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2 | Tips for Taking your Practice Online
If you're moving away from face-to-face consultations due to the coronavirus, here are some quick tips for working with clients from a distance.
Resources mentioned:
- How to set up a Google Voice number
- Practice Better (referral link)
- Five Flavors Herbs Custom formulations
- SendInc for sending secure emails
- Fullscript
Have a question or need help getting started with your virtual clinic? Please reach out.
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Transcript
(00:03)
Hi, everyone, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. I wanted to pop in here and share a few thoughts about taking your clinical work out of the Face-To-Face realm. I know that many of you are doing this right now because of the coronavirus situation. I think that's a really wise move. I hope that more clinicians will consider going virtual or going to a distance model versus meeting people face to face to keep everybody in your community healthy. I've been working virtually for, let's see, seven or eight years now.
(00:34)
So I thought it might be helpful if I shared some of my thoughts about how you might get started with this relatively quickly and easily. I apologize if this is a little bit unpolished. I just have a few minutes between lots of other things going on today, but I thought it was really important to get this out there.
(00:52)
So when you're thinking about moving your face to face clinical work to a distance model, there's two big things to think about. One of them is how are you actually going to meet with people? And then the other is how are you going to communicate with them in terms of sharing their forms, getting them their recommendations, getting them their herbs or supplements and so forth. So, first of all, let's talk about how you're actually going to meet with clients.
(01:14)
There's two big options. One of them is to talk on the phone and the other one is to do videoconferencing.
(01:21)
Talking on the phone is probably the simplest, easiest, and it's very quick to get started. You just give them a call or they call you and you go from there. If you don't want to share your phone number with your clients for various reasons, you can certainly get a Google Voice number and work with that. That's something that I've done before in the past. And some people, of course, don't mind sharing their phone number. And that's another option.
(01:45)
The problem with meeting via the phone is that we don't get that visual.
(01:50)
A lot of us as clinicians learn a lot from looking at people, looking at their complexion, looking at their shape, looking at their tongues for some of us or their nails. You can look at any kind of skin situation they have going on in this sort of thing. And, of course, you can pick up on their expressions and and so forth. So when you're doing that via the phone, obviously that's not an option. So the other option is to use video.
(02:13)
There are a lot of wonderful videoconferencing options out there right now and so many that it can be really hard to pick. And sometimes it's tempting to just be like, well, let's just pick one and get started. And I think that that's probably reasonable if you have a small practice and you're not a licensed practitioner.
(02:28)
But one thing you do want to think about is that many of the video conferencing platforms are not necessarily secure enough to share personal health information over. So if you are licensed, you need to be using a system that is secure, that meets the requirements of HIPAA and so forth. And oftentimes that means a higher paid account. So, for example, if you wanted to zoom, the free account is not considered a HIPAA-compliant account. They do have HIPAA-friendly Zoom accounts, but they usually start around two hundred dollars a month.
(03:02)
So that's something to consider. The other thing that you can do is look at the different client management systems that are available these days. These are almost all subscription model where you pay monthly, but many of them do have a free option where you can see a certain number of clients for free or have a kind of a limited version for free.
(03:23)
So examples of this would be things like Healthie, Practice Better, Kalix, I believe, is one some people use and so forth.
(03:30)
There's actually quite a number of them available.
(03:32)
And what these are is essentially a practice management software where your clients can schedule appointments.
(03:42)
They can, you can do billing, they do reminders, you can send forms, you can communicate your recommendations and so forth, all within a secure environment. And these also offer video conferencing within that secure environment. So if you think you're going to be doing this over the long term, it's perhaps over the next few months, it's probably worth your time to sign up for one of them and start figuring this whole thing out. The one that I use and recommend is called Practice Better.
(04:10)
I did a whole bunch of research on this last year when I was kind of coming back into practice, and that's the one that I really figured was best for me.
(04:20)
But like I said, there's a number of different options. If you need help getting started on any of them, please let me know if you're in Practice Better. I actually have all my forms set up and I can I believe I can share them with you so that you don't have to recreate intake forms and things like that from scratch. So I'm happy to share with you if you just want to email me through my website, I'm more than happy to do that.
