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HIPAA – The 6 Types of PHI You Never Even Thought Of

Today we are gonna talk about the 18 different types of protected health, inform information and how to relate to it in your office and how to protect it, most importantly, so that you don’t get yourselves in trouble.

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi, everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, whatever it may be for you. My name is Perry Barnhill with the Fearless Acupuncturist, and I want to give a big thanks to the American Acupuncture Council for bringing this to you. Today we are gonna talk about the 18 different types of protected health, inform information and how to relate to it in your office and how to protect it, most importantly, so that you don’t get yourselves in trouble.

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Slideshow please. Okay. Like I said, my name is Perry Barnhill. We teach hipaa. We’re certified in HIPAA certifications and compliance. Myself and Julie McLaughlin, we want to protect you. We want to educate you and we wanna defend you. So that you don’t get yourselves in trouble with HIPAA or with the government.

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So we’re gonna talk about some of the things that could potentially get yourselves in hot water and how to prevent those. Like I said earlier, we’re gonna talk about different types of protected health information and sometimes you may hear me say EPHI, and all that means is. Electronic protected health information.

This is the information that we have with our patients in our devices, on our computers, on our laptops, and things such as that. So believe it or not, there are 18 different types of protected health information of which we would literally go through. Each and every one of them, because there’s many of ’em you would never think are actually considered PHI.

So let’s talk about that kind of a little quiz here. We like to call the fearless quiz. What do you think are some of the different types of protected health information that you have with your patients? I’ll give you a little clue to get you started here. We all know, or most of us realize that the patient’s name would be considered part of the protective health information.

What about some other things? Just for a second, start. Start thinking about that. Okay, so we are gonna go through and we’re gonna identify each of those 18 different types. Here we go, and I’ll actually read these to you. Like I said earlier, the name of the patient or the individual or the patient’s child if you’re taking care of the child.

So obviously names are gonna be protected. Health information, an address, anything smaller than the state of residence, any date. And you know what? It includes dates that identify their onset admission, discharge date, birth dates. Even be careful with people and patients that are deceased. Okay? Bottom line is this.

As we go through these, the reason I’m bringing this to your attention is that if you are aware of all the different types of PHI, these are things that you need to be very careful about who you disclose this information to. Because if you disclose any of this information to people that shouldn’t see it or hear it, that’s actually considered a breach.

And believe it or not, we have to report the breaches. These are things we don’t want to have to do because the last thing we want to happen is have the OCR, the Office of Civil Rights, looking at all of our stuff. So let’s prevent these things in the first place so that they don’t happen. Telephone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, even.

Social security numbers. I know most of us realize that this is a pretty important one. They’re medical record numbers. Be careful with that one. Health insurance plan, beneficiary numbers, their numbers that are on their ident, their insurance cards for identification, even account numbers, certificates or license numbers, things such as their driver’s license.

And of course, I think most of us realize that driver’s licenses can be considered PHI. The thing is that a lot of us take copies of those things, so be very careful who gets that information. Even a CPR certification number, believe it or not, passports. I think that makes sense to most of us.

But what about this one, VIN numbers or even license plate numbers? And the thing I wanna elaborate about, the license plate numbers are, many of us will do patient testimonials. Sometimes we’ll do videos of the office and in the office parking lot there’s cars. But in that same video or in the same photo is the car in your office name.

So guess what? Somebody could go online. Check that license number, and I’m not saying they were going they will, but it’s possible and the government doesn’t care whether it was possible, probable, or very likely. If it’s something that you accidentally disclosed and it was linked to the patient and their information somehow was breached, then you’re the one that gets in trouble.

So be very aware of that. Here’s some more device identifiers or serial numbers on the medical devices and treatments that you use during procedures. Web, universal, URLs, internet protocols or IP addresses, biometric identifiers, facial recognition, fingerprint scans, even tattoos. Be careful. You have to be so careful that let’s say for example, someone has a tattoo on their arm and you take a picture and maybe put it up on the internet or somehow it gets out.

And it gets linked back to your office, that could potentially be considered a breach. So be very aware of that. Full face photos, yes, if you do full face photos or you’re doing testimonials, this is where the supplies is. You have to get your patient’s authorization to do and guess what? In our HIPAA program, we have patient authorization video forms, all the things that you need to do that or any other uniquely identifi, num, numbers, characteristics, or even codes.

So here’s my big point on this. Know the different types of PHI. If you know what they are, the likelihood that you’re going to disclose those inadvertently or accidentally are gonna become much less. Therefore, the odds are reduced, that you’ll have the government in there looking at your manuals and everything like that.

