanding and growing, which makes such a huge difference. Could you talk about that just a bit? Yeah. Well, our our core, you know, as who I am, I core I love chiropractic, I love chiropractic, I love seeing people get hope again.

I love seeing them just live a life they'd never lived before. And scared is just an extension of that, helping chiropractors do what they do better and more efficiently. And there's offices that have no staff at all that you said. It's a 350 square foot building, room, I should say. And they're just adjusting and scared, manages all their scheduling and they don't have to worry about it. And then we go from there all the way up to offices, seeing almost 2000 a week with multiple docs and all kinds of space and rooms and all of that.

And it just allows you to focus on other things rather than the minutia of making sure the appointments are all lined up in the right time. And the other thing I want to mention there, Bob, is, you know, we are all at a point in practice where we thought we could never see any more people, right? We were as busy as we could ever be. I remember being 300 a week thinking, I'm never going to see. There's a it's impossible for me to go any faster and provide a great adjustment, a great experience. I can't see any more people.

And then you figure out, well, how to be more efficient, right? Because we all have times in our schedule of our day where it's really busy, and then all of a sudden there's 15 minutes where really nobody comes in and then it gets busy again, and then there's 15 minutes kind of a break or nobody comes in. And those slow times, it's just an inefficiency. If everybody came at the exact right time all evenly spaced perfectly throughout the day, it would actually feel way easier to do that, and you would see way more people.

And so schedules allows your schedule to be more efficient, so it can feel easier, and you can do more than you ever thought you could do. Eric, how easy or challenging is it to get patients to download the app and start using it and understand how to use it? Do you actually have someone in the office who trains them and shows them? How does that work? Yeah. So we wanted to make it as easy as possible, and people are used to downloading apps and phone stuff today like never before. It's all magic link stuff.

So if you came into my office, we got your initial email and your paperwork, we would email you a link automatically. It goes to you. Just set it up and scan this appointment code gets this specific email. And then there's a magic link it's called. And you as the patient click on that link and it brings this get app up on there. You download it. It's already got you connected from your patient ID and that office ID to your schedule. And it's literally a couple clicks and they can see it all. So in our system when we build out their schedule in their care plan at the front desk, when they commit the care and they pay and they're signing up, they check on that email, they click the link, they get into the app.

This all happens in a minute. And they can see all of their appointments that we just built in their EHR, right on their phone right then. And we can show them, click that button. And now it syncs all those appointments to your Google Calendar or your iCal calendar. And now you know, when all of your appointments are for your chiropractic visits. So it's a couple minutes. So, so getting patients up and running on the app using scan it for you. And the feedback you get is a relatively simple and easy process.

Using Scad for Events, Reviews, and No-Show Reduction 21:30

Yeah, it's super easy. And if you're existing office and you have thousands of people in your database, it's one templated email that sends out each patient has a unique link. When they click on it, it connects them directly to that account. It's as easy as that. Now does. Is the doctor required to have a certain type of software or a certain type of computer system, or does this kind of bypass most of that? Yeah. So some of our integrations are a little bit deeper than others. So Cairo, Touch, Platinum Genesis or Billing Precision.

We have really integrated deep relationships with but schedule work totally standalone. If you're still doing travel cards, you can use scan for all of your scheduling and patient mobile app and automated reviews and everything else. That's awesome. All right, let's go further. This is so interesting. I'm sure the people watching this like they want to know more about it. But before we actually talk about the learning about skin and all the different things it does right now, we're really talking about appointments.

Chiropractors like to do events. 15 years ago, I created a product called the Event Driven Practice that still thousands of chiropractors are using on a regular basis with great success. Is there a better way for chiropractors to fill their events? Could they be using skin for that as well? Yeah, absolutely. And, we do tons of events too. And, you know, the best people to come to your events are current patients that have great testimonials that invite friends to come with them. It's like a warm lead.

Those are the best. If you could fill every one of your event with guests directly invited by patients, that's the best. So how do you do that? Well, we would have fliers and then every person that would come in, we would get our team, make sure you hand them this flier, inviting them to the dinner or whatever event we're putting on the talk. And then I would see them in the adjusted room. I said, hey, did you get the flier? Fliers would be all over the office. Some people would get them, some people wouldn't.

