For established chiropractors, time is money. The more you work on patients, the more money you make.

This means that, ideally, you’d spend 100% of your time working on patients, and thus 100% of your time earning money. (We’ll refer to this as “billable work”—work that directly makes you money.)

However, for most chiropractors, this isn’t the case. There’s lots of work that needs to be done, but that isn’t billable work. Insurance, marketing, cleaning the office, ordering supplies, patient notes, replying to reach outs, scheduling appointments, and various other supporting and admin activities.

Obviously we want to reduce the time spent on this as much as possible. It’s (probably) not that fun, plus it doesn’t directly make money.

But sometimes these activities can seem harmless. They can seem like they don’t take that much time. Or it can seem daunting to replace them because it costs money.

Luckily, if we have some data, we can easily figure all this out. So, the goal of this post is to help you figure out what activities you should replace and how much it should cost. Let’s dive in.

Figuring Out Your Hourly Rate

First, we have to figure out your hourly rate.

This is usually done easily with the help of your EHR. A lot of them will track the hours you have in your shift over a given period of time. So, you can just use the hours you worked and divide that by the money you made over the same period.

As an example, let’s say you work 40 hours per week and take 2 weeks off for vacation. This would give you 2,000 hours over the year. Let’s say you made $300,000 over the year.

This gives us an hourly rate of $150.

How Many Hours Do You Spend on Nonbillable Tasks?

Now that we have our hourly rate, we need to figure out how many hours we spend on nonbillable tasks.

Depending on how you do things, this could be easy or difficult to find.

If you do things consistently, then it’s easy to figure out.

For example, let’s say you have a 2-hour lunch break that you use to eat lunch and get caught up on patient notes. During this lunch break, you spend 1 hour on patient notes, and you do this 5 times per week. So, you spend 5 hours per week on patient notes.

Or maybe during times you don’t have patients coming in, you spend that working on admin work. So, if you have 1 hour per day of unfilled work (which you easily figure out from your EHR schedule), then you spend 5 hours per week on that.

Alternatively, if you don’t do any of that, then we’ll want to start tracking it. Usually these numbers won’t fluctuate that much on a weekly basis, so you can do it for one or two weeks and use that going forward.

One way you could track it would be to put it on your calendar when you do specific kinds of work. So, for example, if you need to do marketing work, block off a time on the calendar and do it then. If you need more time, add more blocks. Alternatively, you can use a stopwatch and just record how long you work on marketing. Then, write it down. At the end of the week, tally it all up.

Ideally, we do this for each different kind of work. We want to do this because different tasks have different solutions, and we want to be able to tell how much we should spend on each one to get it off our plate.

At the end of this, let’s say that you spend:

• 3 hours per week on marketing,
• 5 hours per week on patient notes,
• 4 hours per week on insurance, and
• 15 minutes per week cleaning the office.

Your numbers might not look like that, and they might include a lot more activities. We’re keeping this short and simple for example’s sake.

Calculating the Cost

After we figure out the hours and how much you make per hour, it’s time to calculate the true cost of each activity.

Using our example hours and our $150 hourly rate, the true cost of each activity is:

• $450/week on marketing,
• $750/week on patient notes,
• $600/week on insurance, and
• $37.5/week on cleaning.

If we say we take 2 vacation weeks per year, and look at this over a monthly period (because most of our potential solutions are probably billed monthly), we have:

• $1,875/month on marketing,
• $3,125/month on patient notes,
• $2,500/month on insurance, and
• $156.25/month on cleaning.

Now, we look solutions.

Finding Solutions

Now that we know the true cost of our activities, we can see that we’re leaving a lot of money on the table. The time we’re spending on all these admin activities totals up to over $90,000/year in labor!

So, now we want to find solutions.

Ideally, we want to find solutions that cost less than our monthly cost. (If you really don’t want to do a certain task, then finding something that matches your rate—or even exceeds it—may be worth it for you, so you don’t have to deal with it.)

Then, we take our time not spent on these activities and use it on appointments to make more money. If each of our solutions cost less than what we make back, then we now profit money.

As an example, let’s say you:

• Hire someone to do marketing for you for $1,000/month (*cough cough* like me—book a call here). Even if your other marketing costs stay the same and your patient inflow stays the same (with me, both of those will improve—book a call here), you still save $875/month. We net positive from this.
• Find software that reduces time on patient notes by 3 hours/week. It’s difficult to completely delegate this, but there’s software that can help reduce the time spent on patient notes. For example, there are some AI note takers that can take patient notes for you when you record the appointment, saving you time. For example, PatientNotes.App—I’m not affiliates but one of my clients really likes this one. As of writing, it costs about $50/month. If 3 hours/week gets saved, this means we save $1,825/month. Again, a pretty good monthly savings.
• Hire someone to do insurance billing for $1,000/month. Even if our insurance payout rates stay the same, this saves us $1,500/month from having to do it ourselves.
• Keep doing the cleaning yourself. Since it’s such a low cost for us, it doesn’t make any sense to try to hire someone else out. Unless you really don’t like cleaning and the peace of mind is worth it for you, it’s cheaper to continue to do it ourselves.

Going through that full example, you can see how we can improve the practice really easily and make more money.

Depending on your goals, you may want to work the hours you saved to make more money, or you may want to save the time and take them off for other things. Either way, this process can be helpful.

Again, if you want help with marketing and the business side of things, just book a free call here.