That doesn’t excuse the fact to not have one. But of course, we wanna prevent accidents, if you will, from happening before they occur, and then life is much better for all of us. One of the things we talk about all the time is the importance, not just the importance, but the requirement, the legality that we’re required to do monthly, or let me say this ongoing required training for hipaa.

So we do what we call monthly HIPAA training. Each and every month we do a training. And guess what? This can be one of your monthly trainings. You can scan the QR code right there, and then what’ll pop up is this form. This form has those 18 different types of unique identifiers on there. For PHI, you sit down with your staff document.

Remember, if you don’t document it, it didn’t happen, document your training with your staff. If you have a staff, if it’s just you, it’s easy, but you still need to document that. You did the training on different types of PHI. This will help you go a long ways. In the case of an audit, it’s not the only thing you need, obviously, but it’s one of the pieces of the puzzle.

Like I said earlier, document your monthly training in your manual. You can download HIPAA compliance checklist. We have these ’cause a lot of practitioners ask us, I’m not sure if I’m have compliant. One of the things I will say, if you’re not sure, the likelihood is that you’re probably not.

That’s why you may be asking that question. This is a great checklist. Go through these things. If you can’t check off every one of these. It’s very unlikely that you’re HIPAA compliant, so make sure you do this. You can scan this QR code here and you’ll get this list to check for yourself in your office.

If you have any questions, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to us. Couple different things you can do here. If you want to schedule a demo and check out the HIPAA program and all the training that we have, just go to go dot fearless provider.com. Slash demo or you can simply scan the QR code over there.

The other thing too is if you just want to get started and make sure you become HIPAA compliant, you can go to ww dot fearless acupuncturist.com. And like I said, if you have any questions, more than happy to help you. Myself and Julia, more than happy to help. You can contact me at Dr. Perry at better HIPAA blueprint.

Dot com. Don’t hesitate to reach out. In the meantime, everybody, I want to say thank you again and thanks to the A A C for hosting this short webinar on the 18 different points of protected health information. And everybody, have an amazing day. Have an amazing rest of your week, and I will talk to you later.

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Reasonable Treatment Amount Per Visit?

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Safety Considerations When Purchasing A Microneedling Device

So the first thing you want to look at when you are considering purchasing a device and you’re looking at safety features is the weight.

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Hi, my name is Michelle Gellis. I am an acupuncture physician and an author, and I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for giving me this opportunity to speak to you about safety concerns when purchasing a microneedling device. So there are a lot of microneedling devices out. On the market now, and I’m not here to try to sell you one, but the American Acupuncture Council is an insurance agency, and so safety is very important to them, and it should be very important to us as practitioners, both the safety of our patients and Our peace of mind when we are taking on a practice, whether it’s acupuncture, needling, or in this case, if we are doing microneedling.

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So the first thing you want to look at when you are considering purchasing a device and you’re looking at safety features is the weight. Of the pen itself and the reason why this is important, if you are doing a lot of microneedling, then if your pen is too heavy, your hand will get tired, and you may not have the consistency across the face, neck, chest, hands, wherever you’re going to be microneedling that you would have with a lighter device.

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Now that said, you don’t want to buy a product that is merely made out of aluminum, which is very lightweight, but it’s not going to be durable, and then you can run it into other problems with the product. Breaking or just not lasting very long. Something that is aluminum and stainless steel will give you the durability and also the lightness that you are looking for.

The next important thing when you’re looking at safety in a device is how easy is it for it to use and to adjust? So there should be two adjustments on any microneedle pen. And the first one, which is also a safety feature, is the speed. So in this particular pen, the. Speed, which is indicated by these different numbers is easily visible.

And so you know exactly what speed the pen is operating at. What does speed mean? The speed is how quickly the needles go up and down. So if they’re going too slowly. So we refer to this as RPMs. If it’s going too slowly, it can actually tear at the skin, and so you don’t want a pen that isn’t at least 16,000 RPMs with 18,000 being the kind of gold standard for professional microneedle devices.

The next feature. Setting is, if you look at the pen here, there’s numbers on the. Pen and these numbers indicate how deep the needles will penetrate into the skin. Professional micro noodle devices typically will adjust from zero. To 2.5 millimeters and usually when you are using a microneedle pen, you’re going to start out around 0.25 and you really, when you’re working on the phase, really don’t wanna go over 1.0 millimeters.