We'd talk about that with each person. But if you sit back and you just look in your waiting room and there's people waiting in there, what are they doing? They're not reading the magazines on the wall. Most of the time they're not looking at your TV. They're on their mobile phone doing whatever they can do for ten, 15 minutes before they wait. So with scan, we know when they arrive. And now we connect your office to their mobile phone. So as soon as they arrive in the office, you can automate that to send them a text message with whatever you want.

So the text message can include. Hey Mary, looking forward to this upcoming event that we have. Please check it out and invite your friends. We're allowing three people to come with you. Here's a link. Link goes to the Facebook event or the, whatever event you want to create on on, one of those other event sites. I can't think of it right now. Eventbrite is one of them, right? Yep, yep. So then they click on that link and they go directly to their and they can share it from there to their friends.

It just changes the game. Because now I know every single person that came into my office this week got that text message. I know they got it one minute after they swiped in or they signed into the office. So by the time they get to the dressing room, I know 100% of them got that message. And I can ask them, knowing that with certainty and be like, hey, make sure you share that message with people. Are you coming to the dinner or are you coming to the event on Friday? And you know, they know about it?

That's so cool. Technology is a beautiful thing when you understand how to use it properly. Good for you. Good for you. A lot of chiropractors suffer from a lot of no shows. You know, they have endless amounts of cancellations. And this really is not only a huge problem in growing or maintaining a successful and profitable practice, but it's a huge problem from a, an emotional perspective. You know, when you look at your appointment book, regardless of how many people you have coming in, if 10 or 15 or 20 or 30% of them don't end up showing up that day, you kind of feel like crap.

So how does Scad approach that problem? Yeah, and that's really it. Because, there's two main reasons people don't show up. Either they forgot or they don't value it, or they value something else more than they value that they value it, but they might value whatever. It is more than that, because they didn't show up. Right. So if they forgot. So what do we used to do in the past? We would call, we would pick up the phone and we would appointment reminder, call every person. How many people answer the phone today?

If a random number calls you or somebody calls you, I'm not answering the phone. It's going to my voicemail. 90 plus percent of phone calls go to voicemail. So then your team member, they're not going to want to make all those phone calls because they know it's going to go to voicemail. They're going to say the same thing over and over again. Most people don't even want to listen to voicemails. So if you can send them a text message, they read that 98 plus percent of messages are read within one minute of receiving them.

It's like, why would you even. It's just a totally different game right now. It doesn't make sense to try to make a phone call when you know you're going to get voicemail. 90% of the time. We could use SMS and send them a message reminding them of their appointment in an hour. Our reminders there's a link to their scan app, so if they need to move it forward or back a little bit, they can. And we take it take the variable of I forgot or I didn't know I have an appointment. It's just gone. Like we know you didn't forget because you have a reminder, you have the app, then it's just purely a value thing.

Are we building the value in the office on why they should be here twice a week or three times a week? And so it just allows us to fine tune that takes all those other variables out. That's awesome. Just awesome. Right. Another big issue in today's world, especially with social media, you know, laypeople are savvy. They know that they're not looking in a book to find a local chiropractor. They're going online and they're reading reviews. You know, it does scan help you get five star reviews online?

And how does that work? Yeah. Totally does. And and what we see in our office is people come from Google. We don't even we're not doing any AdWords. We're not doing anything. You're like paid wise for Google. And like we found you on Google, because people use Google for everything now and they look at your reviews and you look at like a restaurant. If I was looking to go to a restaurant tonight in a town, if they had 300 Google reviews, I'm probably going to look at them a lot more than I look at somebody that has 48 or 50.

Even if they're still five star 300 something is way better. So with skin you can customize it to send automated review requests to patients after a specific appointment or a specific appointment code, or you can manually send them a request. But here's the big difference is it's not just saying, hey, go leave us a review. We did a lot of testing for months and months and months around how many steps would it take for a person to leave a review, and what part do they fall off and not actually leave the review?

So you can put a specific URL into skids back end that goes right to your review site. So if I'm the patient and I get the text message, I said, Hope you had a great experience today. Let us know how it was. It pulls up and it says, did you have a good experience or a bad experience? If they had a great experience or good experience, they hit good. It literally pulls up your Google review. Most of the time. They're already logged into Google, so they don't even have to log in or anything. And it says air quality, leaving a review for higher health care.

And I can just start typing in there and it auto makes it automatically puts it at five stars. And then Google reviews just come in. We get 5 or 10 new Google reviews every week just through this automated process. That's unbelievable. And, you know, you talked about 305 star reviews are better than 50 and you're 100% right. But there are a thousands of chiropractors who have no reviews or only have bad reviews, you know, or their score is 3.2 out of five. So being able to know when to ask to make it easy for the patient to do it to me is golden.