(04:43)
But most of these are pretty intuitive and easy to get started with, and they actually do save you a lot of money. To give you an idea,
(04:49)
Practice Better, I believe, runs somewhere in the forty to fifty dollars a month range.
(04:56)
And generally most people find that they can make that back from the cost of their consults, although of course, it's not necessarily within reach for everybody. OK, so those are some options in terms of how you're going to do forms in this sort of thing. If you're not using a practice management system like Practice Better or something like that, you can certainly send them via email.
(05:20)
I would recommend sending word documents if you can, so that clients can just type right in, save it and send it back to you. That's a lot easier for many clients than a PDF. If they don't know how to use the PDF functions, they may have to print it out, scan it, upload it and send it back to you. And for many people, that's just not reasonable.
(05:40)
So try to do it as a fillable form or a word document, depending on the digital tech savvy of your clients.
(05:48)
The other thing you might want to consider doing is using a secure email system. Before I used Practice Better, I would send things via SendInc. I'll put a link to that in the notes. That's a free service that allows you to send encrypted, secured emails to people. And that way, if you're transmitting protected health information like their birth date and their health concerns and that kind of thing, you don't have to worry that that information might be getting into the wrong hands.
(06:14)
The other thing you want to think about is how you're storing this on your own computer. So many people now use file sharing or file saving services like Dropbox or Google Drive or things like that. And again, depending on whether you have a business associates agreement or some kind of reassurance that the information you're storing is secure, you probably want to share save your client information to your own hard drive, save it locally and not in the cloud unless you have assured yourself that it's going to be safe and secure there.
(06:47)
So if you save it on your own computer, just make sure that your computer is locked down and that other people can't get in there and find it. So those are all important things to think about. Another question that people often has is how do you get herbs and supplements to people if you're not seeing them in person? Of course, if you have a dispensary in your office, you can ship them to people. That's certainly one option. But for herbs, we do have many options, places that will custom formulate herbs and ship them.
(07:15)
I know one of them is Five Flavors Herbs. I'll put a link to that. You can also do kitchen medicine, having people use things like garlic and ginger and thyme and honey and things that they can find locally.
(07:27)
You can ask them if they have any herb stores or other things locally and send them there, or you can have them order things online. For example, I really like the Gaia line of products and those are easy to obtain online. You can also set up an account via something like Fullscript, which is not custom formulated, but for many of the packaged products, they will have those available and they can ship them to your clients.
(07:53)
If you choose to use Fullscript, there is a few days they verify that you are a practitioner and they'll take a few days. But then once you do that, you can set your prices anywhere up to 30 percent off of retail prices. And so that's a really nice way to make things a little bit easier for clients when things are really challenging right now.
(08:13)
The last thing I want to leave you with is a few tips for meeting with people online, pardon me, via video.
(08:20)
If you haven't done a lot of video meetings, there are there's a little bit of a learning curve. So a few of the things that you want to think about our first of all, make sure that you are not backlit as a practitioner.
(08:30)
It's really disconcerting to your client when they can't see your face. So you want to have the light in front of you. If you can set up your computer facing a window, as long as the sun isn't directly in your eyes, that window will provide really good light and make sure that the client can see you. That's going to facilitate that connection with you.
(08:46)
You also want to make sure that you're looking at the camera.
(08:49)
That way the client will perceive that you're looking at them versus kind of looking off to the side, looking down at your notes and that kind of thing.
(08:58)
If you're going to be taking notes manually via hand or typing, just let the client know, OK, I'm going to be writing some of this down. So if I'm looking down, I don't want you to think I'm not paying attention, but this is what I'm doing. I would say that to them. So they know that.
(09:11)
Remember that you can have the client show you things on their camera. So I've often had clients, if they're having a skin situation, they just pick up their phone or their computer and and show me what it is that they're having problems with. You can ask them to stick out their tongue, show you their fingernails, look in their eyes, whatever it is that you need to do as part of your work.
(09:32)
Those are some key suggestions.
(09:35)
And just keep going. Allow yourself a little bit of extra time, allow yourself a practice session and plug away. I also wanted to make myself available if you are getting started with seeing clients from a distance, if you're having trouble or you have a question or you need to run something by somebody, I'm available to help. Please feel free to email me through my website, camillefreeman.com, and share any tips or questions that you have so that we can all
(10:03)
transition and serve as many people as we can during this coronavirus situation. OK, stay safe, everybody. Keep washing those hands and I'll talk to you soon.
