https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8kZZ9q5i00

Show Notes:

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hey, what's going on Doc? Welcome back to episode two, the simplified integration podcast brought to you by me, Dr. Andrew Wells. The episode two is what I call my near death experience and how am I near death experience actually saved my life.

Speaker 2: (00:18)
Leonardo da Vinci once said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and I agree. You see the problem with the way that most consulting groups approach medical integration is anything but simple. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It's expensive, it's complicated and quite frankly it's exhausting. Enough is enough. There are far too many amazing integrated clinics that are struggling. Well, I'm on a mission to change that. What I've come to find from over five years working with integrated practices is that simplicity really is the secret. The old saying of less is more is true. Through a streamlined approach, I was able to create multiple successful seven figure integrated clinics and now I'm going to show you how you can do the same. Join me as I share with you the secrets to successful medical integration and practice growth. Join me on a journey to greater sophistication through innovation. I'm Dr. Andrew Wells and welcome to the simplified integration podcast.

Speaker 1: (01:14)
Now, if you're on the last episode, um, which was, it was just titled, don't be a lemon with integration, why integration fails so many people. I left off with, um, a really bad experience. Uh, we were in the middle of running several integrated offices, um, and then all of a sudden my family and I were in a really bad car wreck. So I was in the hospital and as our integrated business because of insurance stages and all kinds of different issues we had in the practice as our practice started to, to literally go under, I'm sitting there in the hospital bed like wondering how I'm gonna keep this practice afloat and now how I'm going to keep the office and my staff and everybody, like how we're going to keep this whole thing going. And, um, you know, that was a really dark time in my life cause I didn't have the answers, but I just knew that, um, that this was all happening for a reason.

Speaker 1: (02:01)
So as I'm sitting there, um, and, and uh, you know, eventually got transferred back to my house, uh, to recover and wearing this neck brace. And I just, I was sitting at home, I couldn't, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't work. Uh, I just had to be alone with my thoughts and like day after day it was a pretty miserable experience and I was trying to like figure out a solution for our practice and our business and I just knew that we, the integrated model was not sustainable. And I talked to other people who are also integrated around the country and the exact same thing was happening to them. You know, they were struggling to find a way to pay their bills, to pay for this massive overhead, to find services that actually pay that you can get reimbursed for it. I wasn't the only one struggling and it's not like because I got in this accident that all the bad things happened, the bad things were happening before the accident.

Speaker 1: (02:45)
The accident was just the icing on the cake. And so as I'm sitting there like looking over like our office records and financial statements and all that stuff, I realized pretty quickly that one of the solutions was just start slashing our overhead. So I'm like, what can we get rid of in our office? And it dawned on me that actually I could actually get rid of, it would be more profitable to get rid of all the insurance junk, all the insurance crap, all the things that we were told would make a great integrated office. I could get rid of why? Because it wasn't reimbursing. I wasn't passionate about it. Even if we got rid of those services, it wasn't going to mean that our patients got like bad results. All of a sudden we got great results with just chiropractic care. So getting rid of all the insurance, once we decided our, we're going to cut the insurance crap, I'm going to go back to what's profitable.

Speaker 1: (03:34)
All of a sudden this huge weight was lifted off my shoulder. We went from having a hundred $110,000 zero monthly overhead down to like a $30,000 overhead. And that seems like a lot blog. Explain why it went down, why it was at $30,000 to begin with. And all of a sudden, like when we decided to cut out insurance, like this massive weight was lifted and all of a sudden I'm like, okay, we're getting somewhere. And uh, okay, so if we're cutting out insurance reimbursement, like what are we going to keep or what will we add to keep the practice going? We were still doing chiropractic, we were still doing some rehab, like what we're going to keep. And there was one there, there was one therapy or one thing that we did in our, in our office that had been keeping the practice afloat even before all this happened.

Speaker 1: (04:18)
It was a cash service. We got amazing results. Our patients loved it. I enjoyed doing it and sometimes I'm like kind of thick, like a little thick headed. And sometimes I don't get the answer right away, but I'm like, why did I think about this before? And that one thing in our office, the thing that kept it all afloat was regenerative medicine. And it's what some doctors call STEM cell therapy. You know, if you've heard of STEM cell therapy, regenerative medicine, before you jump to conclusion. Oh, I've heard that's great. Or I heard it's bad. Like you let me explain what it is first. And I'm like, wow, this could actually like this could, this could be something that could really, that could not only keep our practice afloat, but actually something that would help our practice thrive. And so what we did was when we caught the insurance stuff, we cut regenerative medicine.

Speaker 1: (05:04)
I was actually able to run a very, very successful regenerative medicine program from my house, even from the hospital bed. And the great thing about regenerative medicine was it required very little input from me to make the whole thing run. In fact, we had gotten it to a point in our office where our staff did most of the work and the, you know, one of the nice things I, I, I kind of laugh about this when I think about it and chiropractors asked me like, Hey, you're a chiropractor. Like how do you do regenerative medicine? Isn't that out of our scope of practice. Yes. Like don't think that I'm doing like re like regenerative medicine injections or another chiropractor in her office is doing it. It's totally not within the scope of chiropractic, but it is legal and ethical to run a regenerative medicine program or business out of your chiropractic office.

