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

Have you ever thought about being a supervisor? A lot of therapists become supervisors and it can be profitable and helpful to your profession in lots of different ways.

Let me give you an example. I have one therapist who has five interns that she supervises. They all work in her office, they all get their own patients, and she pays them just $25 per session. She collects anywhere from $75 to $100 a session.

I talked to her the other day and we did some calculations and she makes $3500 profit on those therapists, those interns that she’s supervising, every single month. I’m not saying that you have to do that; you can just do one at a time, but I want to explain to you how successful it is to have a person that you supervise.

It varies state by state. In most states, a supervisor will supervise someone for approximately three years until they get their hours and they’ll have a meeting...

Are you blogging? Blogging on your website is necessary.

This keeps your website fresh and updated and keeps your business refreshed on the search engines. Come to think of it, when did you blog last? If it’s been less than 10 days, good for you. You need to do it probably at least once a week and even more often if you want to. Put it on your website. Once you’ve posted it, go in and copy the URL address. Then go to your other social communities that you already have profiles on and paste that URL address and post it on that site. That way when people Google you or Google the keywords that you have in those articles, it will come up right away. Having a profile in social communities such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is all really good, but everything is going much farther now. Bookmarking, creating your own YouTube video and posting in content sites are a great way to get your brand and your name out there today.

While only some of this is needed to be known...

If you take insurance and even if you are a cash practitioner, you should run an aging of accounts every month. What I mean by an aging of accounts is just a report that tells you who owes you money and how long they've owed you that money. And you have to decide based on that report what you need to do for collections.

I have here a hypothetical aging of accounts that I'd like to go over with you and show you what we would do if we found these on our aging of accounts. Let's look at the aging of accounts.

You can see the first person there is Bill Jones. Now he doesn't owe anything for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, but from 90 days to 120 days he owes $100 and for over 120 days he owes $400. So he owes a total of $500. Now it appears to me that he has stopped coming in some time ago, about three months ago, and we have not collected from the times previous. Something went wrong, we sent it to the wrong insurance company, or we didn't bill it because we didn't have the right...

Dr. David Kats: Hi, this is Dr. David Kats and Dr. Michael Perusich and we have a
video tip for you. One of the things that's hot right now, as far as getting new
patients, it is doing Facebook Live. Facebook Live is a very simple thing to do. In
fact, if we tell you how to do it, you can probably do one this afternoon. We have
clients that do Facebook Live meetings and get one or two new patients off it every
time. This is basically what you got to do.
You just go to Facebook and it says whats on your mind, you remember that. You
click on that and down below, you'll see four or five little decals. One of them has a
picture of a man with sound waves around it. Just click on that, tell them if you want
it to be private or if you want it to be public, and then hit the go button. It counts
down from three, two, one and you're doing it.
Dr. Michael Perusich: You're live.
Dr. David: Yes and you're live.
Dr. Michael: All you have to do is just spend a little bit, just talking about your office,
talk...

Michael: Hi everybody, this is Michael Perusich and David Kats here with your video tip of the week. This week we want to talk a little bit about brand awareness and this is something sometimes we don't think about as healthcare providers. Brand awareness is about making sure that your name, that your business name is easily recognized. If I put up Golden Arches in front of everybody right now, everybody would know that was McDonald's. How well known is your practice in your community?

David: Yes. I got a good case in point. When I was first building the practice, we went to medical offices to do medical luncheons and after about the first three or four medical luncheons, we had a good time and they accepted us and enjoyed us coming over. I realized that probably the doctor's that we met with didn't even know the name of our clinic when we left. As a result, what we started doing is we put our name all over for brand awareness and our logo all over. We had vinyl placemats that we...

David Kats: Hi, this is David Kats and Dr. Michael Perusich for Therapist Consultants and we have a tip for you. You know you have to start saving for taxes sometime. You don't want your taxes to sneak up on you and always feel like you're behind the ball as far as getting taxes paid on time. You have to set up a tax account. Do you have set up a tax account?

Michael: Yes, we do. In fact, what I do just so it doesn't sneak up on me because boy, the year really flies by, and you're probably filing quarterly taxes. You want to just do this on a continual basis. What I do on my practice is I just have it automatically removed once a week. I have a certain amount taken out and moved right over to my tax account. I don't think about it, I don't physically have to do it. The way automation is today with our banking accounts and online banking and those kind of things makes it really, really easy to just slide that money over so it's there when the tax man comes.

David: You know you said...

Dr. Michael Perusich: Hi, everybody. This is Dr. Michael Perusich and Dr. David Kats, we are here with this week's video tip. David, we were just talking off camera just a minute ago about HIPAA, and HIPAA Compliance and you're getting ready to do this in your practice. Dr. David Kats: I'm going to be training for HIPAA with my staff day after tomorrow and we're going to go through it at least once a year. It's amazing how many therapists and doctors don't do HIPAA Compliance training like they should. You need to train every new employee, as soon as you get that new employee, you have to train them. You have to train at least once a year and keep track of the fact that you trained with HIPAA. Now, if you are a member of us, you know that on our website, we have the training, all you have to do is play the audio and you'll have the HIPAA training done. Make sure that you take advantage of that. And if you are a member with us, we certainly invite you to do that. Either way, you've...

Michael Perusich: Hi, this is Michael Perusich and David Kats, and we've got a video tip for you. One of the things that we recommend when you're running your practice is that you understand and know all the time what services are covered under the health insurance plans that you're on.

David Kats: That's right.

Michael Perusich: Because if you don't, you may be providing services that you may have to ultimately just write off, so you'd be providing the service for free. This is a very important thing to understand each and every year because it changes from time to time and you want to make sure that you just keep a list, an active list about all those services that they cover, and probably a list of the services they don't cover as well so that you can try to avoid those services if possible.

David Kats: Yes. In our clinic, we just have a spreadsheet, the excel spreadsheet, and it has all the insurance company's solution and what they cover and what they don't cover and how much...

David Kats:  Hi, this is Dr. David Kats and Dr. Michael Perusich. We have a video tip for you. Most people now are thinking about moving to a cash basis, either to a total cash basis or a partial cash basis. You have to decide what to do in your practice because insurance companies are paying less and less and less every year. Just this year, their deductibles went way up and the-- What they're paying went way down.

Michael Perusich: Yes, the reimbursement trends keep going down. Analyze your practice. We recommend doing an excel spreadsheet, and if you're a member, we already have that spreadsheet built for you, get it on the back office, but we recommend that you analyze your insurance companies and see what your reimbursement is compared to what your fees are. You may be really surprised. You may find that many of the codes that you're submitting to insurance are not getting paid well.

David: Yes, as a result, you'd probably be better either going to cash with that insurance...

Dr. Perusich: Hi everybody. Dr. Michael Perusich and Dr. David Kats here. We've got a video tip for you this week. This week we want to talk about head space. Stephen Covey talks about, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, sharpening the saw. In fact, that's the final habit that makes the habits all work together. Sharpening the saw is about making sure that you take time to renew yourself. As healthcare providers, we give off so much energy to our patients and our clients on a daily basis that we have to, every once in a while, take a little bit of a step back and just sharpen our saw again, renew ourselves and we need to be doing this on a daily basis.

Dr. Kats: Dr. Perusich, I don't want to turn it into an advertisement for the companies but I have to tell you that the best way to get your head on right and get your head space right is to just tune in to the the webinars that we do and make sure that you listen to them on a regular basis. I can't imagine how much smaller...