And I love how you set that up. And most of the time, the people that have 3.2 or like they have a lot of people that love them, that come in great patients and they just never left. The review. Yeah, if you don't ask, you don't get the right answer. It was so arrogant from your experience, not only in your clinic, but in overseeing and collecting raw data from thousands of of patients and hundreds and hundreds of chiropractors. How can chiropractors who are watching this? How could any wellness practitioner watching this work smarter and not harder?

Yeah, and it's just engaging with people. And so improving your technology and looking at your systems and saying what's what's working, what can we improve? I mean, scared does so much. But you could start with just one. Like let's say I just want to improve my events and I just want to use scared to message people after they arrive in the office to invite them to events. You can start with just that. If you want to start with just scheduling or just the review feature, like you have options to just start and see if you like it, but I can guarantee you it's a game changer across the board, because all of those things come together and they tie together and they work cohesively around keeping people excited about your practice.

That's what kid does. It makes them excited about your practice. It makes them. It makes your practice feel ahead of the technology. Because guess what? There's no scheduling out for the hospital. There's no scheduling app for the urgent care center or even their dentist or anybody else because it doesn't exist. And so, man, my chiropractor has a technology and uses the technology that nobody else is using since super easy for me and it makes it builds the value on your clinic just through one piece of technology.

And if you just look at no shows alone, get can help you reduce 3 to 5 no shows a week. You look at your per visit rate 50 to $100 a visit. That's a few hundred dollars a week. You're looking at a thousand, multiple thousands of dollars a month that you're losing from people just not showing up to their appointments. That's get around $300 a month. I mean, that's a no brainer on ROI. Just with that. Yeah. You know, there's a big difference. Obviously people know this between a cost and an investment.

This is an awesome a vast investment that just returns a great return on investment ROI over and over and over again. And, you know, I'm sure there there are some doctors who are listening to you who are thinking, well, I'm not having 90% of my call ins on my voicemail. And that's because you're probably not busy enough that you're actually answering the phone. And if you look and want to get busy, or if you want to see more people, if you want to serve, if you want to follow your calling of helping as many people as you can, express more of that greatness that is inside of them, that innate intelligence, that innate wisdom to be healthier, to be happier, to live a better life.

Using some technology that's relatively inexpensive, totally affordable to help you run your business, to help you manage your patients, to make it easier for your patients to engage with you, to reduce your no shows, to coordinate your events. And I'm sure there's a laundry list of other things that Scad

Training, Integrations, and Platform Improvements 33:08

does that we haven't even gotten to. Man. As a coach and a guide and a mentor of chiropractic is I mean, I speak to at least 25 chiropractors every single day. The reality is, this is a no brainer. This is a must have for practice. Could you share with us, some success stories of some of your clients that either were doing well and went to a whole nother level because they're scared or was struggling and actually kind of fearful about laying out the money to, to get scared. And then their practice just took off and they realized it was one of the best decisions they ever made.

Can you kind of share a success story or two? Oh yeah, absolutely. And if you go too scared about life, there's no.com. It's just scared life. There's a bunch of testimonials and videos on there. But I mean, the number one thing when I talk to chiropractors, their first hesitancy is giving up control. They feel like if I automate my schedule, I'm giving up control and it's all going to be horrible and nothing's going to work. And I think back to probably like when automobiles had no cruise control and you had to hold the pedal down all the way across the country.

We just took a family trip. We went 80 some hours in a car. If I didn't have any cruise control for 80 hours, that would be an awful trip. And you think, well, how could you ever like cruise control? People are going to crash into each other. They're going to not slow down. Like. And now you wouldn't even think anything like, how would I even be able to drive across country without cruise control or even on a daily basis? And so scared is one of those things that initially you're like, I don't know if I can give up control my schedule, and it's not giving up control.

It's actually taking more control, because when you automate it and put those systems into scale, it doesn't forget, it doesn't screw it up and puts somebody in the wrong spot. It's technology. It only it either works or it doesn't work. And so it takes that part out of it. So you're not have to deal with that stress every day. Not only is it improving the experience for the people, but it improves the experience for your team takes a weight off of them so they can interact with the people in front of them and provide them a great experience.

