All professionals are on an equal plane. You’re no better, you’re no less. So you’ve gotta grab that mindset, and then realize that you’re no better than anybody else, but you also deserve the same as everybody else.

Click here to download the transcript.

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, I’m Michael Coates, president of Personal Injury Made Easy, or pimadeeasy.com, and we’re continuing with the six-part series about personal injury. And what we’re really getting into is I know you’re all great healers. What I want you to all be is a great business operator or owner. So to do that, the first thing I wanna mention today is that it starts with mindset.

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And for mindset, realize that you are a pro, you’re a professional. And I think a lot of times, whether it’s chiropractic or acupuncture, that you think of yourself less than whether it is even the MDs or certainly dealing with an attorney, or you’re dealing with the court system, and it’s just not true.

All professionals are on an equal plane. You’re no better, you’re no less. So you’ve gotta grab that mindset, and then realize that you’re no better than anybody else, but you also deserve the same as everybody else. And the second thing is, again, realizing that you’re not just a great healer, but you need to be a better business operator.

So I really want you to grab onto those two hats. And the third part about mindset is to, something I talk about a lot is whether you are a fox or a lion. So the fox has to outsmart things. It could be a problem you’ve gotta kinda MacGyver around it, or it could be someone you’re dealing with, someone that’s trying to, whether they’re taking advantage of you, it could be someone that’s a staffer, could be a patient, could be an attorney in PI, about anything.

You gotta be a fox, right? ‘Cause no one outsmarts a fox. But at the same time, you may have to be a lion, and the lion is about strength. And you have to be strong for your patients, your staff, your family, your business, and also for yourself. So when someone says you need to be a fox or a lion, I say you need to be both to succeed in business.

You’ve gotta have both the ability to outfox those that are around you, and you also gotta be strong to stand up for what’s right and the people that matter to you So that’s the first part. The second part is I want to get into what is the success formula, and it’s a three-part form- formula, and I always think that when you get into things that they’re too complicated, it’s just too hard to implement.

It’s too hard to even get set in your head because we like to put things in buckets. So I’m gonna give you three barrels, so to speak, to put things in, or three buckets, and the first one is processes because we need proven processes to make things more efficient and more effective. And you all know about processes.

You cannot have a medical office or medical practice without being really efficient in processes. How many patients do you see in a day? It’s done because you’ve got a process for how you flow from at the lobby and intake, putting them in the room, when you’re doing treatment, and when they’re even exiting.

It’s just to realize that in personal injury, you’re gonna have all these nuances that are unique to PI, and you’ve got to learn to master those, to identify the ones that really have a great impact and to put those in place, and then you can tweak it and modify it for your practice. But if you don’t do that, you’re going to have gaps in the timeframe.

You’re going to be missing all kinds of ability to value drive. And when I say value driving through processes, there are things that you can do through processes, from intake, the forms you use, when you use them, to the documentation that you do, how you do your documentation, that literally can drive the value that you bring to a personal injury case for your patient and also for their attorney, even for your peers So if you think about it this way, you’ve got the insurance companies that are all trying to drive down PI case value, and you are remaining as this neutral, ethically bound medical provider.

You are all about just the patient’s health. You’re not about the liability or outcome of the PI case, because that’s just not your role and you have no control over it. But what you are is an avid healthcare advocate. You are there for your patient. Remember, you see that patient far more than an attorney ever sees their own client.

So because of that, you’re at this ground level to pain and suffering. That’s when you get into storytelling documentation that I’ve referred to before, and I’ll refer many times, which is about the ADLs, the activities of daily living. That’s life that you’re living. Then it’s about the duties under duress, those that affect the workplace, and then the loss of enjoyment, the LOE.

That’s about life. And so all those have this incredible impact, and it’s the impact that trauma has on our lives and on your patient’s life. So the processes that you do help to pu- and documentation help to pull that out. Now, we’re going to get much deeper into that in the next session when we really dive deeper into processes.

But I want to give you a little flavor for it, because when you do these things, it so positions you well. And let’s talk about positioning a little bit more. So when you talk about processes, that goes also the documents you use to protect your bill. So we’ll talk about a number of them in the next session, but it includes things that you have the patient sign, and it’s not just a medical lien agreement or even a letter of protection.

But there are other forms that you can do that helps to stop when the attorneys want to throw things at you. And again, it’s positioning you to be better at the time it comes to be paid. So all those processes, which include when you’ve even discharged a patient, what process do you have to follow up on a PI case?

Who do you follow up with? When do you follow up? And what are you asking when you follow up? So again, we’re going to hit that in the next session, but I just want you to realize how important processes are. Everything else flows from that. So that’s the first area of the success formula. The second area is profits Right?