Hi, everyone, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. I wanted to pop in here and share a few thoughts about taking your clinical work out of the Face-To-Face realm. I know that many of you are doing this right now because of the coronavirus situation. I think that's a really wise move. I hope that more clinicians will consider going virtual or going to a distance model versus meeting people face to face to keep everybody in your community healthy. I've been working virtually for, let's see, seven or eight years now.
(00:34)
So I thought it might be helpful if I shared some of my thoughts about how you might get started with this relatively quickly and easily. I apologize if this is a little bit unpolished. I just have a few minutes between lots of other things going on today, but I thought it was really important to get this out there.
(00:52)
So when you're thinking about moving your face to face clinical work to a distance model, there's two big things to think about. One of them is how are you actually going to meet with people? And then the other is how are you going to communicate with them in terms of sharing their forms, getting them their recommendations, getting them their herbs or supplements and so forth. So, first of all, let's talk about how you're actually going to meet with clients.
(01:14)
There's two big options. One of them is to talk on the phone and the other one is to do videoconferencing.
(01:21)
Talking on the phone is probably the simplest, easiest, and it's very quick to get started. You just give them a call or they call you and you go from there. If you don't want to share your phone number with your clients for various reasons, you can certainly get a Google Voice number and work with that. That's something that I've done before in the past. And some people, of course, don't mind sharing their phone number. And that's another option.
(01:45)
The problem with meeting via the phone is that we don't get that visual.
(01:50)
A lot of us as clinicians learn a lot from looking at people, looking at their complexion, looking at their shape, looking at their tongues for some of us or their nails. You can look at any kind of skin situation they have going on in this sort of thing. And, of course, you can pick up on their expressions and and so forth. So when you're doing that via the phone, obviously that's not an option. So the other option is to use video.
(02:13)
There are a lot of wonderful videoconferencing options out there right now and so many that it can be really hard to pick. And sometimes it's tempting to just be like, well, let's just pick one and get started. And I think that that's probably reasonable if you have a small practice and you're not a licensed practitioner.
(02:28)
But one thing you do want to think about is that many of the video conferencing platforms are not necessarily secure enough to share personal health information over. So if you are licensed, you need to be using a system that is secure, that meets the requirements of HIPAA and so forth. And oftentimes that means a higher paid account. So, for example, if you wanted to zoom, the free account is not considered a HIPAA-compliant account. They do have HIPAA-friendly Zoom accounts, but they usually start around two hundred dollars a month.
(03:02)
So that's something to consider. The other thing that you can do is look at the different client management systems that are available these days. These are almost all subscription model where you pay monthly, but many of them do have a free option where you can see a certain number of clients for free or have a kind of a limited version for free.
(03:23)
So examples of this would be things like Healthie, Practice Better, Kalix, I believe, is one some people use and so forth.
(03:30)
There's actually quite a number of them available.
(03:32)
And what these are is essentially a practice management software where your clients can schedule appointments.
(03:42)
They can, you can do billing, they do reminders, you can send forms, you can communicate your recommendations and so forth, all within a secure environment. And these also offer video conferencing within that secure environment. So if you think you're going to be doing this over the long term, it's perhaps over the next few months, it's probably worth your time to sign up for one of them and start figuring this whole thing out. The one that I use and recommend is called Practice Better.
(04:10)
I did a whole bunch of research on this last year when I was kind of coming back into practice, and that's the one that I really figured was best for me.
(04:20)
But like I said, there's a number of different options. If you need help getting started on any of them, please let me know if you're in Practice Better. I actually have all my forms set up and I can I believe I can share them with you so that you don't have to recreate intake forms and things like that from scratch. So I'm happy to share with you if you just want to email me through my website, I'm more than happy to do that.
(04:43)
But most of these are pretty intuitive and easy to get started with, and they actually do save you a lot of money. To give you an idea,
(04:49)
Practice Better, I believe, runs somewhere in the forty to fifty dollars a month range.
