The most difficult aspect of incorporating a new habit into an existing medical practice is simply investing the time to integrate it into your practice. For this reason, we’ve built the digitalcare100 platform to be easily set-up and integrate into your practice with just an afternoon’s worth of work. Here is a guide in a few quick steps to getting started.
1. Upload your contacts
Est. time: 5-10 minutes
To start, you’ll need to upload your contacts if you’re planning to use the DC100 platform to text care messages to your patients. For this, you’ll need to export a file from you’re EHR, preferably in a CSV format. If your EHR can’t export a CSV file, another form of Excel file will work, but you’ll simply need to convert the file to a CSV before upload. I recommend starting with your current active patients, or those that you’ve seen in the past 6-12 months. You’ll want to export the file with first name, last name (separated), and phone number. If available, gender and date of birth can also be uploaded, but are not required. Once you’ve completed exporting this CSV navigate to the contact upload page, https://portal.digitalcare100.com/people/add/batch. There you’ll see these instructions:
Click “Download CSV template
Open template titled import_example once downloaded
Copy & paste columns from your CSV contact list into the import_example CSV file. *Note: Make sure to copy first and last names into the appropriate columns. First name, last name, and phone number are required. Birthday and gender are optional
Save import_example CSV with new informationClick “upload CSV” in digitalcare100
Select fileIf desired, tag contacts by selecting a pre-existing tag or typing a new tag into the field
Click checkbox to certify that you have not purchased your contacts
Click “add contacts”
Review uploads. DC100 will produce an error report CSV for contacts that have not uploaded ed
A few tips on this upload:
- Make sure that the names of your contacts capitalized properly and organized into the proper columns
- When uploading a large group, use the tagging function to group the contacts into one group. I usually recommend something to the effect of “Active Patients XX.XX.XX (upload date)”
If you have any issues with uploading your contacts email [email protected] or email me directly at [email protected].
2. Record and edit your Video Messages
Est time: 30 minutes per video
The most important part of improving communication is, of course, the message that you’re communicating! Thus, the first step to setting up your sequencing is recording the messages that you want to send to your patients. If you haven’t decided where to start, see this post for the 8 most important videos to use in your practice. If you’re crunched for time, here are the 4 videos that I recommend starting with.
1. First Appointment Expectations: make a video telling your patients what to expect when they enter your practice. If desired, you can configure the landing page that displays the video to have a link to your paperwork or schedule.
2. At-Home Exercises: this is a great topic to increase patient compliance with exercises. You can use our digitalcare100 templates for a general message reminding your patients to follow your advice, or you can make custom videos for common exercises for rehabilitation.
3. Stretching: as the days grow colder, stretching becomes more important. Record this video as a valuable piece of information and a helpful reminder for your patients. This video can be an educational video targeted for a specific exercise, or it can be a general reminder video used to improve patient compliance across your practice.
4. Ice vs. Heat: this is one of the most common-asked questions for chiropractors, "Should I be using ice or heat for my pain?" Video content like this is great to share because this is a valuable piece for patient education, but can also be used as a social media video or posted to your website to improve SEO.
You might notice that the topics all have suggested images to go along with the videos. Here are a few tips for making your visuals look great:
- Record from your smartphone using the digitalcare100 app to leverage the best camera at your disposal. Smartphone cameras are nearly universally better than built-in webcams!
- Record in landscape to leave room for graphics.
- Record yourself standing to the right of your device, with your shoulders positioned in the bottom right portion of the screen during recording. This will leave ample room for your images and text.
- Make sure that you’re smiling when the recording starts! Your thumbnail will come from the first few seconds of your recording, so a big smile is a great way to make an inviting preview of your message.
- Use the first 3-5 seconds of the video to display your name and title. We recommend placing your text on eye level, and if possible, matching your logo colors.
- Use the graphic library to place images on the video. We recommend sizing them to take up about as much space as your head.
- If available, record from a tripod. Tripods that can hold your smartphone sell at most large retail stores for about $20.
- Natural lighting is best. If unavailable, moving a lamp closer to you while you’re recording can help brighten up your video.
3. Start Practicing Digital Care
Once you’ve uploaded your contacts, recorded your messages and added graphics, it’s time to start practicing digital care! You have the choice to start sending them out as you see your patients, or if you’re looking to engage all your current patients, share a “value topic” such as Ice vs. Heat to your active patients. To send a message to all of your active patients, simply pick the video that you’ve recorded, build your text message, and schedule it for a good time. A few tips for effective messages:
- Start your text message with “Hi {{firstName}}, this is Dr. _____ with ______” so that they know who the message is coming from.
- Leverage your landing page by including a sign-up link below the video. For 1st Appointment Expectations you can include a link to patient paperwork.
- We recommend that you limit your messaging to >200 contacts every 15 minutes. If you’re planning to send a care message to more than 200 contacts, separate your contacts into groups of 200 and schedule the messages at 15-minute intervals
By following this easy guide, you can have your 4 most-used topics ready for the rest of the year in under 3 hours! Every message that you create is reusable, so the small investment of time will save you and your team time throughout the following year. When you’re ready to beef up your arsenal of topics you can finish out our recommendations of 8 Videos that Every Chiropractor Needs, or simply browse through our digitalcare100 library of over 100 topics for the content you think will resonate best with your patients.