The next important safety feature that we’re looking at. So these numbers should be easy to read even if you have a protective sleeve over the pen, and it should be easy to adjust without any confusion about. What number you’re at. Next is the actual cartridges themselves and the cartridges you purchased should be pre sterilized.

And this is usually done through a gas process and. The package itself should be sealed. It should be dated, and it should be easy to open. So heal them open and. The cartridge itself should not be a screw type, and the reason is screw type cartridges can pop off the pen. You want something that has a bayonet.

Tight, and you’ll see this is a three prong bayonet. You want a bayonet type, which when you put it into the pen, it will click on nice and tight, and you don’t have to worry about the cartridge popping off. So another. Important feature of buying a professional pen should be some sort of anti backflow technology.

So let’s break this down. What does that mean, anti backflow technology? The prongs when they go into the pen should. Fit into sorry, my camera’s reversed, so you can actually see right inside there. There are three little holes inside the pen and there are three. Places where the pen connects and then there are three hall.

Let me do it this way. Let’s see, trying to get the right light. You can see, almost see there’s three holes here on the cartridge itself. So these three prongs go into the hu inside the pen, and they fit like this, and then you push it on. And once it’s connected, it stays connected. Also, the needles should be protected with a tip so that when you open the package up, if you put the cartridge down, the needles aren’t exposed.

But don’t forget to take the tip off before you do your microneedling. Then as you adjust the pen, you can see the needles will come out over the top, just like that. You see that? So that’s adjusted. Right now I am all the way up at 2.5, but you would never, so that’s how deep those needles would be going into the skin.

Perhaps you could use that on acne scar on the back or the chest, or stretch marks on a leg, but you would never have the needles out that far for working on the face. So we’ve talked about some of the actual safety fit features of a pen. So lightweight, easy to read display, easy to read, and easily adjustable numbers, the cartridge, pre sterilized, and individual packets.

And good connection, no backflow, so that when you’re microneedling any serums that are on the face you really shouldn’t have any body fluids coming out. But any serums that are on the face do not go back into the pen itself. And lastly your device should have, should come with a couple of rechargeable batteries.

And that way if you are in the middle of microneedling and your battery dies, you have a backup. And just as an extra backup, should you have a really busy day and you. Forget to charge your batteries or you just completely use up the batteries, both of them having a cord that you can plug in. Sorry, mine is in a case.

Having a nice long cord that you can plug in. To the same sort of instead of a battery, this would be something that shows you the speed and controls the pen just like the battery does, except this plugs into the wall. Having a nice long cord so that if your treatment table is not anywhere near a, an outlet, you have plenty room to work with.

So last but not least, having good instruction manual, something that is also easy to read, very important having. Nice pretty pictures and what each one of the parts does and all the contraindications and precautions. And this will ensure that you don’t that you actually know what you’re doing or what each one of the parts or four.

So I just wanted to give you that. Quick overview on safety and kind of what to look for when you’re purchasing a microneedle device. There are a lot of knockoff products and multifunctional devices that maybe or not. Designed just to do microneedling, and I would caution you that these devices probably are not very good.

If you try to do too much in one tool, you’re not really going to be very good at any one thing. So if your pen has red light or if your pen does microcurrent. It’s not going to be as good as a dedicated red light device or a dedicated microcurrent device, or as a dedicated microneedle pen. Wanna thank you again and.

I look forward to speaking to you next time. We will be. I also will be talking a little bit about marketing and so stay tuned for that. Thank you so much.

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Acupuncture Business Insurance Quote

Every company should have insurance to protect itself, and an acupuncture business is no exception. Businesses that are service-based, particularly alternative treatments, are especially vulnerable to complaints with legal implications. The good news is that insurance can help safeguard your practice. However, like any important purchase, you need to be smart when choosing coverage — and requesting an acupuncture business insurance quote is a great way to start.

The goal of getting an acupuncture business insurance quote is to find coverage that matches your specific business needs. It helps ensure peace of mind, knowing that your acupuncture practice and your professional reputation are well-protected. It provides multiple coverages, such as:

Malpractice – Protects you from risks associated with various acupuncture modalities: needling, herbal remedies, moxa, and cupping. And, in today’s acu-industry continued development, you can add coverage for Gua Sha, bloodletting, or facial rejuvenation.

(AAC protects you from enhanced risks of your profession that these modalities may present. Learn more about our Malpractice Insurance.)