They can get done all the other stuff that you want them to do. You can get done all the other stuff that you want to do, and there's no time better than now. Look at the crazy Covid scenario. Our offices are like, I don't know what I would have done without scared because some of them had to close Friday. They were open. They had to close for however long. Monday. How do you let everybody on your schedule know and you know, call them. You're going to call every single person and try to get Ahold of them and scare in five minutes.

You could go on there, you could type a custom message and you could send it to every one of your patients. And, you know, within one minute, 98% of them read the message. Got it. And now they can respond to you via the text if they want, via email. It just allows you to connect and communicate with your patient base like you never could before. And it's what I love about it is I love chiropractic and now we have a technology that chiropractors have that nobody else has. There's something better than the health care profession in the hospitals and urgent care centers and everywhere.

All chiropractors have a technology that they can use and utilize to make chiropractic awesome and easier to get into that even the other professions don't even have yet or don't have the ability to get, which I think is super cool for our professionals. I need to meet you and thank you for creating that. Let me ask you this. You know, I've always seen practice in the most basic or simplistic terms is that there are two parts. There's the people business and the paper business, and scared and eliminates a large part of the paper business so that you could put more of your time, more of your talent, more of your capacity on the people business, which is what helps you grow the practice in the first place.

And, I again, I, I love what you've created. I, I recommended I endorse it, I just think it's it's absolutely brilliant. It. Hey, how easy is it for the doc to learn how to use get him, him or herself? Yeah. This was a this was a big one for me because I've signed up for new softwares before and a software I signed up for. They scheduled seven one hour trainings for me. Like just cancel it because I don't have seven one hour time slots available to do anything. And so we we wanted to make this the, you know, our experience in our office is everything.

That's how we get referrals. We get 50 referrals a month. This through people, you know, telling people. And so we wanted the experience of skilled doctors to be just phenomenal and awesome. So we have an entire experience team devoted to doing your whole installation, learning, talking to you on a on a training call, learning. Okay. What well, how do you run your practice? We set the entire thing up for you. And then at the very minimum, you can just let it work. You can just let the audit. I have appointment reminders I set up in 2017 and I haven't touched them.

They just keep going out for every person automatically. I don't have to do anything all the way to. If you want to be super involved and you want to, you have a different theme in your office every month and you want to change the messages to have emojis and like specific to the theme every month. I mean, you can go as far as you can, dream up all the different ways that you can do it. But yeah, our team is awesome. Customer experience is so vital to this and so we make it as easy as possible for you to implement it.

Beautiful. I love hearing that. In the 5 or 6 years since it has been around, I've got to imagine now that you've made refinements and modifications, it it went from scan 1.0 to 2 point 0 to 3.0. What have you improved in the system? Oh, man, we don't have enough time. You know, and and what I love about this company is we're focused 100% on chiropractic, chiropractors do weird stuff. Barre, chiropractor. You know that. Chiropractor. Watching you do it a certain way, even though you might be part of the same system or technique.

How you do it, it's a little bit different than how everybody else does it. You don't want to schedule these people in these times. So we have just learned, you know, through chiropractors, the hundreds we worked with around okay, how do we create a system so that you can literally customize it to anything? You can imagine different hour blocks within the week that you only allow certain appointments. Multiple providers, massage therapists, different therapies, multiple appointments per person, like every little or literally every scenario you can think of as a chiropractor that you do in your office.

Scared has a solution for you, and it works with that system. And so we've just continued to refine it and make it better. On the same hand, making the patient experience better too, through them being able to see their care plan in the app and how that communicates back to your office, and so how you can easily and effectively communicate that back to them. All the way through new release stuff that we got coming out is like a tagging system. So if you want to tag all of your patients that have low back pain or neck pain or are pregnant or you met at a certain event, you tag them and now you can message people that you met at a certain event two years ago that also have this condition or you want to message everybody that's ever come in that has neck pain.

This video on what you do in your office that makes you unique and special. And so it's just an endless number of things that you can use to just grow your practice, improve the experience for your patients, and just make it easier for you at the same time. That's awesome. So in the few minutes we have left, I would love for you to share. How could people learn more? How do they get in touch with you? Is there a website they can go to? How do they learn how inexpensive this is and their return on investment and how quickly they can get up and running?

Because I've got to be certain that there are hundreds and hundreds of chiropractors watching us who want to jump on board, or at least at the very least, if they're analytical. Just want more data, more research, more facts before they jump on board. Eric, lead them in that direction. Yeah. So when we started scared, I envisioned it being so easy and simple that you could sign up, pay for it, download it, and just install it and start using it like within an hour. And what I learned is that every chiropractor does something different.

