Changing The Way You Think About Compliance With Daniel Hirsch

[00:00:00] We have knowledge of state-specific rules of even just how to process medical records that people don't even understand. A lot of times it's like, oh, well, I thought I could do it. And it's like, well, there's laws that are constantly updated that you have to follow. Here's your policy. Let's go execute it. What gets me excited is the ability to calm people down when the worst day happens to them. So some kind of incident will happen or something terrible will happen. And the idea is that you could just address it.

[00:00:26] You could just address it and minimize the damage. Welcome to the Private Practice Owners Club. Your hosts and coaches, Nathan Shields, scaled his practice and exited for millions, while Adam Robin went from working 60 hours a week in one clinic to scaling to multiple clinics while working less than four hours per week remotely. This podcast is meant to share with you exactly how they did it

[00:00:52] and how you can build a business that supports the lifestyle that you truly desire. And don't forget to join the Private Practice Owners Club community on Facebook, where we are obsessed with providing even more resources that help owners, just like you, win the game of private practice. Hello, and welcome to the Private Practice Owners Club podcast. I'm your host, Adam Robin. And today we have a guest.

[00:01:21] His name is Daniel Hirsch. He's the owner and CEO of Risk and Compliance Analytics. Daniel has a background. He is a physical therapist. And I thought it would be cool to have Daniel on because he said that he's here to help you change the way that you think about compliance. Daniel, what's going on, man? Adam, what's up, man? How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Super cool to have you. I think Tanny introduced us. Is that right? He is fantastic. He's unique.

[00:01:50] And he's a great advocate for the profession. And definitely in the private practice world, we need more of that. Dude, I love Tanny. You will not find somebody who just wants to help others win more than Tanny. Exactly. I love that guy. That's a great summary. Yep. He's really passionate about just helping you out, which is great. We need this. So we had a short talk over the phone. And I know we don't know each other well, but kind of the way that I experienced you was like, here's a dude who just wants to like demystify compliance,

[00:02:19] kind of like go back down to the fundamentals and help owners. Just like make this more of a simple thing, as opposed to a big complex hairy monster that the industry tries to make it. So I thought it would be cool to just bring you on and learn a little bit more about you. Let the audience get a taste of like who you are and how you help owners. So if you don't mind, would you just kind of introduce yourself and like tell people who you are, what you do and what you feel like they need to know? And I'll just let you take it away. Thanks, Adam. Yeah, sure.

[00:02:49] So I'm Daniel. I'm just another physical therapist who just got sick of seeing things the way that they were happening over the course of a long time. And my background, I started out in property and casualty insurance, insured businesses and helped limit their exposure from a business operations. And then went back, got my DPT and had a beautiful combination of these two careers as a compliance officer for very large equity-backed companies.

[00:03:16] And now all I do, I don't pretend to be Adam, I don't pretend to be everything to everybody. It's just private practices in this space and really helping people understand how to leverage compliance as opposed to this perception of this, the boogeyman. Oh my God, I don't know what to do with it. This is going to be terrible. So or simply historically, everyone has some kind of bias when it comes to some audit that they had 15 years ago from Medicare or something like that.

[00:03:40] But it's really important to understand what is current, what the trends are going forward, and what you can do about that. It's not just a nice link to a webpage. You have to give people the tools and you got to help them do it. And that's really the way I wanted to be treated. And that was kind of the birth of my company where we decided it doesn't have to be complicated. Even if you are, let's say, a compliance officer for some company, why spend three months out of the year recreating the wheel?

[00:04:08] You might as well just go spend about 15 minutes finding exactly what you need, and then you're ready. Or if you're a small mom and pop, you don't want to be working the weekend. You don't want to be working evenings when you simply just have exactly what you need to operationally make great decisions. And I think that's the uniqueness of what we do. We don't just give people nice ideas. We simply say, this is what you need to be compliant. And we simplify it, but we actually do the work. So we actually give the tools, we give the resources, and we say, hey,

[00:04:36] this is how you expand and this is how you could be successful. Because right now, I'm sure you know about this, there's so many other challenges. There's so many other things. I just complained to you a second ago about why are insurance premiums going up, right? I have nothing to do with it. There's nothing to do with all these, the property insurances or your liability insurance and all these other things that are impacting year over year over year. There's no reason to explain for all these double digit increases, except, well, they can, right? You have to have it.