Premises Liability (PL) – Often referred to as “slip and fall” insurance, this coverage protects against claims from clients injured on your premises. For example, a client slipping on a wet floor or tripping on loose carpeting could lead to a liability claim–this policy helps you manage such risks.

Business Personal Property (BPP) – coverage for lost, stolen, or damaged business property, such as acupuncture tables, chairs, furniture, or other portable equipment that is not permanently attached to the building. ACC’s BPP typically includes a $10,000 liability limit with a $500 deductible, and higher limits—up to $100,000—are available in $10,000 increments.

Before Requesting a Quote

The more detailed your information, the more accurate your quotations will be. Be prepared to provide:

Your business name (if applicable)
Practice location (clinic, wellness center, home-based, or mobile)
Years of experience (affects risk assessment)
Licensing and certification details
Types of services offered
Estimated client volume (weekly or yearly)
Approximate annual revenue

How to Get a Quote in 3 Easy Steps

Research insurance providers

There are many acupuncture insurance providers in the U.S. Use online search tools to shortlist 4 to 5 reliable options.

Use their online quote tool

These tools are simple and allow you to get insurance details, including prices, promptly.

Call to finalize your list

Once you’ve reviewed and compared quotes, call each provider for further clarification. Discuss policy details, including: coverage limits, premiums, optional endorsements, and discounts.

Pro Tip: Don’t just go for the lowest price—go for the best value and appropriate coverage for your business (asking quotations is crucial to making an informed decision).

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Are you looking for reputable acupuncture business insurance? Look no further than the American Acupuncture Council. Request a quote today or call us at (800) 838-0383 to speak with our team.

HIPAA – Immediate Nationwide Update Alert – Dr. Perry Barnhill

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Hi, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. This is Perry Barnhill with the Fearless Acupuncturist. Today I want to give a big thanks to the American Acupuncture Council for bringing this to you. Today we are going to talk about HIPAA and as it applies to reproductive healthcare. Many of you acupuncturists deal with reproductive healthcare, even for those of you that don’t in your files, in your patient’s histories, in the forms that the very patients fill out.

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There will be things regarding reproductive healthcare, like contraception, pregnancy management, fertility, sterilization, and also sexual health. Just as a reminder of what reproductive healthcare means in the context of hipaa, slideshow, please. Okay, so how fast things change. Literally at the beginning of the year, we had some new laws regarding reproductive healthcare, and now, like just within the last few weeks on June 18th, it’s changed.

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Some of those things have changed for most of the states out there, but not all of them. And this is what we’re gonna talk about. And again, things change very quickly. Sometimes you really need to stay on top of all the HIPAA laws, new, old, and the changing ones as they’re coming down the pipe.

Strengthening reproductive healthcare privacy under the new HIPAA privacy rule. Now, again, like I talked about a little bit before, there was the new requirements that we talked about in December and also in January, but now there’s some new requirements regarding attestations, or shall I say, some things you may not need to do, and we’re gonna talk about the action steps and specifically how it applies to you and how it applies to compliance and relationship to hipaa.

Here’s what happened on June 18th, so just a few weeks ago, a US district court judge for the Northern District of Texas, federal judge has invalidated the 2024 HIPAA reproductive health modifications to the privacy rule decision is immediate and it applies nationwide. This is how we’re saying there can be a law, and then several months later that law no longer exists, or you no longer have to do certain or specific things within that particular law.

The Texas judge, this is what the Texas judge said. He said that HHS had overstepped its bounds, and he cited three main legal issues, which we’ll just talk about briefly. One, the rule unlawfully restricted public health laws. Two, it redefined terms like person and public health in ways that exceeded the federal authority.

And three, it addressed politically charged issues like abortion without clear congressional approval. A violation of a major questions doctrine. And again, let me just remind you what the reproductive healthcare law that I was talking about just a little bit before, things like contraception, pregnancy management fertility, sterilization, sexual health.

So those was what specifically they stated was fell under that umbrella of reproductive healthcare law. However, some of the things we had to do, like I said earlier, like attestation statements. Most of us will not need to do any longer. Okay, so let’s just keep going here. HIPAA related entities, covered entities like you and your business associates.

Remember, business associates are folks that you do business with or basically people that have access to your patient’s information or basically anything that you have that you share with somebody else in relationship to a business associate for protective health information have to follow state laws.

Regarding that particular reproductive health. All right, so now let me say this. It does get a little confusing. It gets confusing for everybody. Federal law. There’s federal law as we know, and then there’s state law. When it comes to hipaa, actually state laws will supersede or become in addition to.

