Dr. Brian Capra: Welcome everyone to UAC's Best Practices podcast. Our goal here today is to introduce you to a special guest, Dr. Ashley Torchio, and hopefully to share a best practice, a nugget that you can take, implement in your practice and see the results that another very successful doctor, actually husband and wife pair are getting in their practice. I'm here with my special partner in crime, Dr. Allen Miner. So, doc, why don't you take it away?
Dr. Allen Miner: Sounds like I come in on the short bus, Brian.
Dr. Allen Miner: Special partner. I have to laugh, Dr. Ashley.
Dr. Brian Capra: I can't get the word though.
Dr. Allen Miner: We all use the wired headphones. Nobody wants the EMF with the...
Dr. Ashley Torchio: No, never had them, never do them.
Dr. Allen Miner: Well, Dr. Ashley Campbell/Torchio and her husband, as Dr. Brian said, practice in Bend, Oregon. How long you guys had that practice for now, Ashley?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: We... This year will be 13 years in September. So, we just hit our 12-year mark.
Dr. Allen Miner: Way to go. And like many UAC members, you guys have built a successful clinic and now your kind of onto other acts as well, including... This isn't a best practice, but I just want to mention it, with what you guys have developed for patient education. Touch briefly on that. We'll come back to the practice with best practices. But tell everybody about what you guys have built and launched.
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yeah, so it has been cool, when you kind of let go of the reins a little bit and just the adjusting part of it and you bring other people in to take your mission and kind of move it forward. So, we brought in multiple associates to start doing a lot of the patient care. And then my husband, Dr. Andrews, started a, it really is a, like a patient retention driver called PracticeOwl. So, he just launched that this year. And then on my front I, besides homeschooling kids and having babies and doing all that, I also do business coaching for service providers. I do one-on-one, I do group coaching. And then we're hoping to do, we want to launch something this year, my husband and I, because it's something we need to do together again. We did stuff together, went apart. We like it, but we like coming together and doing stuff again, so.
Dr. Allen Miner: I love it. Well, yeah. And for those of you who just probably never heard of PatientNow, google it, check it out. It's...
Dr. Ashley Torchio: PracticeOwl is cool. It is cool. It's like one-minute snippets in your patient's pocket. Like, it's cool.
Dr. Allen Miner: And from a very principled chiropractic education, increase retention, help people get the big vision why this makes sense not in the short term, but as a lifestyle for the family, so.
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yep.
Dr. Allen Miner: With that said, though, let's talk about best practices. And we were talking before the podcast started, Ashley, and I love the concept. If you go a little deeper, you guys have, like many of us, I think, pressed marketing over the years in all its forms and all its ways. And you kind of took a different approach to it last year. Tell us about it.
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yep. So last year, you always want growth, right? And so we had this number that we've been kind of striving for, and last year we let our marketer go. It wasn't going well. So part way through the year, we let her go and couldn't find the right person, I guess, to take over. So instead of continuing to try to drive in new patients, new patients, new patients, we're like, let's just take a beat and try to look at all of our retention factors that we have in our office to increase our PVA and keep the people that we have so we don't have to drive those new patients and just keep our in-office stuff working the way that it's working.
Dr. Allen Miner: Yeah. And so, what'd you find happened?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: So, during that time, we went a couple of different things. We rewrote some scripts and made sure that all of our docs were saying things on visit 1 through 13. And then after they had a re-sign, we actually went through the exact same scripts again. People had never heard it, did that again 1 through 13 at a re-sign. 1 through 13, just brought those same ideas back around and it was like they were brand new to people, which is fantastic. It just goes to show how many times you have to say the same thing.
Dr. Allen Miner: That's a nugget right there. I mean, you just... How many... I've heard it from my docs, like, well, we did that workshop or...
Dr. Ashley Torchio: I did that once.
Dr. Allen Miner: Right.
Dr. Allen Miner: Yeah, it's just, it's funny. I wonder sometimes when people, you know, we're so deep in the forest, sometimes you think of a patient who's never been to a chiropractor, they're processing so much. Who are these people? What's this like? This is such a different approach. What are they doing? I think very little of that sticks. And I think you're so smart to just not just double down once, but just to keep circling.
Dr. Brian Capra: Another thing is the opposite perspective is getting... They are getting bombarded with it every single day. Right?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yeah.
Dr. Brian Capra: And taking them the opposite direction. So sometimes if you... If you were to just say, hey, what's the 13 most important things that if a patient just got these things, they would be a patient for life kind of thing, right?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yep.
Dr. Brian Capra: And that's brilliant. And sometimes we try to over complicate it or, and like Alan said, just assume that they got it the first time, which they don't.
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yeah, they heard it one time. They got this.
Dr. Brian Capra: Sometimes they do get it. They get it when you say it. Right? But they don't retain it. They're not telling other people.
Dr. Allen Miner: What were a couple of the key things that jumped out to you, Ashley, that you really doubled down on educating people and making sure they heard it over and over again?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yeah, I think... Well, I was saying about, Brian, I think the cool part about having associates is that we all communicate differently. So even if we have the same talking point, I'll be like, what were you just talking point? Like, what visit number was that? And they'll say it. I was like, oh, that's definitely not how I would say that. The first ones are pretty scripted, but then after that, it's kind of like, how would you take this idea and make it different through whatever? So that is kind of cool because you're right, Brian. Like, they might get it one way, but to hear it another way, to double down even on the idea was great.
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Okay, so some of the things that you talk about. Well, when it comes to chiropractic, I think all of us think, actually in my heart of hearts, I really believe that our philosophy is really everybody's philosophy. I think people actually believe in their heart of hearts that they were made to be healthy, that their body can heal itself, so I think that is real, but I just think they choose the contradiction on the regular only because they hear it so often, you know, like the analogy and all those different things. They know that their body is doing it for a reason, but they've been educated over and over and over again that it's troublesome rather than helpful. So, the crazy part is when you say it, they're like, oh yeah, of course. But you say of course, but yet you choose something else, so...
Dr. Brian Capra: So just doing that one thing alone, how much would you say your retention went up?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Just education-wise?
Dr. Brian Capra: Yeah.
Dr. Ashley Torchio: So, I know our patient visit average, our PVA, I know how much that's gone up even over the last six months and we've increased it by about 15 visits just in the last 60 months. So, I took out of it, okay, what if we had the same amount of new patients? What does that... Like I've reworked all those numbers, so it's right around 15 visits by just strictly doing that and a couple other things that we did.
Dr. Allen Miner: What about, you alluded to it when we were talking earlier, podcast? Tell us a little bit about that. How often do you release it? Who's on it? What do you talk about? What have you found maybe works, doesn't work? How do you use it in the clinic, out of the clinic? Just give us all things podcast related that you found...
Dr. Ashley Torchio: Yeah, podcast-wise, we all do it. I have one doc that's pretty hesitant, but he does it and when he does it, he does great. He just is like a...
Dr. Allen Miner: So, it's like a group of you together?
Dr. Ashley Torchio: It's a group of us. Every single doc in the office does it. We haven't started inviting in guests yet, but that's our next hope is like we'll bring in people as we become hopefully the authority of health for our patients in our community. And we'll talk about our app in a little bit, but as long as we become the authority for them, I want to bring in other people that they can utilize as a resource. But right now, podcasting-wise, we only release every other week. I didn't want it to be daunting for my doctors. We're already doing workshops; we're already doing better results faster. We're already doing advanced wellness workshops, so I didn't want it to be more, I just wanted to take the information and recycle it a little differently.
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