(04:56)
And generally most people find that they can make that back from the cost of their consults, although of course, it's not necessarily within reach for everybody. OK, so those are some options in terms of how you're going to do forms in this sort of thing. If you're not using a practice management system like Practice Better or something like that, you can certainly send them via email.
(05:20)
I would recommend sending word documents if you can, so that clients can just type right in, save it and send it back to you. That's a lot easier for many clients than a PDF. If they don't know how to use the PDF functions, they may have to print it out, scan it, upload it and send it back to you. And for many people, that's just not reasonable.
(05:40)
So try to do it as a fillable form or a word document, depending on the digital tech savvy of your clients.
(05:48)
The other thing you might want to consider doing is using a secure email system. Before I used Practice Better, I would send things via SendInc. I'll put a link to that in the notes. That's a free service that allows you to send encrypted, secured emails to people. And that way, if you're transmitting protected health information like their birth date and their health concerns and that kind of thing, you don't have to worry that that information might be getting into the wrong hands.
(06:14)
The other thing you want to think about is how you're storing this on your own computer. So many people now use file sharing or file saving services like Dropbox or Google Drive or things like that. And again, depending on whether you have a business associates agreement or some kind of reassurance that the information you're storing is secure, you probably want to share save your client information to your own hard drive, save it locally and not in the cloud unless you have assured yourself that it's going to be safe and secure there.
(06:47)
So if you save it on your own computer, just make sure that your computer is locked down and that other people can't get in there and find it. So those are all important things to think about. Another question that people often has is how do you get herbs and supplements to people if you're not seeing them in person? Of course, if you have a dispensary in your office, you can ship them to people. That's certainly one option. But for herbs, we do have many options, places that will custom formulate herbs and ship them.
(07:15)
I know one of them is Five Flavors Herbs. I'll put a link to that. You can also do kitchen medicine, having people use things like garlic and ginger and thyme and honey and things that they can find locally.
(07:27)
You can ask them if they have any herb stores or other things locally and send them there, or you can have them order things online. For example, I really like the Gaia line of products and those are easy to obtain online. You can also set up an account via something like Fullscript, which is not custom formulated, but for many of the packaged products, they will have those available and they can ship them to your clients.
(07:53)
If you choose to use Fullscript, there is a few days they verify that you are a practitioner and they'll take a few days. But then once you do that, you can set your prices anywhere up to 30 percent off of retail prices. And so that's a really nice way to make things a little bit easier for clients when things are really challenging right now.
(08:13)
The last thing I want to leave you with is a few tips for meeting with people online, pardon me, via video.
(08:20)
If you haven't done a lot of video meetings, there are there's a little bit of a learning curve. So a few of the things that you want to think about our first of all, make sure that you are not backlit as a practitioner.
(08:30)
It's really disconcerting to your client when they can't see your face. So you want to have the light in front of you. If you can set up your computer facing a window, as long as the sun isn't directly in your eyes, that window will provide really good light and make sure that the client can see you. That's going to facilitate that connection with you.
(08:46)
You also want to make sure that you're looking at the camera.
(08:49)
That way the client will perceive that you're looking at them versus kind of looking off to the side, looking down at your notes and that kind of thing.
(08:58)
If you're going to be taking notes manually via hand or typing, just let the client know, OK, I'm going to be writing some of this down. So if I'm looking down, I don't want you to think I'm not paying attention, but this is what I'm doing. I would say that to them. So they know that.
(09:11)
Remember that you can have the client show you things on their camera. So I've often had clients, if they're having a skin situation, they just pick up their phone or their computer and and show me what it is that they're having problems with. You can ask them to stick out their tongue, show you their fingernails, look in their eyes, whatever it is that you need to do as part of your work.
(09:32)
Those are some key suggestions.
(09:35)
And just keep going. Allow yourself a little bit of extra time, allow yourself a practice session and plug away. I also wanted to make myself available if you are getting started with seeing clients from a distance, if you're having trouble or you have a question or you need to run something by somebody, I'm available to help. Please feel free to email me through my website, camillefreeman.com, and share any tips or questions that you have so that we can all
(10:03)
transition and serve as many people as we can during this coronavirus situation. OK, stay safe, everybody. Keep washing those hands and I'll talk to you soon.
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