Federal law. So you can have a federal law, but your particular state may have it more strict, it may be more detailed, or you may have to do additional things regarding that particular law. So we always say stay on top of your state laws as well. So in the absence of hipaa, reproductive health rule, some states, not only many states are increasing.

HIPAA privacy protections for the residents. So here’s some of the states that you need to pay attention to that will likely, or I wouldn’t, going to suggest to you to keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing in regards to reproductive healthcare and providing attestation statements, which we’ll get into just a second.

So anyways, New York, California. Washington, Nevada, and Connecticut, and there may be some more to come. We’ll see. How does this impact you? Here’s the thing. Covered entities, at least most of them in those state or in most states, are no longer required to seek attestations from requesters regarding protected healthcare or rather protective health information related to reproductive healthcare.

So what does that mean? Basically because of this new law. The states that I didn’t mention, you follow the federal law, okay? You do not have to provide an attestation statement if someone asked for those certain things regarding reproductive healthcare. All right? What that means is if you did what you were supposed to at the beginning of the year with all the new updates that came down the pipe and you change your privacy notices, now you would actually take that out.

’cause now it no longer applies to you. But if you’re in those states that are going to continue to follow this. You need to keep it in there. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, make sure you reach out to me so we can make, tell you the things that you need to know regarding this and many other things that changed at the beginning of the year.

So double check your state now, navigation or navigate the prohibition on disclosing protected health information for the purpose of investigating or imposing liability unlawful reproductive healthcare imposed by your state. Let me put that in some different words here for you. If you have patient files, which we have patient files that do in fact many times contain the very things that I detailed regarding the big umbrella of reproductive healthcare, and if somebody like from law enforcement or a judicial BA branch, we listed these things before, requested that information, we were supposed to by law actually send them this model attestation form, which basically said, Hey, listen, we’re sending you some information here.

You have to fill this out. Actually, let me reverse here. We’re not gonna send you this information, this protective healthcare information until you fill this form out and basically promise to us that you’re not going to punish anybody for whatever was in those particular files regarding reproductive healthcare.

So now, because that federal state judge said what he said. Most states no longer have to do this. All righty? So make sure you pay attention to your state. This is why we always talk about hipaa. It’s not like you can just do HIPAA and you can just fill out this manual and you’re good to go and you just sit back and you forget about.

It’s constantly evolving and it’s constantly changing as you can see and what happened in Texas is just a real simple reminder that a single court ruling can unravel. A lot of the new guidelines that were literally just presented and required six months ago. It’s evolving from reproductive privacy rules and think about this, cybersecurity, look at ai, artificial intelligence, and all the new things that are coming down with computer systems and privacy and cybersecurity threats and phishing.

It gets really scary at times. This is why. Monthly training isn’t optional. It’s your, it’s literally your lifeline such that you have to stay on top of these things. And I’ll be very clear, it’s not like the government says, Hey, by law, you have to absolutely do one monthly HIPAA training a month.

That’s not what they say. What they say is you need to do continuous training throughout the year for yourself and to all of your employees and even to your business associates, believe it or not. What I’ve also heard other people say that teach the things that we teach is that even the government suggests that you do HIPAA training.

To about two times a month. Now, is that a law? It’s not a law, but it’s what we’ve heard for suggestions. We step back and say, Hey, you should be doing things at least once a month. All right, so staying informed protects your license. It’s your patience and your peace of mind. And believe me, if you don’t have these things dialed in like you’re supposed to and someone comes knocking on the door for an audit, it’s something that you don’t want to go through because I talk to doctors all the time.

I talk to acupuncturists all the time. That get scared because they don’t have the things that they should have. So it’s really easy to get the things that you need to have, and I’ll talk to you about that here in just a second. HIPAA compliance, again, you can’t just check a box and be like, okay, cool, I’m HIPAA compliant, or fill out a particular form.

It can get a little bit involved. It’s about staying ready for whatever comes next. Keep learning. Keep updating the things. Stay fearless. We want you to be fearless so you can focus on your patients. That’s why you became an acupuncturist, is to focus on your patients. We can help you with the HIPAA side of things, so what are some of the next steps that you can do?

Couple things here. HIPAA checklist, if you’re wondering like, ah, I wonder if I’m HIPAA compliant, or I wonder if I’m even close to being HIPAA compliant, you can scan the QR code and get this checklist, or you can just look at it here and go through these questions. You can’t answer these questions, or if you’re not doing these things on these questions, you’re not HIPAA compliant.

