While You’re Still in School?
4. Begin taking a serious look at the amount of capital you will need to start up your practice and consider possible sources
of funding. What pieces of equipment and furniture do you already have? What more will you need? How much will you need for signing a lease, business insurance, licensure fees, installing a phone, computer hardware and software, printing forms, signage, and initial marketing? What will you need in reserve to pay personal bills for the first six months? How much do you have and what sort of family or personal financial support structure will you have in place when you graduate? Be as realistic as possible.
Competition
You also need to know who’s there already. If it is a large city, you can go to the library reference department and look through the actual yellow pages. Go online to the NCCAOM site and do a practitioner search there. Write down any names and phone numbers you can get. If you can also get addresses, that’s even better. You may wish to contact them, possibly get some part-time work from them, rent space from them, ask for referrals for a specific specialty you plan to pursue, and
otherwise try to set up a nice working relationship before you move into the area. There may be some sort of support or study group already in place. Some practitioners won’t be happy about your move into “their” area, but don’t let that disturb you too much. Others will be supportive and more helpful than you may think. They might even offer you a job!
Also do some web searching at sites other than the NCCAOM, especially if you live in a state that does not require NCCAOM certification. Try as many web searches for acupuncture in that area as you can. I like using www.dogpile.com since it uses all
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other search engines at the same time. Try going to
www.yellowpages.com and looking up acupuncture for the zip code(s) of your chosen area. Anyone that has a Yellow Pages ad should come up.
Other resources may be www.acupuncture.com,
www.acupuncturetoday.com, and the website for the licensing organization for the state in which you want to practice.
This exercise is designed to do three things. First of all, it lets you see where everyone is located. If 70% of all acupuncture clinics are on the west side of town, perhaps you should look at the east side. Or you may find that the little town of 13,000 people that looked so attractive already has 100 acupuncturists.
That’s not likely, but you may not like the numbers you see.
And last, with this contact information, you will be able to get in touch with at least some of the already established
practitioners in the area (if there are any) and check the current rates for acupuncture in that area. This helps you determine your own rates and whether or not you can make the living you need and desire.
Should I be one — or one of a hundred?
No matter where you decide to hang your professional hat, you will undoubtedly have to spend some of your time educating the community as to the benefits of our medicine. However, if you settle in an area where there are other acupuncturists (or even if you don’t), you can help yourself greatly by finding and serving a niche market. This means specializing. Specializing may feel like a limiting factor for you in the beginning, but it can produce patient interest in the community and lots of referrals from other acupuncturists or Western medical practitioners who are not as proficient in that specialty.
Remember that there is no lack of human suffering with almost any condition, specialty, or body part. And it is easier to know a
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lot about one area than a little about a lot of areas. If you get really, really good at one thing, people will find out about it and refer to you when appropriate. We will discuss specializing in much more detail in Chapter nine of this section. I [HW] once had an arm surgery from an orthopedist who only did surgery on arms, and he had more than plenty of patients! So give specialization some serious thought.
While specialization is a wonderful way to carve out your niche in an area, make sure to get extra training in your area of interest. The reason we mention specialization in this chapter is that it may be easier to get that kind of training while you are still in school. Do some special research and talk with your instructors.
Pick a name
It is never too early to begin searching for your name. The name of your business is a very important decision. It will represent you to the community and your patients, appearing on your signage, letterhead, business cards, website, everywhere. While a good name can help build a positive patient flow and bottom line, a poor one can contribute to you being alone in your office.
Why does your business name matter? Because it is your brand identity. It announces who you are and what you do. And it can lump you in with or raise you above your competition. When selecting the name of your business, you will want to keep a few important questions in mind:
• Does it make my business easy to market? The more information your business name conveys, clearly and concisely, the fewer explanatory words you need in ads, on signs, etc. In other words, if the name of your clinic is Skin Care Acupuncture Clinic, your Yellow Pages ad does not need any extra lines of type to tell people what you do. It’s already in the name. Just pay to have it listed in red and call it good!
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• Is it easy to remember, spell, and pronounce? Whole Family Health Center, Boulder Herbal Medicine Clinic, and Orange Park Acupuncture Clinic . . . these are all pretty easy to remember, right? They are short, concise, and can be pronounced by anyone who drives by your clinic. Why is this important? Hundreds, even thousands of people may drive past your clinic sign every day, but, if the name is weird, hard to pronounce, or hard to remember, you may lose that future patient to the guy down the street. We do not suggest that you use Chinese words like An Shen (calm spirit) or Jin Shan (golden mountain). These may sound pretty and may have meaning for those of us “in the club,”
but they mean nothing to and may even put off the average American patient.