It takes money to do the mission, as we’ve talked about, and your mission is to heal. And the more money you make, the more healing you can do. So I wanna really see you ramp up the profit. And for profit, remember, it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much you keep in your pocket at the end of the day.

It’s that net profit that allows you to give increases to staff on bonuses, hire more staff, do more things for your family. So profits is such an important area, and we’ll dive deeper into the two weeks from now when we get into that session, we’re gonna hit profits, and we’ll talk about MedPay and PIP.

We’ll talk about how you negotiate with law firms. The negotiation method that I have come up with and I’ve refined over the last 15 years that literally has providers owning law firms because the leverage is on your side. You just gotta learn how to identify the leverage, how to apply it, and that’s what the method that I’m gonna talk about in that session is all about.

And then there’s the third area. We talked about processes, we talked about profits, and there’s a third area that every business must do, and if it doesn’t, it cannot succeed, and it’s growth. You have to be able to scale. But what is growth? I think that I find that people think different aspects of growth.

Growth doesn’t have to mean you’ve got to have 15 offices, okay? Growth can simply be that you are maximizing your patient flow for if you’re the solo provider, you’re maximizing that out. You might have a multidisciplinary practice, though. You may have another office, a second or a third. So growth can mean different things to different people.

So when you’re scaling, it could be scaling up just your one office to maximize your potential so you’ve got the flow you want, you’re not overworked, but you are maximizing your patient mix and your patient numbers. It could be because you’re thinking of the exit strategy, like where you wanna end up, what kind of life you wanna lead.

You might want more offices. So then you gotta think about growth that way, which again, if you have processes down, that prevents a brush fire turning into a forest fire when you’ve got a number of offices. It’s why it becomes refining those processes early so important and why profiting matters, because the more you profit, the easier it is to expand And so think about how this works together.

Processes, profits, and growth. It’s a simple formula, but you cannot have any success, whether it’s personal injury or a medical practice or, to be honest, any business, unless you’ve got all three. Any of those three pillars, like a tripod that is off and goes, the tripod’s gonna fall down because it’s only got two legs.

It’s gone. It’s over. So this path that we’re talking about is to help you understand through the next sessions each of those silos, each of those buckets, because it’s all about one thing: helping you to be more successful, and you’ve earned it, and you deserve it. So again, think about that formula, think about how easy it is, because when things get too complicated, we find ways to stop ourselves.

And I have a lot of providers that come and talk to me, and they say they just want to focus on one. Michael, I just want to grow,” because they think they’re doing the processes right or they think they’re making enough. And when I dive in and talk to them, and because data doesn’t lie, and I find out the forms they’re using, the process they have, or I find out how much they’re actually getting paid by the trusted attorneys and even more what they’re getting paid by the difficult for attorneys, I found out it’s not what they thought.

So what they’re growing is is not profit. Sometimes they’re growing losses, and you never want, of course, to do that, right? So when someone says, Michael, I just want to focus on processes,” by the way, that is the best thing to start with. There is an order to things. So I do love when someone’s never done PI before, and when they say, “Mike, what’s the first thing I should be doing?”

And I say, “It’s processes.” Think of it like a, a house, and you’ve got that solid foundation in the house, and you want to have the great processes are part of that foundation, but they also get into the curb appeal, right? So that’s like the documentation. We talked about that the the last segment.

So when you build this really great house that has this great curb appeal, that’s when you can really thrive as a business, where you become a value driver to personal injury attorneys, to your patients, to your peers, to yourself And then that allows you to also not only profit more, but to grow. So I hope that gives you a little bit of a start and sets the stage for what we’re gonna talk about these next three really important weeks.

Because once you understand it’s about processes, profits, and growth, and that you need all three, I would say as we go through the next few weeks, I want you to identify one, two, or three things that I talk about that you will implement right away. So maybe you might do one thing in each of those silos or those buckets and put them in this month, okay?

Or next month when we talk about it. I think that’s gonna help you. In fact, when we talk about processes, try to pick out three things and implement that. When we talk about profits, try to pick about three things and implement that. When we talk about growth, try to pick out three things and im- implement that.

That means each month you’ll be doing more, and at the end, if you’re still, maybe you put this aside, you didn’t hit this like you wanted to, don’t stress yourself out. It’s about your life and your practice. Sometimes we’ve gotta take a step back to move forward. That’s what I’m gonna tell you instead of picking three things, pick one.

It’s still stepping forward, and stepping forward is what perfection is. Perfection doesn’t exist in this world at all. So I always say that progress is perfection. And again, if you wanna live well, you gotta build it well. So that’s what we’re gonna be doing through the rest of this series. We’re going to build it so that you can live well.