And so the best thing to do go to get that life. That's life. Check out the website, look at the testimonials, look at all the stuff. But schedule a demo. It could be 30 minutes even for our team to to talk to you and learn. Like how do you run your practice? What are your specific problem areas and within a few conversations and questions they can figure out, okay, this is what I can do for you. Specifically, it can do 100 things, but maybe for you A and B would be the most impactful, and maybe the next guy, F and G would be the most impactful.

And so it's not a cookie cutter, you know, same thing for everybody because it can do so much. If you do a demo, we can really fine tune. Exactly. I get this is your problem. This is the software you use. This is your team dynamics. This is how many people you see. This is what your goals are. This is the solutions that shed can implement for you. And you can be up and running in a couple days. Beautiful, beautiful. So look let's just recap a little bit. It's going to generate more new patients, more referrals.

That's a profit center. It's going to keep people in the practice longer and keep them more engaged. Build your retention and your compliance, help you get even better clinical results, help you increase your reputation. That's a profit center. It's going to minimize or reduce or even fix your no shows. That's a profit center. It's going to get you five star endless five star reviews.

How to Learn More and Get Started 43:28

Google reviews so that you are more attractive for people searching for a chiropractor or healer online. That's a profit center. It's going to reduce your paperwork so you can focus on your people work. We're in the relationship business. You can build a better relationship with more and more patients. That's a profit center. It's easy for the patient to download and learn. It's easy for the doctor to to understand and implement. You don't have to go out and buy any special equipment. To me, I quite frankly, I don't think you charge anywhere near enough.

I know for some people, you know, a $300 or so a month might seem burdensome, but you're going to earn that back over and over and over again. And fortunately for the overwhelming majority of doctors watching this, three, $400 a month or whatever the actual price is based on the customization, it it isn't scary at all. Think about this. If you went out and hired a new car or even a part time car, and and if she was or he was working 20 hours a week and you were paying them just 15 bucks an hour, that's $300 a week.

And this is about that for the month. And so to me, this is the best virtual assistant option that currently exists that has ever existed in our profession. Eric, I, I don't know how to thank you enough. I bleed chiropractic just like you bleed chiropractic. Chiropractic has blessed my life in so many ways I can't even begin to express it. I know you're the same. The reality of it is I want to see more chiropractors be more successful, serve more people, make a bigger dent, move the needle in health care, allow people to live a better life.

Help them normalize and maximize brain function. To me, scared is a must have tool. I really, really want to thank you for not only creating this and bringing this to the marketplace and continually improving it. I bet also, you're the kind of guy that even after you improve it, that's just kind of included in the service. And it's part of the, the system. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of docs using this with thousands and thousands of patients. It's been time tested. It's been proven whatever kinks might have been in the system or gone long gone.

I vote yes. I vote yes with both hands. I'm sure you have a parting comment to two. Would love to hear it. But again, I just want to thank you for being not only a speaker, but a sponsor of the Practice Upgrade Summit. And I just want the people watching this to know that we fully recommend and endorse Scad. Yeah, I appreciate that. And, thanks for putting the practice upgrade Summit on and all the awesome speakers that have been in this and are are coming, you know, with, with 2020 being as crazy as it is and so many variables, seeing companies like you guys adapt and innovate and just keep pushing forward instead of, you know, one of the solutions is just, well, we're not going to do anything right now.

And so doing something and taking action, I appreciate that view, which is why we're excited to sponsor it. But yeah, the we sent 4.5 million plus text reminders every month. So our system has been so robust and proven for so long. It's going to work and it's going to be one of those moments in practice. So you look back and say, man, 2020. When I watched this video on the Practice Upgrade Summit, I went and checked out the software. It's never been the same since it changed the game. It's allowed me to do x, y, z.

So I'm excited for all those testimonials to win it. Make sure you catch all these videos and interviews. Practice upgrade summit. It's it's been really great. Well, thank you for the very kind words. I greatly appreciate it. You know, the there's 40 plus speakers. It's a parade of stars. Everyone approaches the practice upgrade from a slightly different perspective and angle, and everyone is important. Cutting edge information, amazing material, but yours is absolutely part of that. This was a terrific interview and, I love and appreciate you and what you do for our profession.

And again, please go to Scad Dot life and schedule your demo. Find out more about it. And Doctor Eric, thank you so, so very much. Absolutely. It was a pleasure to be on.