• Does it convey a clear understanding of what you do?
Womencare Acupuncture Clinic and Athletic Edge
Acupuncture Center are good names that communicate to your patient population both that you do acupuncture and that a selected group of people would benefit from your services. Look for ways to add the words “acupuncture,”
“Oriental medicine,” “herbal medicine,” etc. to convey your purpose.
• Does it market you to the specific niche you want to serve?
Again, this is a great way to separate you from the average.
Niche marketing can fill your clinic quickly. Every athlete who sees Athletic Edge Acupuncture Center will have a pretty good idea what you do!
Once you select your clinic name, try it out on friends and family and see what their reactions are. Ask them to spell it without seeing it. Try it on the cute waiter at the coffee shop.
You may just score your first patient before you even leave school!
Check name availability
Now that your mind is brimming with ideas, go to the web site for your Secretary of State and search for name availability.
Whether you are planning to be a sole proprietor, an LLC, or you are going to be huge and want to incorporate, you need to choose a business name that no one else already has. Most of the Secretary of State web sites are either www.sos.XX.us, with XX replaced by the initials of your state, but a few are www.ss.XX.us.
If your chosen name is available, call the number on the website or try to apply for the name online. Find out what the
reporting/renewal requirements are for maintaining your business name. (Typically, you have to renew your name once per year or once every other year.) I [ES] registered my business name almost one year before leaving school and then printed business cards with my cell phone number and gave them to everyone! To this day I still get calls on my cell from those first business cards.
Get a job
Another good idea for the beginning acupuncturist is to find someone looking to hire you. These days, more and more physicians are looking to augment the services they can provide in-house to their patients. Multidiscipline treatment facilities are the wave of the future in health care. The more of these that are out there, the more patients will realize how convenient it is to be able to go to a single clinic for their standard medical care, chiropractic, acupuncture, and other alternative medicine treatments.
A friend of mine [ES] is an acupuncturist in Denver, Colorado.
He moved there straight from school, took a job at a multi-discipline clinic, and, within a week, was seeing a full load of 30-40 patients. It was a nice setup for him since the company also pays for all of his herbs, needles, and other supplies and
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they are paying for his malpractice insurance. Best of all, he is part of a staff of healing professionals in a nice, clean office with a receptionist who calls him on the intercom and says, “Mr.
Hillman, your next patient is here.”
This can be done. However, your timing must be right. Draft a letter describing yourself and your skills/specialties, desired position, and date of availability. Add referral letters from your academic dean or a few professors. You do not want to send the letter too early. Your letter might spark someone’s desire to add acupuncture to their office now, not six or eight months from now. If you are still eight months from
graduation, that may be too long of a wait. I recommend sending out feelers no earlier than four months from your expected licensing date. Offer to come and meet the
practitioner(s) personally. Make sure to include some research reports on the increased effectiveness of Western medicine when combined with acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine.
If you want a more Western medical setting to work in, that is also possible and happening more and more all the time,
especially if you have had any experience in the Western medical world (RN, PT, Med. Tech., etc.) Go and talk to some hospital administrators and employment offices or directly to as many MDs as you can. This may take some persistence and repeated phone calls, but, if you don’t give up, positions like these are being created all the time. See Section 1, Chapter 7 for more information on this subject.
In addition to Western medical or multidisciplinary clinics, you may find jobs with other acupuncturists. Ask your school administration to give you names and contact info for all alumni in the area where you wish to work. (Personally, I [HW] think there is something not quite right if they won’t give you that information, but that is only my opinion.) You may also want to
place a small ad in your school alumni newsletter if one exists.
Contact the graduates in or near your chosen area and ask for a job. Be flexible about hours and duties. You may have to work odd hours, put herbal formulas together, or answer phones some of the time, but that could get you some free rent, observational
experience seeing how another person runs their practice, and other benefits that help you get a toehold in your new community.
See the Resources section at the back of this book for websites and other books to get more guidance on negotiating skills. You may want to sharpen that saw a bit before you enter into negotiations with any kind of clinic that wants to hire you. One pointer with regard to negotiating anything: remember that the party most willing to walk away from the table has the edge in any negotiation. So don’t act desperate. We have included an entire chapter about getting a job in Section 1 of this book.
Paperwork is easy
Something that is very easy to get out of the way while you’re still in school is creating the various forms you will need to use as a practitioner. There are some form examples on the
companion CD for this book, but don’t let that limit you in designing your own forms. Look at the forms used in your school clinic as well. Maybe you can get some examples from recent graduates who may have become friends during school.
