Healthspan Blog

SoundPractice.Net has a free podcast on finding the right office staff. It caters to the MD crowd, but there are few interesting points in the 20-odd minutes.

Perhaps even better, there are over 100 free podcasts on the same site...

SoundPractice.Net - Podcasts for Medical Practice Management and Health Care Administration

(For a full list of all the podcasts, check out: http://www.mpmnetwork.com/page.cfm?name=featured_content )

CAMLAW has a new post on the "acceptance" of complementary and alternative medicine by the AMA.

While I'm sure many of you didn't need the blessing, it does provide more ammunition for getting more referrals from MD's who have been reluctant to "buy in" to your modality, or who are nervous for liability reasons.

CAMLAW : Complementary And Alternative Medicine Law Blog: American Medical Association Supports Alternative Medicine

At E-Myth Worldwide, you can complete a short questionnaire that ranks your business on a few different scales.

While the results are generally geared towards getting you to buy E-Myth products and services, the questions themselves and the simple results might get you thinking.

dan

PS - For those wondering what the E-Myth is, I'll put a review of Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth Physician, up in the next few days.

It’s one thing to understand the types of referrals, but quite another to know which type is growing your practice. I've touched on this briefly before, but I want to stress it further.

Tracking your referrals is actually pretty straightforward, but often neglected. For the most part, it’s a front-line job, and needs to happen the first time a patient arrives. The easiest way to do it is to make it part of your intake form. It’s very difficult and far less accurate (and less likely to happen) later on in the patient cycle. The great thing is that it's easy to implement - if you've got staff, just make it part of the new patient process. That's it.

If you’re using any type of software to run your office, there may be a place to enter this information. If not, a spreadsheet will do just fine. Even a piece of paper will work, but it’s a lot harder to do the math at the end of the quarter or year.

You can use the 5 referral type framework to categorize your new patients, each with a sub categories:

Professional

• Break this down by profession – chiropractors, naturopaths, MD’s, acupuncturists, TCM practitioners, etc. – and then even further by the actual professional (Dr. Jones, Dr. Ahmad, J. Doe, etc.).

Patient

• List by patient, and enter into the referring patient’s file as well, so you know when you see a patient who they’ve referred recently. It’s quite helpful to jot this on the inside cover of their file so you can see it as soon as you open it, and thank them on the spot for recent referrals.

Promotional

• Again, this can be categorized by print, other media, speaking engagements, internet, etc, then broken down further by the actual magazine, paper, website, etc.

Purchase

• Patient files you’ve bought. If you’ve purchased from more than one source, list them separately

Personal

• Family, friends, etc.

In a future post, we'll take a look at how this info can be used to help you grow faster and spend smarter.

The exciting story of Terry Wallis, who was involved in a car accident when he was 19 and now woken up after spending 19 years in a vegetative stats has shaken the medical community and bring new hope of coma victims everywhere.

Three years ago, Mr Wallis uttered his first word, “Mom”, and has shown continual, although limited, improvement.

Since speaking his first words, Wallis’s speech has improved and he has regained some movement in his legs, but his short-term memory is very poor and he does not understand what has happened to him.

A US and New Zealand team of researchers scanned his brain using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to try and understand his recovery. 

Using this method, the scientists were able to look at Mr Wallis’s brain and to see any damage or reorganisation of his white matter.

White matter is the part of the brain that contains nerve fibres wrapped in an insulating fatty substance, called myelin. It is responsible for transmitting information in the brain, whereas grey matter processes it.

The researchers believe the most likely explanation is that axons, the long thin connections that make links between different brain cells, have re-grown.