Marketing Psychotherapy and Psychiatric Practices


I have heard other clinicians claim that they have "full" practices. That has never been my experience in 30 years of practice. Maybe it's due to my business model - relatively high fees and not participating in the insurance Read more

Innovating


As I wrote in my eBook, I had happily practiced psychiatry for 20 years, never entertaining doing anything but seeing patients in my office 5 or 6 days a week. But a vacation to South America several years ago Read more

Service Design


Taking time away from my busy clinical practice and other life routines allows me time and mental space for thinking and writing. Yesterday's poolside reading in Bloomberg Businessweek provided the seed for this post. Audi sells very popular, high quality Read more

Productivity in Your Practice


Long ago I believed everything I read. Really. Sort of. Now I do my best to fold a dose of skepticism into any thing I read, especially in works such as the one I am about to quote. But the Read more

The Tao of Growing Your Practice


Verse 63. Tao te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series Read more

Your Limbic Systems Tells You to Play it Safe


We are ruled by subtle, unconscious currents. Does the thought of running your own business right out of residency terrify you? “In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect Read more

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Passivity Prevents Practice Promotion

May 3, 2012 Bill Lynch Blog Leave a comment   , ,

One Path to Marketing Your Practice

We psychotherapists, especially us more seasoned ones, are hampered in our efforts to grow our practices by forces other than our neuroses. Passivity was drilled into our professional identities by absorbing the central, now outdated, theories of psychotherapeutic technique. This passivity has also invaded our business practices.

In the spirit of full disclosure, despite “growing up” professionally when psychoanalysis was the pinnacle of psychotherapeutic approaches, I am not temperamentally disposed to it. Never was, really. But I tried my best – graduating from the Dallas Psychoanalytic Institute after ten years of hard work, practicing the art as a part of my Dallas private practice, and finally giving it up completely with my move to Chicago. I even tried a bit here, joining the faculty of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Chicago until it became clear that I did not fit. The degree of obsessional intellectualization in all of psychoanalysis is not my cup of tea.

There have been voices within the field that have addressed this issue. Allen Wheelis in How People Change (1973), wrote the following:

“The most common illusion of patients and, strangely, even of experienced therapists, is that insight produces change; and the most common disappointment of therapy is that it does not. Insight is instrumental to change, often an essential part of the process, but does not directly achieve it. The most comprehensive and penetrating interpretation – true, relevant, well expressed, perfectly timed – may lie inert in the patient’s mind; for he may always, if he be so inclined, say, ‘Yes, but it doesn’t help.’ If a therapist takes the position, as many do, that a correct interpretation is one that gets results, that the getting of results is an essential criterion for the correctness of an interpretation, he will be driven to more and more remote reconstructions of childhood events, will move further and further from present reality, responding always to the patient’s, “Yes, but why?” with further reachings for more distant antecedents. The patient will be saying, in effect, “Yes, but what are you going to do about it?” and the therapist, instead of saying, as he should, “What are YOU going to do about it?” responds according to his professional overestimate of the efficacy of insight by struggling toward some ever more basic formulation. Some patients don’t want to change, and when a therapist takes on the task of changing such a one he assumes a contest which the patient always wins. The magic of insight, of unconscious psychodynamics, proves no magic at all; the most marvelous interpretation falls useless – like a gold spoon from the hand of a petulant child who doesn’t want his spinach.”

Wheelis finally provides the magic ingredient for change: the exercise of will. Surely we all know that the hope of “build-it-and-they-will-come” approach to growing a business does not work. Starting and growing a psychiatric or psychotherapy practice takes a lot of hard work. We have to provide excellent service and let the world know that we do. Some of us have managed to fight through the engrained passivity, some haven’t.

Have YOU? Tell us how you market your business. How have you overcome the resistances to self-promotion. Please leave your feedback via the “Leave a Comment” link at the top of this article.

Billing in Psychotherapy Practices, Part 1

January 20, 2012 Bill Lynch Blog 3 Comments , ,

A Foggy Day in Chicago

Adopting the use of billing software cured a huge headache in my office operations. When I first started in this business, bookkeeping and billing was all done by hand, believe it or not. I was lost in the fog of how things were done.

In my last therapy session of the month, Herb, my first therapist, would give me a hand written bill. It included my name, diagnosis, dates of sessions, charge per session, and the total balance due, neatly folded and tucked into an envelope with my name on its front. From this experience and “comparing notes” with other colleagues I developed my own bookkeeping and billing process.

It was cumbersome. I would copy each patient’s name from my Week-at-a-Glance calendar into a journal, a notebook containing a year’s worth of the daily list of patients, the charge for their visit, and any payment received that day. Toward the end of the month I would begin transcribing this information from the journal onto a ledger card for each patient. Before the patient’s final session of the month or the first visit of the following month I would produce a written statement containing the same information Herb put on mine. This went on for too many years to count.

My move to Chicago brought many changes to my life and business. One simple yet game changing one was adopting a computerized bookkeeping/billing solution. A Google search pointed to a host of options. Many were complicated, expensive practice management programs. I settled on ShrinkRapt by Saner Software. It is relatively inexpensive, easy to use, and produces simple yet complete billing statements.

Several years ago I spent many hours per month on these basic bookkeeping functions. Now it’s all efficiently handled by ShrinkRapt. It takes a few minutes to set up a new account. Entering charges and payments requires a mouse click or two. The remaining time consuming step is printing out, folding, stuffing into envelopes, and mailing the end of month statement for each client.

In part 2, I will address the evolution of my thinking about billing. How dramatically different it is now compared to what I did in the 1980’s and the even more drastic changes I am beginning to implement and how I am clearing the fog from all my business practices. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, what is your bookkeeping/billing philosophy and process? Let me know in the comment section below.