So again, as Michael Coates, I wanna give you how to contact me if you need any help on anything from me or my team. That’s, my website is pimadeeasy.com, and my email address is michael@pimadeeasy.com. And we’re here to help, so please don’t hesitate to reach out. And I want you to start compiling your questions, because I think that’s gonna really help to get things focused on what matters to you, because you matter to me.

I’ll see you at the next session.

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Click here to download the transcript.

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.

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Hi, I’m Michael Coates of Personal Injury Made Easy, and I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for allowing me the honor of presenting to you on personal injury So this is part of a series on personal injury, but today’s topic, we’re gonna talk about why PI. We’re gonna talk about the pros and the cons, what providers that do really well in this kinda what, how they’re shaped, and other ones that don’t do so well, and we’ll also talk about some common myths.

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So the first thing I wanna hit to, into is about why personal injury, ’cause whether you should be in this or not, and I know that a lot of you have either experienced it in the past, and you may have had a very bad experience and a bad taste in your mouth, maybe from a law firm you dealt with or a particular patient.

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And I wanna try to have you rethink and have a new perspective. You also may be someone who has maybe dabbled in personal injury, just not done a lot. Maybe you’re a little frustrated, you feel overwhelmed or it’s out of your normal skill set. And the last would be the griddles, the grizzled veterans, those who have really have a, a solid personal injury segment, but I wanna make you better.

So let’s first talk about why PI or why to expand personal injury. So the first thing about personal injury that I think is maybe the best for the chiropractic and also the acupuncture base, and even for physical therapy, as I call them, the CAP providers, is about that you can bill your full out-of-network rates.

So when you think about a business and a practice, you also wanna think about your patient mix. Not all patients are profitable. Sometimes it takes a lot more patients to make the same amount of money as it does on a single patient, and that’s one of the beauties of personal injury, is that one PI patient, when you’re paid your 100% of your full out-of-network rates, can make up for a handful of in-network pers- or in-network patients, and also for a number of cash patients.

So that’s the first major benefit. The second one, which I find very valuable for your segment, is because it, you can bill for things that insurance would deny. So when health insurance wants to deny for laser procedures or the things that you really believe are medically necessary, are gonna help your patient, PI allows you to bill for it, and you’re gonna get paid for it, and that’s really significant.

The next area I would say is like what Warren Buffett said on investing. He always said, “Invest your money and your time and your resources by following the money.” So where is the money going in healthcare? It certainly isn’t going to normal healthcare reimbursements because healthcare reimbursements in the insurance industry have been cut in half, and a lot of medical costs have doubled.

But the one area you’re gonna find that there’s more investment in is personal injury. All you’ve gotta look is at the minimal auto policy benefits and the minimum insurance coverage in whatever state you’re in, and most of your states have had an increase or will be having an increase. So California, for example, went from 15,000 per each patient walking in the door to 30,000 behind them So that means it doubled, and a lot of states have gone way up.

So more money is being invested into personal injury to pay, of course, obviously it’s gotta pay the attorney, it’s gotta pay all of you, and it’s gotta pay the patient. But that’s a real benefit. But there’s more than just money when I say benefits or profits. So here are some other ones that I think are really fantastic for personal injury.

One is you’ve got no financial paperwork you really have to get on your patient because it’s the personal injury matter that would be satisfying your bill. So you’re really not having to chase patients. Now, sometimes you do, sometimes that occurs, but the primary aspect of PI is you’ve got an attorney who generally has a fiduciary duty to watch your financial back when they receive monies.

Even if their own client says, “Send me the doctor’s money,” wink, “I’ll pay him,” they’re not supposed to. In fact, if they do, it could be a violation of state ethics laws and other problems they’ve gotten into. So you have to hold it for you. So that’s a real benefit when you don’t have to chase patients and someone’s protecting your financial interest.

Also, it’s a great gateway to new patients. A lot of people have never heard of the magic of what you do. You know how good it is, but they’ve never experienced your medical specialty ever before. But you have the opportunity now here to wow them on how good it is, what you do, and what your profession is.

You get to educate that patient on the value, not just for them seeing you for PI, but for all the things you do. So that turns PI also into a great feeder to all of your practice segments. So that’s why I say when you’re growing a P- a PI practice, it’s not just growing personal- a personal injury segment, it’s using PI to grow all of your practice segments, and I think that’s a huge advantage.

So another really great advantage is medical, the medical lien area is a very collaborative one. So it’s not just you. There’s usually a healthcare team that is treating your patient. Now, usually because, let’s say you’re the chiropractor, you are the quarterback generally of that team. It is the only industry in this entire country where chiropractic is the number one lead medical specialty, just that one.