[00:05:06] They can do it. So why not? Just increase the dollar a little bit, raise the premiums 20% every year. So the exchange, I think, is really what we're trying to impact. That you should be getting more. You shouldn't just be satisfied with, you know what? Eh, well, whatever. I signed up for something and I'm getting something. You should be expecting a lot more out of these services, even if it's just simply for compliance, where usually you think reactive. I think I used to think like that. Compliance was always reactive.

[00:05:32] Oh, when I get that letter in the mail or when someone walks in the door that I'm not expecting, right? Instead of saying, I need to build a program. How do I do this very effectively? And how do I protect my business? So all this talk that we see, private practice sections and all these other great maybe conferences and groups is about growth. We're always trying to grow the practices, which is good. But how do you protect that? You got to protect the growth. You can't just throw all your eggs in one basket and say, we're just going to leverage

[00:06:01] growth and try to increase as many lines of services as possible. You got to put certain components in place to stay in bounds. And I think that's one of the skills that we have to guide people and say, hey, by the way, what's your program you're trying to do? Let's create a waiver for that. Let's create a unique set of either consent forms or documents that you need in order to actually do what you need to accomplish. And thank God we've had a lot of success with that. Awesome. Yeah.

[00:06:27] What I heard you say twice, you said a few things, but what stuck out to me was, I think you said the word leverage. Like you want to be able to leverage compliance or you want to be able to utilize your compliance program. And what I heard was instead of playing defense, you want to play offense. Right. And you also mentioned instead of being reactive, being more proactive. Right. And that's I'm interested in that. So I'd love to hear.

[00:06:54] I don't know if weaponizes the right word, but how can we use this compliance program that you offer and that the services that how can we turn this into an offensive attack or approach for practice owners as opposed to being reactive? Sure. I'll give you an example when it comes to maybe cash services. Right. Everyone's like, well, what do I do? There's a lot of we could talk for hours about that. Right. Different things that you can do for for expanding on cash services. But at the end of the day, you still need to create a program. So how do you create a program without talking to compliance or legal?

[00:07:24] So generally, you need a contract in place where you need certain agreements in place. And the idea is that once you have certain things in place, then you're able to say, OK, well, how is it actually going to what's the workflow? How are you going to actually create this? And if you're including compliance in that, you're exponentially decreasing your exposure on the preventative side from the announce is a fantastic prevention for the cure. Right.

[00:07:49] So you really want to make sure that you're able to change the perspective of when you have a new idea. Let's say you want to do something with laser or something experimental. The idea is not to just say, yeah, we're just going to put that in the cash bucket and we're not going to worry about that. You still have exposure. You still have areas of risk to your company or to your employees or whatever line that you're trying to get into. I say line of service, but it could be anything. Right. It could be home care. It could be something else, something else fantastic that we haven't even heard about yet.

[00:08:17] But the idea is that if you address it early on from a compliance perspective, it pays dividends downstream just because you're not dealing with the cleanup. You're not dealing with the concerns of all those other problems that I'm the guy that you don't want to call when things go bad. Or rather, you want to call, but you don't want to have to call because that means something already went wrong that you could have prevented. And I know that's not a fantastically, wildly amazing thing to talk about because we don't think we're going to be the exception. Right.

[00:08:45] Everyone's going to be, oh, well, maybe that's not going to happen to me. That can't possibly happen to me. And every day I hear, oh, that happened to me. So that's really tough. And I think explaining that to owners and saying, hey, by the way, it could still be reasonable. It could still be very affordable. I think that's also part of the bias that people come to the table with. Oh, my God, it's going to be so expensive. There's no way I could be compliant. And the answer is you can't afford not to be. That's the challenge that like if you're just running it yourself and saying, you know what, I'll figure it out.

[00:09:13] The truth is the laws are constantly being updated. There's constantly things, you know, the notice of privacy practices, something that every practice has on their wall. It changes. It finally changed and people are like, oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know I had to update it. And the answer is it just took five minutes of looking on your website to make that assessment. It costs nothing. It didn't cost anything for you just to be compliant, just to have what you needed to be posted. So I think that's the difference where we're saying you could do all these great things. It doesn't have to take a lot of time.

[00:09:43] It doesn't have to take a lot of resources. But you could still be operationally really successful when you have a team that understands what therapy is and what it takes to actually get it done. Yeah, that's cool. The way I kind of internalize that is you're taking you're kind of like, hey, talking to the private practice owners. It's like, what is your vision and what do you want to create? Let me help you build the boundaries and the safety net around it. Right. And we're at your level as opposed to call me whenever you are in a fire.