Just remember that they need to be easy to read and understand for you, your future front desk staff, and anyone else who may be reading them, such as insurance companies or lawyers.
There are many forms that you will need to run a clinic,
communicate with patients and insurance companies legally and effectively, and perform and properly record patient care. From patient intake and follow-up, to patient information and clinic policies, to HIPAA and financial policy forms, you can begin filling a computer or paper file with these immediately. It will
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actually give you some peace of mind to know that you can start practicing effectively and legally on the day after graduation. If you are a computer user, once you have your clinic name and address, you can place that information at the top of the forms.
Below is a list of forms you will need, examples of which are on the companion CD and which are discussed in more length in other chapters.
Patient management forms
• intake forms
• patient health history
• liability waiver
• insurance form
• notice of privacy policy (HIPAA)
• acknowledgement of receipt of privacy policy (HIPAA)
• individual rights for authorization (HIPAA)
• disclosure form (HIPAA)
• informed consent (HIPAA)
• fax log (HIPAA)
• sign-in sheet
• patient information
• clinic policy (financial, cancellation, etc.)
• follow-up care (report of findings)
• herb instructions (bulk, patent)
• referral information sheet Business/legal examples and forms
• hardship waiver form
• INS form 9
• IRS forms W2/W4/SE/S4
Write some text for brochures
Brochures function as your clinic’s voice when you are not available for comment. They are one way to extend your reach into your community. People love to take brochures. They take
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them home for more information, they take them to work to put up on the company bulletin board, and they give them to their friends and family. To be most effective, your brochure should contain just enough information to get people interested about acupuncture and Chinese medicine and its ability to treat a certain disorder but not so much technical jargon that they feel lost, bored, or stupid.
When designing your brochures, you want to include certain information. You may want one that just tells people what your clinic can do for them in a general way. This can have at least one picture of you. Get a classmate to take pictures of you working in the school clinic since people don’t know what your clinic looks like in any case.
First of all with a brochure, make certain that prominent parts of it are based on benefits to the patient, not the features of your clinic that you think are important. For example, instead of a bullet point that says:
• Four spacious treatment rooms with modern equipment (feature)
We think it’s more effective to have two or three bullet points that say:
• Clean and quiet treatment rooms insure your privacy (benefit
#1)
• Modern equipment to guarantee the most effective therapy for you (benefit #2)
• Plenty of space to allow you the most convenient scheduling (benefit #3)
Second, you may want to make one or several brochures tailored to a specific disorder or set of disorders that you would like to treat, for example, gynecology, back pain, headaches and migraines, allergic rhinitis, etc. You might include a brief description of acupuncture and its uses worldwide and/or its
history. It may also be useful to add a small piece of research proving acupuncture’s effectiveness with your specified disorder.
Last, include your clinic name and contact information and maybe a small section on the back panel about you if there is space.
Remember, the key is to make the brochure easy to read for the layperson yet informative enough to grab the attention of a potential patient. The other alternative to drafting your own is to look around and find someone to make brochures for you or to purchase premade brochures. There are several companies selling a variety of brochures these days.
Business cards
Sometime during your last year in school it is time to create a business card. Once you have decided on a clinic name and a general location, you can start work on a business card. You may not be able to accept patients yet, but you can start generating interest by letting people know the business name, the general area, and when you are expecting to begin your practice. Use your cell phone number to start this off. Remember, business cards are cheap and you can always print another 1000 cards when you have an actual clinic address and phone number.
As you can see by the example to the right, this beginning business card, while not perfectly
complete, told people what we were, when we were going to be opening, a website for more
information, and a phone number for questions. That phone number still gets calls
to this day. This simple $60 purchase netted almost 30 patients.
Maybe not as many as one would like, but it helped us to hit the ground running. We actually had patients the first week we were
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open! Looking back, those first cards, the cell phone time, and the cost of our simple website, altogether $350–400, produced about
$4500 in business in the first three months of our practice. That’s not a bad return on investment and is certainly better than you can do on Wall Street in three months time.
Once you are really in practice, you will need new cards with other pieces of information. However, this is not the time to worry about that. When you are ready to get your “real”
business cards, see Section 4, Chapter 5.
Logo or no logo?
A company logo is another item that you can begin working on months before you graduate. You may decide to start without one and that is also fine. It may take you awhile to decide how
A company logo is another item that you can begin working on months before you graduate. You may decide to start without one and that is also fine. It may take you awhile to decide how