The Problem

Earn More – “The Problem”

Why does the chiropractic industry need this program?

Problem: On personal injury cases it is common practice for an attorney to ask for a 50% reduction in your fees with these cases.
Solution: We will teach you how to address this situation and how to add so much value to these cases that attorneys will be more than willing to pay 100% on personal injury cases.

Problem: Number one cause of malpractice is failure to diagnose.
Solution: There is no diagnosis code for whiplash. Our program will teach you how to diagnose what gets injured in that type of trauma. You will learn the difference between a diagnosis and symptoms and how that knowledge affects a case.

Problem: Improper documentation used to be addressed by the insurance industry as a billing error that you would be allowed to correct. It is now addressed as insurance fraud.
Solution: Our program teaches you how to document, how to bill, and what codes to use so that you avoid any issues with insurance companies on these cases

Problem: Failure to diagnose leads to a failure to treat all of the injured structures which leads to a lack of compensation for the injured party and a lack of needed treatment.
Solution: Our program teaches you how to diagnose, document, and manage motor vehicle injuries at the highest level.

Recap: How does the Academy of Motor Vehicle Injuries solve your problems as a Chiropractor?

Make More Money through better treatment plans

When you add value you get paid for the value that you add. There are roadblocks everywhere when treating personal injury patients. There are most certainly complications with Insurance providers and there are definitely complications with the legal side of these cases. Knowing what to look for and how to document the case is everything when dealing with theses complications.

From the legal perspective, we teach our chiropractors how to evaluate the level of credentials that the attorney possess. Just knowing the difference between a lawyer with a license to practice law (which includes personal injury), and an attorney who practices personal injury as well as other areas of law, or a lawyer who specializes in personal injury can open doors and allow you to speak the right language.

On a typical personal injury case the attorney will request a 50% reduction in total treatment cost. The American Bar Association Rules of Ethics require them to do so! The American Bar Association works for their clients and not the doctors and as a result they are required to get the best pricing for the client. For a case with a $5000 bill from the doctor it is common to ask the doctor to reduce it by $2,500. Here is the ridiculous game… so many chiropractors have taken up the strategy of charging more up front to counteract the expected reduction request. Unfortunately this borders on insurance fraud.

Our program teaches chiropractors to add value to the case in such a way that allows the attorney to get a better settlement offer from the insurance company. In our medical and legal courses we go into great depth to explain how to deal with this reality and maximize your income on personal injury cases across the board! The bottom line, your bill is less important than your diagnosis, documentation, case management. These are the items that add value to a case… not the price tag. We train our students to add value using each one of these tools throughout the process and go into great depth on how to properly avoid loss of income.

It gets better! On a fully diagnosed or documented case, settlement offers rarely exceed $10,000. From this the Doctors must be paid, the attorney expects to be paid ⅓ and the patient / client deserves to be compensated as well. Weak cases will yield weak settlement offers. Strong cases demand stronger settlements.

There are times where the attorney will be limited by a lack of coverage, typically %15,000 limit. Typically all other cases where the funding should be available it is the documentation that adds the value. Not the price tag. The difference is struggling to pay the bills from a small settlement check or having sufficient funds that the doctor can be paid in full and the patient can be appropriately compensated.

It gets even better! When your work makes the attorneys work easier, you become the chiropractor they want to work with rather than being the chiropractor that they refer to because they know they can get a 50% reduction. Our students become the preferred referral source for attorneys because we teach them to add value to the case and make the attorney’s life a little bit easier. You don’t want to send an attorney to a gunfight with a pocket knife and sadly that is exactly what most chiropractors are doing when they have not been trained how to properly add value to the case that the attorney will have to represent with the insurance company in court. The attorney can only argue what is in the records so if the chiropractor fails to document it then they cannot argue it in court. If your patient has lost their left arm and no one has documented that in the records the attorney will have a difficult time getting compensation for that loss. By the same token, when you fail to diagnose ALL of the injuries sustained in the motor vehicle accident those injuries will be excluded. If you are diagnosing whiplash that is all that can be addressed.

 

Reduce Risk through credentialing and cutting edge knowledge

85% of MDs are board certified in at least one specialty. It is that extra education that flows over and gives them all shared credibility. For Chiropractors, less that 15% hold the same level of education. It is our objective to provide chiropractors with the additional education about motor vehicle injuries and the mechanism of injuries to give you stronger standing on a personal injury.

At some point the defense will ask to examine the patient. This defense medical evaluation, DME, will likely be performed by a board certified, orthopedist, neurologist, or surgeon. Their credentials do allow them to make an assessment of that patient’s condition at the time of that evaluation. Our doctors are trained in how to diagnose injuries based in part on understanding the mechanism of injury. The medical specialist may be able to evaluate the need for surgery, or not, at any given time, but they rarely have the training to evaluate if those injuries were caused by the motor vehicle collision. Mechanisms of injury is the name of the game.

The certification that we offer to our graduates is not just for showing up for the courses to get your credit. We award certifications to individuals who have attended all courses and who have also completed a comprehensive exam covering the material. The student must also meet various criteria to take the exam itself. To be allowed to take the exam, you must have a signed letter of recommendation from an attorney, from a doctor within your field, and from another doctor outside your field. It is also required that you have held your license for 5 years and typically 300 hours of coursework in order to be board certified as a specialist.

 

Treat Patients Better through more comprehensive skills and techniques

The nitty gritty! How do we treat patients better as trained and certified professional chiropractors. First we have to get ALL of the injuries diagnosed. MDs typically diagnose cervical strain. By definition this is a muscle injury and muscles heal quickly and well. DCs typically diagnose a cervical sprain which involves ligament injuries and unlike muscles, ligaments stay stretched out and do not ever go back to normal. Understanding how to discern these ligament injuries is the difference between the value of a case and the long term health of the patient.

In addition it is not possible to introduce enough force to damage structures in the cervical spine without bouncing the brain inside the cranium. A whiplash patient will have a concussion. Failure to perform a complete cranial nerve exam will not only cause you to miss multiple diagnoses but can also expose you to a malpractice claim.

At the end of the day, we train our students to handle a personal injury case properly for the benefit of the patient. We teach all of the critical ins and outs of properly diagnosing the patient to get the best possible long term recovery outcomes in all areas.