And for say for those in acupuncture, you’ve never even had that usually before, so it gives this whole new area to get into. But on chiropractic, being that healthcare team quarterback, you’re the one really guiding the referrals, and when you’re referring out or someone’s referring patients to you, it needs to be someone on lien, or if you’re in a letter of protection state, that will take it on LOP.

So that’s an advantage. In fact think of it this way. Every time you may have gotten a settlement notice from a law firm, and you’ve asked them to lay out all the settlement amounts, the attorney fees, costs, and all the lien holders, and the amount to their client that’s going, so you can make an evaluation of how much you should get paid, guess what you should be looking at?

the listing of all those medical lien holders. ‘Cause when you do, you now know in your community who is taking it on lien. It’s a great one to reach out to, to say, “Hey, let’s look about maybe collaborating.” But you’ve got to vet them first. Of course, you want really competent, good providers as part of your lien network, and you want to have that in the can, so when you do have to refer out to specialists, they’re there.

But what I’m getting to is that there’s a lot of peers that maybe doubt the efficacy of what you do, and they shouldn’t. It’s because just a lack of knowledge. So when you engage in the lien area, you have a chance to educate them also on how get it– good it is of what you do and how you do it, and you have someone else telling them, your patient Also their patient.

So that’s a great extra advantage. So there’s so many things that I think that are so pro– good about YPI, they outweigh the benefits. If we looked– outweigh the negatives. If we looked at the negatives, some of that’s gonna be obviously you have to wait to be paid, right? And it could be either months, it could be years.

Then again, going back to a positive, there is the fast cash options in personal injury. That would be MedPay, which most policies have, unless you’re in a no-fault state. For those states, you’ve got PIP, personal injury protection. Now, those are both auto policy benefits. They’re given for prompt care, they get prompt payment.

Now, attorneys do tricks and stuff, and we’ll talk about that later in the series. But in the end, it’s something really important to realize you can get paid on a monthly basis for you as a reha- rehabilitation professional, and that’s fantastic. You don’t have to wait. So you’ve got to learn how to identify when it exists.

You have to learn how to properly submit, and you have to learn when attorneys try to hijack it or maybe take fees out of it, how to address that so that doesn’t occur. So that’s fantastic, even though to offset the downer that I had. Now, of course, you are gonna be dealing also in an area that you get pushback.

Now, you don’t get people in insurance that are trying to sometimes degrade you or degrade what you do. It’s just the way that insurance tries to delay, deny, devalue, and defend. That’s what the attorneys do too, but they do it a lot more aggressively and forcefully. Why? They’re warriors.

They’re advocates. This is what they do for a living. Not just the attorneys, but a lot of the law firm staff. Back when I was first a defense attorney in my earlier years of course, everybody in law firms, whether on my side or the plaintiff side, all had law clerks and paralegals, so trained in the law.

They understood the law. That’s not today’s environment. All are– they are as a lien specialist is someone that follows a protocol the law firm sets, and they generally try to pay you less. But there are easy ways to work around that. You just have to learn. So that, again, is the beauty of this. And I think that personal injury’s just gotten this bad rap from prior bad taste in the mouth, like bad medicine going down, and it’s just from a lack of knowledge A lack of skill development and a lack of support for you.

Now, the great thing is all of you, you’ve got me to support you on whatever it is that you’re doing. So a little bit about me. I speak, teach, and coach around the country. I help providers in every state. All the state laws are generally unique in PI. I deal with really all medical specialties. And in the end, it’s trying to right the ship.

I think that medical providers have been used and abused, where first the attorneys are looking for themselves. They then try to make their clients happy enough so they will refer them or be happy and not slam them on Yelp. And so unfortunately, a lot of times they try to make the burden fall on you, the medical provider.

But that’s why I’m here, to help guide you along. And part of that guiding is this. When I say what is it that makes a good provider and a, maybe one who struggles more in this, and that’s learning how to be a value driver. What do I mean by a value driver? You al- are always to remain neutral as to the outcome of a PI case.

You’re there for the healthcare of your patient, and you’ve gotta stay in your lane. However, when you learn how to do personal injury right, you become a value driver to your patient, to your peers that you may be referring to or referring to you, and also to the law firms. That includes what are the things that could harm a PI case?

What are the things that when you put them in your documentation, it helps, as I call it, and we’ll talk again more later in the series, storytelling documentation, focusing on the ADLs, the DUDs, and the loss of earning. The other thing that, that’s so key when I talk about what works really great is when you can get across that value to an attorney early on in a case.

