Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

There are a lot of ways to encourage patients to stay under your care but one of the best ways is to give them an occasional progress report. Here is what I mean by that. About every 10 visits you should sit down with your patient and before you start the counseling session you should simply say, “Let’s recap what we’ve accomplished in the last 10 visits.” Then you can do it in two different ways. You can use the plan of care that you gave them at the beginning of their care and say, “ Here is what our goals are. Here is the ones we’ve accomplished. Here’s the ones we have yet to accomplish.” And give them just a progress report. The other way I like to do it is just look at my daily notes for the last 10 visits and say, “Well, we had problems with this when you came in and that’s gone. Your anxiety level was at a nine. Now you say it’s at a...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

I’m always amazed how the medical profession treats the people that are wealthy. They cater to them in a special way. I had an opportunity several years ago, to spend a lot of time with the plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills and in Hollywood, and it’s amazing how they treated their patients. They treated their patients like royalty. When the patient came in they were greeted by name. They were whisked off into a private reception area. They were asked if they wanted coffee, or juice, or water, whatever they wanted and they were catered to in every way. They were treated like royalty. Now, my old dentist treated me like royalty too. Whenever I came in the staff greeted me by saying, “Hi, Dr. Kats.” Not David or just a grunt or something like that, and I rarely if ever waited at that dentist’s office. He would saw me right away, it was a professional experience. They kept my credit...

This is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants. I have a tip for you.

Last week we talked about what kind of billing software you should use. We talked about Therapy Appointment being good and Therapy Notes being good and Practice Mate by Office Ally if you wanted something that was free. Today I want to talk about your bookkeeping software and I think hands down, you should have QuickBooks. QuickBooks has one program that resides on your computer that you can use and there is a Cloud-based software. They are both fairly inexpensive. Here's what you need to do, if you keep your books on QuickBooks, it makes it light years easier for your accountant at the end of the year. You should provide your accountant something that interfaces with the software he or she uses and your accounting fee should go down. Virtually every accountant in the world interfaces with QuickBooks, so I would suggest you get QuickBooks. If you know nothing about accounting, I would suggest you go to Craigslist or...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

There are so many people who are starting to do something unique in therapy. They are starting to do either 90-minute sessions, or double sessions, or in fact intensives. Now, the most common thing I see is therapists starting to do double sessions with their clients. This is mostly for the cash patients but it can be used with insurance if they want to pay cash for their second part of their visit. For the cash practitioner, a lot of times, especially if you have a married couple, a lot of therapists are of the opinion that 50 minutes, once a week, doesn't cut it. They give the patients or the clients the opportunity to have a double session if they are interested. And you'll be surprised, this is not a sales job, you just say to the patients, "When I have a marriage counseling situation like this, I usually ask the people if they want to do one session or two sessions each time they come in. One session...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Last time we talked about writing reviews and making sure that people give you plenty of reviews so you get an internet presence. Another way you get a good internet presence is by having blogs or articles. Now, when people hear about writing blogs and articles they say, “Oh, this is going to take a lot of time. I’m going to forget to do it. I’m never going to get it done. It’s going to fall by the wayside.” Those things could all be true but we can make blogs and articles a lot easier for you and maybe you’ll stay with the program. First of all, realize that blogs and articles can be very short. They can be one paragraph if you want, they can be three or four sentences if you want, and three paragraphs would be a lot. So don’t plan on putting a lot into each of these because you don’t need to. You can have a short article or a short blog. When you listen to...

Hi. This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Last week we talked about kicking some of the low payers to the curb. One of the things that naturally comes up from people when they respond to that is, "Well, if my practice is not yet full, can I keep these people?" And the answer is yes, you can. If your practice is not yet full and you do have those low-paying insurance companies and you want to stay with them and you're willing to work for the $40 or $50 or $60 that they give you, go ahead. More power to you. In fact, if your practice is not yet full, one of the things you can do to get it full is to talk to the Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) in your area about you being the therapist for them. See, this is rarely done by a therapist and EAPs are always look for people to send their workers to. EAPs look for people to send their workers to. If you go in and talk to HR or whoever is in charge of the Employee Assistant Program and you say, "I'm...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Do you remember when the new codes came out? We talked about so many different things with these codes. Something new that had been added was add-on codes. Well, I find that most therapists aren't using the add-on codes. There are certain add-on codes and I'm not going to list them for you but you can look them up. Just go to add-on codes for mental health practice, CPT add-on codes for mental health practice, and it will bring those add-on codes up. Some of the ways you use an add-on code is when a patient is in crisis, you bill your add-on codes. You bill those add-on codes or you bill a new code for a patient in crisis. You have to look at those things. Also, with things like play therapy or if you have language as a barrier, you can do an extra charge using these add-on codes. Like I said, I'm not going to list all the add-on codes for you or the other codes for you but make sure that you just look them...

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultant, and I have a tip for you.

I would encourage a lot of you to become supervisors so that you can supervise people that are not fully licensed. I find that supervising does a lot of good to build your practice and it does a lot of good as far as helping you to stay sharp in your training and in your therapy. In fact, I want you to think about how much value a person that you supervise has for you. The average person in the United States is going to meet with their supervisor, once a week, for about three years. Now, if they meet once a week for about three years, that's going to be 150 visits. If you have an average of 15 visits from a new patient, when you pick up somebody to supervise, you've actually picked up the equivalent of 10 new patients, as far as finances are concerned.

So, think about becoming a supervisor, usually, it's fairly easy. In our area, you have to go through a one-day training session, and then do some study on...

This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

One of the ways you are going to get noticed on the internet is to have reviews. Now it used to be reviews were hard to get and when I talk to therapists they say, "We can't have patients leave reviews." It is okay for the patient to leave reviews but you can't ask for the review. You shouldn't ask them because it is unethical to ask them to leave a testimony. You can have your colleagues leave reviews. You can have your family leave reviews. You can have your friends write reviews and it's gotten much easier in the last six months. It used to be that you had to go to a desktop computer to leave a review, but now you can leave a review on your mobile phone. If you have an android phone it automatically comes loaded with Google Maps and if you have Google Maps you can leave a review for the therapist right from your mobile phone. It is very easy to do. Just look up the therapist's website and it will say write a...

Hi. This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

There's a way that you can use people that are not fully licensed to benefit your clinic. Some interns are not fully licensed and cannot see patients but they can do administrative things in your office and they often do them for free or a very inexpensive rate. The other way to engage interns is to have the ones that can legally see patients help in your practice with the overflow of patients. At times what I see happening with interns in practices is this: the head therapist will charge $150 an hour. There are some people that come to your office that can't pay you $150 an hour. For those people, you can route them to your intern and they can charge whatever they want, $90 or $100 an hour, whatever you want them to charge and it gives you a way to treat everybody while you still remain at your full charge. I would think about this very seriously. I see so many practices who use interns to provide great...