It’s not worth the risk. So if you want to, you can set up a demo with us, where we can talk to you, we can show you the HIPAA compliance program that we have and how easy it is to navigate through this. Just go to go dot fearless provider.com/demo. You can scan the QR code here as well.

Sometimes acupuncture, you just wanna get started. So you can go to ww dot fearless acupuncturist.com to get started. Or. A lot of times people just wanna reach out and ask me questions, and I am more than happy to answer any questions that you may have, and you can contact me there at that email, Dr.

perry@betterhipaablueprint.com. If you have any questions, like I said, reach out to us. We are absolutely more than happy to sit down and talk to you and spend some time with you and clear up any questions or confusion that HIPAA presents with many of the times. In the meantime, everybody have an amazing day and we will talk to you soon.

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Is AI Changing How Acupuncturists Are Found? – Michelle Grasek

So how is AI changing search engine optimization? There’s really two ways that AI has impacted SEO, and the first is that the way people are able to search for the answer to a question has changed.

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Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I’m a practicing acupuncturist and a marketing strategist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. And today we’re talking about how AI is changing search engine optimization and what we can do about it as acupuncturists and local brick and mortar small business owners.

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So before we get into that today, I would love to say thank you to the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you. All right, let’s get into the slides. So how is AI changing search engine optimization? There’s really two ways that AI has impacted SEO, and the first is that the way people are able to search for the answer to a question has changed.

So if you. Recall, and originally we would simply type a couple keywords into the search bar in Google and we’re gonna use Google as our primary example. I know there are other search engines, but really the one that owns everything as and is the most important is Google. So we’ll use Google as an example.

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So we used to just be able to choose a couple keywords like acupuncture, frozen shoulder, or maybe. Frozen shoulder acupuncture near me, just a mishmash of keywords and put them into a Google search. And of course we can still do that, but that used to be the most common way that people would search.

Now people can use their Alexa and ask full sentences, so there are, they’re using a voice search or they can type full sentences into chat GPT. So instead of just saying acupuncture, frozen shoulder, they can say things like. Can you find me at an acupuncturist specializing in frozen shoulder near me, or can acupuncture help my tennis elbow and X, Y, Z?

So these are more conversational, they’re full sentences, and these are called high intent queries because they indicate that a person is really very interested. In what we have to offer, right? They wouldn’t be asking about, natural alternatives for frozen shoulder or acupuncture specifically for frozen shoulder if it was not their intent to pursue that line of treatment.

Okay? We know that the way we are inputting our query has changed. It’s a lot more long tail keywords. So when you’re entering a whole sentence or multiple keywords or big concepts, that’s called the long tail keyword, right? And these long tail keywords are often conversational in tone, right?

They’re phrased as an entire question. And then we also know that AI is changing the output, that social, sorry, that search engines are providing as an answer to a question. So you may have noticed when you search on Google that up at the top, Google will give you an AI summary of the answer it thinks is most relevant and most accurate to your query.

And. Google also has a specific AI search, so let me skip ahead here for you called AI mode where you get a much more comprehensive AI generated response to your query. So as an example, I typed into AI mode in the Google search. I put in. Acupuncture to manage celiac disease symptoms near me. So this is a longer tail keyword, and this is the response that it gave me.

So first it says, yes, acupuncture is likely to be helpful for celiac symptoms, and then it went ahead and it listed the local. Acupuncture clinics. So my practice is very close to my house, so I knew that my practice was gonna come up, but I was curious what the ranking would be. I have a lot of content on my website about digestion and I really just wanted to see are we ranking for these kind of local searches for symptoms that we like to treat?

You can see it’s listing five different clinics and we’re at the top and it provides the most information about my practice. And now why is that? If you take a look at this, it’s summarizing the specific answer to the question about celiac symptoms. At some point in creating content on my website over the past six years, I must have mentioned that I have Celiac and that I have been using acupuncture to help manage those symptoms for a decade, and that contributes to the reason that I love to help patients with a variety of digestive conditions.

I know that I wrote this content, I don’t remember when, I have no idea what page it’s on, but it’s very specific, right? And it is. A direct answer to this question that was put into the search query and Google found it. And there’s a specific reason that I am sharing this with you. So to review the two ways that AI is changing search is, one, it’s changing the way that we ask questions of Google.

So the questions themselves have changed. And two, it’s changing the way that the search engines AKA Google are providing the answer. Okay? So as you can see here, it says results are summarized with relevant points and fewer clickthroughs are necessary because if it’s summarizing your an answer to a question, you don’t actually have to click through to that website that it’s referencing to read the same information.