Speaker 1: (05:49)
And that's how most chiropractors do it. And because here's a huge advantage because a chiropractor can't do it. You have to outsource those tasks and delegate to other people in your office. So because you're not, you can't be the doctor, you can't be the, uh, the one doing the work. You can do the marketing and the admin and the, and the advertising, all that stuff. But what we found was that when I was recovering from my broken neck, we had, we had a such a high level of automation with our regenerative medicine program that it practically ran itself. So as I'm recovering at home, this is the recovery process was about six months. Our regenerative medicine pro practice still ran. And in fact, it's the very thing that kept us from going bankrupt that whole time. But once we caught all the extra stuff and the insurance crap and all that, all this stuff that makes integration so not worth it and so bad.

Speaker 1: (06:40)
I, in my opinion, for the chiropractic and if you want me to cut it out, everything seemed to work a whole lot better. We became very profitable again. All the stress in our office was gone and all of a sudden it's like, ah, like there's a huge wave of relief came over me and I knew that that was gonna that would work. And I, during this recovery process time, I got really bored. It really, really bored. So there are times where I would, um, I wish I had, I don't know if I have any pictures of this. I have to go back and look at my phone, but I used to get out of, out of my house, someone would drive me and I would do like a a one hour live seminar on regenerative medicine. And then I would drive back home and go back to bed.

Speaker 1: (07:17)
So I would do like, Oh, do like one seminar a week or one seminar every other week. And I just, cause I was so bored and wanting to get out of the house. So imagine this, this is like a funny image. Here's Dr. Wells. I'd walk into a seminar with like 30 people in the room, in a neck brace. And people are like, like, is that, is that the doctor like he's going to, is he, he's, he is he the one talking to us about STEM cell therapy and regenerative medicine? And of course the question is always like, eh, did regenerative medicine cause a problem in your neck? So it does have to preface it, will it know this is from a car accident. But um, you know, even in like an even in a neck brace, I was able to make this and go. And so the message I have for you is that, uh, uh, uh, well-run regenerative medicine practice does not take a lot of time, effort, and input in order to be successful and profitable.

Speaker 1: (08:03)
So if I can do it from my bed at home, if I can do it from a hospital, almost any doctor can make it run. Now there are a lot of people get regenerative medicine wrong. They do it the wrong way because they got bad advice from consulting groups or from marketing groups. And the mistakes that doctors make is that they, um, they hire a full time MD or a full time nurse practitioner. Those guys are expensive, so automatically had this massive overhead. Another mistake chiropractors are making is that they do it for one, two, three months. And like, Holy cow, I'm making 40, $50,000 a month doing this and all of a sudden their focus shifts from their chiropractic business, which is their core to regenerative medicine. Cause like, Oh my gosh, I can make you know, half a million dollars a year, a million, $2 million a year doing just regenerative medicine.

Speaker 1: (08:50)
And they lose sight of what was really important, which is their core business and taking care of patients. So you can, for as much success as regenerative medicine can bring and as much profit as it can bring to your office, it should never take the place of your core chiropractic philosophies. That's where a lot of chiropractors, uh, go wrong. And they make this part what should be a part time business. They make it into a full time business and all their focus and energy and efforts go into regenerative medicine. They should not be that way. It should be a part time business that runs side-by-side, seamlessly with your chiropractic business. So when you, when you do it that way and trust me, like that's how, that's how we did it successfully. When you run it part time, you can still add a massive amount of cash revenue to your office without doing a ton of extra work, without giving yourself another job to manage.

Speaker 1: (09:41)
Right. But also you're still taking care of, you haven't lost your soul, you haven't sold out to medicine. Um, you, you can still be the chiropractor that, uh, that you want to be in the, you want to be in the future. So this was this one aha moment, um, in, in, you know, they kind of came in a really tough time in my life and uh, and I knew like I knew I had to make a change and I'm really happy that we stuck with regenerative medicine cause it helped us in the past. It helped us through a really rough time and it's really helped me to develop a, uh, really a business of my dreams where I can still take care of patients, be profitable, but also have time to spend time with my family and go on vacations and not have that constant stress of where's my next patient coming from and will I be able to pay my overhead and can I save money for retirement?

Speaker 1: (10:25)
Regenerative medicine has afforded us a lot of those freedoms that I know most chiropractors want in practice. And so, listen, I'm going to talk about, um, uh, on the next podcast episode why I think all chiropractors should integrate and do regenerative medicine, but not the conventional way, right? Not the way that most management groups and consulting groups teach it. There's a very simplified, streamlined way to do it. That makes sense. So I hope you found this beneficial. And you know, my big message here was, listen guys, if I can do this from a hospital, uh, you can do this. You can certainly do this in your practice. And I know there's a lot of like chatter and talk about regenerative medicine. It's a very, very hot thing in chiropractic right now. It's actually a very hot thing in medicine right now. It's a very, very big industry.

Speaker 1: (11:09)
It's growing and growing, growing, but there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it. So I hope that provides you some value. And by the way, this was a part, this is a second part of a five part series on the seven figure shortcut. My goal in this five part series is to get you to producing massive results in your office in a streamlined, simple way. That makes a sense from a business standpoint, it makes sense to you as a chiropractor. So a doc, I hope you found this helpful. Great to have you on here. And we'll see you on the next episode. Take care. Bye bye.

Speaker 2: (11:41)
Hey, innovators. Thanks for listening to the simplified integration podcast. The fact that you're listening tells me that you're like me, someone who loves simplicity, and the truth is those who embrace Implicity, some of the greatest innovators. So hope you got a ton of value from what we covered on today's episode. Be sure to subscribe and share with other docs that you feel could benefit from greater sophistication through simplification and innovation. If you've got specific questions that you'd like answered on this podcast or you've got specific topics that you'd like me to discuss, just shoot me an email at info@simplifiedintegration.com that's info@integrionsecrets.com.