One of the biggest areas of tax that the law firms have to deal with for you, aside from poor documentation, and that is rampant in this area, I’m gonna make you better in this series. But one of the areas is of attack that the adjusters always do to the attorney, and it rolls downhill, is that you overtreat and overbill.

Now, usually you don’t hear about that till the case is already over. So a lot of times it’s a red flag. It’s not really the truth. But imagine this, if you could help the attorney support your fees and your billing before, when you’re first treating a patient, so that when they’re dealing with the adjuster, they cannot allow the adjuster to drop your bills, your fees, and lower them.

Because what does that do? That increases the value of every case. Because one of the, the tricks when I was, of course, being an insurance defense attorney is lower the value of the bills, lowers the settlement offer that we’ve gotta deal back and forth with them, and we save money, right? By you being, making yours more solid, you’re taking that kind of trick away, and it’s fantastic.

So that increases settlement value, and that’s just you holding firm to solid fees, but you gotta learn how to do that. And I do find there are providers that don’t do this area right, and they do improperly set fees too high. They have something different for personal injury versus other things. And in the end, realize you’ve got one fee schedule across, right?

We’ll talk about that more in process of the next one, but it’s really important to understand it. Okay, the, the other side of the coin is when you have proven the value, shown the value, they’ve gotten better results, obviously it makes it easier to get paid, right? From the good firms Even when you’ve got the good ones, I think you’ve got to realize that personal injury is an industry of pushback.

Insurance pushes back a little bit like, “Where’s the paperwork? You didn’t have the right code.” But in personal injury, the pushback is gonna be our client said they didn’t show these days or they didn’t get these treatments or you billed too high or your per office visit is way too high you’re way past Medicare, all these things they try to throw at you.

So in the end, what you want to realize is that those are tricks and traps and you got to learn how to spot them and then to address them. So those that learn how to do it well do really well. Those who don’t know what they’re doing get so overwhelmed and being the healer mindset that you have, you generally give in and I find it disappointing that a lot of you in your profession are so happy when you get paid half your bill.

Why is that? Are you not worth what you bill? If you are, I believe that in the cap side, chiropractors, acupuncture, and even physical therapy, that you should be getting paid 100% of your bill 80% of the time, or if you did a blended rate, because not all are winners, it’s at 80% for your medical specialty. So use that as a barometer, and there are– And it’s being done all the time.

So when the four-minute mile was broken, everybody else could do it. That’s what I’ve been doing in helping people in personal injury for medical providers. At the same time, they get more patients. So the other thing, our, maybe let’s address a few common myths. So some common myths out there in personal injury that I want to hit today are that MedPay is okay to be held by the attorney, and that’s not correct.

MedPay, as I was saying, has been for prompt payment. And what– The same thing is happening with PIP, by the way, which is less but still happening far too often than as what I see around the country. So when you get that, you have to first be able to identify it, and you want to make sure to make the proper professional pushback demands of attorneys to get paid back.

And remember I talked about an industry of professional pushback? They are being pushed back on by adjusters, defense attorneys, judges and juries even sometimes. So they’re not new to being pushed back. It’s how you push back. Do it professionally. And when you can learn about the facts that matter, have enough of the law to where you can be dangerous to know.

You’re not there to be an attorney, but once you can assert facts and law, that makes you also someone that the good attorneys want even more. And why? Because in the really good cases, they may go to trial. Less than 3% of cases actually go to a jury trial, but a lot of them position to that, and that’s where d- adjusters and defense attorneys say, “Do we settle or do we go forward to try?”

And the better that the expert is, the better that the treating physician is, the more likely we need to settle. So when you learn how to stand for your fees and your bills and can support it, when you’re treating properly, when you have the storytelling documentation when you then push back, the good firms say, “I want that doctor.”

That means they’re gonna hold up well at a deposition. They’re gonna hold up well at trial. They know what they’re doing So with that, we’re gonna wrap up for the t- today on this first session. I hope you learned a few things. You see a little bit of the overall, and the way to look at the rest of the series is this.

We’re gonna hit three segments. We’re g- And I think it’s three segments that build any medical practice, and that’s processes, systems, you know that well, but there’s unique systems in personal injury. The next is being properly paid, not just MedPay and PIP, but how to out-negotiate law firms, the trusted ones to get paid more, but also the really difficult ones, and how to protect your staff or for your staff to do it better.

And the last is growth. And like I said, it’s growing not just a personally injury segment, including how to be a better value driver, but it’s how to use PI to grow all your practice segments, and it’s gonna be fantastic for you because this really is the high-profit highway. That’s what personal injury is.

And with that said, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for their support in allowing me to present to you this wonderful series.

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