Okay. So all of this is important to keep in mind when we ask ourselves, okay, those are the changes. What can we do about it as local brick and mortar businesses, as practice owners, and truly high quality, detailed content that talks about your specific experience and mentions local keywords is going to be more important than ever.

This AI models is referring to any, aI that’s built into a search engine. So we just saw, if we skip back here, this is AI mode in Google, but different search engines have different names for it. But AI really prefers content that is detailed, that it feels is going to be authentic because it mentions a real person’s experience or background or expertise, and also incorporates local keywords.

All of this in addition to mentioning the keywords relevant to the symptom that the person mentioned in their query. Okay. And we’re gonna talk about an exact page structure for a new page on your website that you can create, where you can incorporate all of these things. But I think this is really interesting.

We’re emphasizing that. The AI search part of search engines wants to ensure that the content it’s providing as an answer to a question is authentic and relevant, as opposed to providing really basic, vague information that may have been generated solely by ai. AI generated content is not a bad thing.

When I’m creating new pages for my website, I absolutely use chat GPT to help me. The important thing to note is that. If you ask chat GPT to help you write any content, the quality of the output is going to depend on the quality of the prompt that you give it. So you need to tell chat GPT about your target market, your ideal audience, your expertise.

You can tell it the things you want it to include. The things you do not want it to include, you can even tell it that this is going to be content geared towards SEO. So you need it to mention a specific keyword or phrase and your location, et cetera. Okay? So this is not to say that you can’t use AI to help you write these pages, either the content or the outline, but what you wanna avoid is.

Content that sounds very basic and generic that doesn’t reference any particular experience or expertise where the examples are really vague and just not helpful. I think you’ve probably come across that sort of content before. That’s probably AI generated content. Instead, what the AI search is looking for is deeper, right?

It wants more detail, it wants more testimonials about the symptom on the page. It wants more information, okay? Because that’s indicating that it’s authentic and it’s relevant and it’s most likely a good answer to the person’s question. So before we move on, I wanna emphasize that search engine optimization.

And really Google’s goal, everything Google is doing. It is about the user experience and we can maximize that when we are creating pages for our website for SEO. And what do I mean by user experience? Google cares very much that the answers it brings up to a search query are authentic, relevant, and useful answers to the actual question that was asked.

It does not wanna be tricked into putting a website at the top of a search. That actually doesn’t answer the question, right? So it’s become very savvy in that way because it wants to provide the best answer to a question. Do you remember Ask j Eves? It still exists. Lots of people don’t even think it exists anymore, but ask j Eves algorithms.

To answer questions we’re simply not as good as Google’s, and so Google really took off and asked j Eves got left behind. Google does not want that to happen. Okay, so it’s like Google wants to help you. It really does. If you are the answer to a question that someone type in, it wants you, it wants your business, but we have to help Google understand.

When our business is the answer to a question that’s been put in the search, that is our responsibility. And so how do we do that? We build out our website with deep rich content that talks about our experience as practitioners, our expertise that mentions our location and. Can include testimonials, et cetera.

All of the things that help Google feel like the content is authentic and specific to the search query. Okay, so you know, one thing I always ask my marketing clients when they are a little resistant to. Adding more content to their website is, is the content that’s already on your website specific enough that Google would know what kind of patients you want it to send you?

And if the answer is no, then we have to write about those symptoms and conditions. Otherwise, Google will have no idea exactly who to send us and it’s gonna send those people somewhere that is specific. Okay. One way of maximizing the potential of your website for the new way that AI is impacting search engine optimization is to write these long form detailed pages about specific symptoms or conditions that you wanna see more of.

Now, there are lots and lots of SEO strategies that you can use that are very effective. This is just one, and I chose it. For today, because it doesn’t require us to have any technical behind the scenes knowledge of our websites, it doesn’t really even require us to have much SEO knowledge. We are just writing a really good, thorough, detailed webpage and including a couple key elements so that.

Google understands when our website is the answer to a question that someone entered into the search. Okay? And so let’s talk about the detailed format for these symptom pages. I’m actually gonna skip ahead. And just run through an outline of this page and then I’ll show you a real time example. So a really nice format and you can pause and take a screenshot of this, is to have the the title of your page be.

Acupuncture four. And then the symptom will say osteoarthritis of the knee, if that’s something you’d love to treat in Rochester, New York, or whatever your town or neighborhood is. And then each one of these bullet points would be a heading section for the page. So what is osteoarthritis of the knee? How can acupuncture in Rochester.

