Chris Kresser: Actually I’m not totally sure about that because I’m not doing those calls myself. I don’t think that that’s the case. I think we do the call anyway, and that call, in some cases, may be part of them moving on to approve the invoice. If they, for example, don’t understand some of the charges or estimates and they need clarification on that, they can ask a staff member, and then that might lead to the next step.
We initiated this call last year and found that it dramatically improved patient satisfaction. Compliance was already pretty high, but it went up after we started doing this call. It’s just another touchpoint. We talked about this at the beginning of the practice management section. The goal in a lean distributed practice model is to automate everything that can be automated so that you have more time for the personal contact that is really essential. Put another way, the automation of repetitive tasks actually frees up more time for personal contact with patients, and that is really important to understand. The intention isn’t to automate everything so that there’s no personal contact because that’s terrible. That doesn’t serve patients. You need a warm personal connection with staff and with the clinicians. That’s an important part of the healing process, and patients need that kind of support and contact, and it’s also good for the staff and for the clinicians. The purpose of the automation is to free up time for that kind of contact and to be efficient so that you don’t need as many staff members and as much overhead to do what you need to do. So the calls are, I think, a really important part of that contact, and they become possible when other aspects of the onboarding process are totally automated as we’ve been teaching.