Help with osteoarthritis of the knees. How many treatments do I need? What to expect for osteoarthritis of the knee for acupuncture? Frequently asked questions about acupuncture and osteoarthritis. Why choose your clinic name? Why choose Ageless Acupuncture? Schedule your first visit today in Rochester, New York at ages acupuncture.

Okay, so keeping all of that in mind, let’s look at. And I apologize. I thought I had this, oops. Pulled up for you.

Okay, so let’s look at a real time example of this. For diverticulitis I mentioned I love to treat digestive conditions, so we try to have these pages for the various digestive conditions that I really enjoy treating and want more of those patients. So you can see acupuncture for diverticulitis relief, and son falls.

I’ve got my keywords, which are acupuncture, the symptom. And my location. Okay, and then I’ve got my headings. What is diverticulitis? I’ve got a call to action button here. Make an appointment. How acupuncture might help with diverticulitis. How many treatments? Another button to make an appointment. What to expect.

Why choose our clinic Is acupuncture right for you and ready to make an appointment with of course, another button. Okay, so if we hop back to the slides. I wanna go back one slide here. So really what you are thinking about is. Answering a long tail question that you think your ideal patient would ask, and you can actually like if you think the question is going to be, can acupuncture help with my frozen shoulder?

That could be one of the headings on your page, and then you answer the question, right? It’s okay to have the question be verbatim as a heading on your page. Okay, and what you wanna do to help Google understand that you are. An authentic business to build trust with Google. So it knows that sending traffic to you is a good choice.

You are a good answer to the query. You can mention your professional experience. You can mention testimonials. For example, you could say 10 years in business treating digestive conditions just like diverticulitis. Or we have been in business for eight years and we have 45, 5 star reviews.

Okay. You can talk about a case study, of course, where you’re scrubbing any patient information, but you can talk about the improvement that you have witnessed in similar patients in the past, giving Google an idea that your real person and you, again, you are just a trustworthy source to send people to for the search query.

Okay. And making sure that over and over again you are including the symptom diverticulitis, for example, and your location. Rochester Seneca Falls in the headings going down your page. Okay? And I pointed out that I had multiple call to action buttons saying book now you wanna have. You don’t want people to have to look around and figure that out.

You wanna have multiple going down the page. I also recommend having internal links. This is very good for SEO and can help improve the rank of this page in particular and the pages that you link to. So on your symptom page, you can link to other relevant pages on your website. For example, if you say, why choose Seneca Falls acupuncture and then say our our acupuncturists have a combined 30 years of experience. You could hyperlink that to the about page on your website. Okay? And this just helps Google understand the structure of your website better. And anytime we’re helping Google understand us, it has a better idea of when we are the answer to a question, and it’s more likely to send people to us.

Okay?

And Oh, I apologize. It looks like I didn’t quite finish this page. So to review, why do these detailed symptom pages work so well? So one, they match people’s new search behavior with the long tail keywords or the full question queries, like full sentence. They also position you as an expert, not only for potential patients, but also for Google.

And they improve your local search rank. So it’s not just about including the symptom, but also about including your location over and over again so that Google knows like within what range are you the answer to this question. So here’s what I would love for you to do. I’d love for you to write two of these pages.

The reason I say two is that it can take three to six months for these pages to really, bring you a return on your investment of your time and your energy for Google to start sending people to these pages. So the more pages you can write now, the like the better results you’ll have later on. Okay?

So if you can only write one page right now, that’s fine. Certainly better than nothing. But if you can, if you have time to write multiple symptom pages. Please do think about your ideal patients and two conditions that you love to treat and want more of. It could be it could be anything, right? It could be carpal tunnel and fertility for women with PCOS.

Okay, and just follow the outline that I provided. Ask chat GPT for help. That’s totally acceptable, and publish them so that you get an enormous benefit down the road. So I really hope this is helpful. As always, if you have questions, you are more than welcome to. Send me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com and I would love to invite you to a new marketing membership.

I just launched. It is a low cost membership. It’s called the Snack Size Marketing Club. The idea is about taking. Small bite size. I love puns. Small bite size actions every week, which done consistently really add up to practice growth over time. So you can visit the Snack Size Marketing club@michelleGrasek.thinkific.com.

I’d love to have you as a member. And before I sign off today, I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council. One more time for the opportunity to be here with you today. Talk to you next time.