[00:10:14] I don't mind the fire. I don't mind the fire call. But just tell me where your tolerance is. So some people are very risk adverse. So we got to pull that lever back. And so that's kind of like similar to my style of treating as a therapist. You can be reactive and you can say, OK, well, what works for you, Adam? How risk tolerant or adverse are you to whatever line of service you're trying to enter into? And then we accommodate that. And I think that's kind of the beauty where it's not just this off the shelf nonsense that you're just saying one size fits all.

[00:10:43] Good luck with it. And come back to me if something goes wrong. Got it. And that kind of leads into my next question. Where do, in your eyes, you see the profession get this wrong? Like the compliance professionals that we have in this profession, where are they getting this wrong in your eyes? I think I got to be careful answering this. I don't want to upset anybody. But I think my biggest concern with where people are getting it wrong is that they're not explaining it in a way that private practice owners understand.

[00:11:12] That this whole concept of I'd rather not know. I'd rather not look under the hood to know what's wrong with the transmission. The answer is you want to know. You want to know where your areas of exposure are. But you want to have the solution with that. You don't want to just tell people and point fingers and say, you know what? I got you. You know what? Here's what's wrong. You want to say, well, you need to do this, that, and the other in order to correct this. And let's do this together. As opposed to just pointing the finger and kind of making this whole perception of it's a negative feeling usually when you talk to compliance.

[00:11:42] It's usually a negative. Even me. I don't like to talk to other compliance people because they kind of, it's never a positive conversation. It's never like, oh, how are we going to help each other? It's always, well, are you doing this? Are you doing that? It's always this I got you feeling. And it's like, that doesn't help us. It doesn't really help us as private practice owners. Yeah, I understand. So it's like they are viewing compliance through a lens of limitation. Yeah, but what about this? What about this?

[00:12:12] Oh, wait a minute. Gotcha. Right. As opposed to why don't we help? Why don't we look through this from the lens of possibility and like, let's create something out of this. And I think that matters. That matters a lot, especially for small practice owners. Oh, it's tremendous. I'll just give you an example. We were all traumatized, obviously, by COVID. But like for a couple weeks there, we didn't know what the heck was going on. Right. So for a couple weeks, we were kind of like all looking to be APTA. We're all looking around what's going on. There's waivers coming out. And the answer was, let's just do the right thing.

[00:12:41] We're waiting for all this guidance from the professionals. Right. And people were shutting their doors. They didn't know what to do. And I was very loud and clear in saying, keep the doors open. You have to do what's good for the pay. You have to allow the profession to figure this out. But you can't just say no to everything. You can't be the profession of no. You can't be in my, again, for compliance. You can't just be the team of no. Where everything is in, it's not recommended. You have to come up with answers. And you have to come up with strategies as opposed to just saying, well, the fee schedule,

[00:13:12] again, what are you going to do? 2.8%. We're going to keep taking these hits. And the answer is, no, you have to leverage technology. You have to use certain components that you have available to you to take advantage of this. And I think that's what's so unique in the space that we are right now, that we've never really had this advantage from an AI perspective, from an authorization for even like remote therapy monitoring and all these other things that we still have. Telehealth, of course, that got extended, which I think will continue to be extended. We have these really great opportunities that people are just kind of sitting back going,

[00:13:41] should I jump in? Should I participate in this? And you're like, yes, the answer is absolutely. Let's go. Let's do it. I love it, man. Why private practice? Oh, because that's just, it speaks to the core and the culture of who I am. I think really it speaks to everything else in the rehab world from a PT perspective is very safe and controlled. It's the Wild West. It always has been. And it's the place to take the lead and say, hey, by the way, we could do it better. So it pushes the boundaries. And I love that.

[00:14:10] I mean, even my time living out in Denver, I was like, listen, we got to, let's not be the lazy people that just stopped at the Rockies. We got to get forward. We got to, we got to push passes. And I think that's one of the uniqueness of private practice where people are so creative. You see it all the time. You get practice owners who are coming up with these fantastic ideas and you're like, ah, how do we still stay in bounds? Okay. This is what we're going to do. You have three options. Pick one. And I really think and believe that that's what people want to hear.

[00:14:35] They want to hear the solution to the ideas and how to keep it safe and protected while also helping them grow. Yeah. My favorite question is what would have to be true for us to win or what would have to be true for this to work? I like the answer to that question as opposed to this is why you can't do this. Nobody wants to hear that. Right, right, right. It's frustrating. Super frustrating. Awesome. So I heard all kinds of cool stuff about how you help owners, but I want to hear more about

[00:15:05] who you serve most often, the type of owners you work with primarily. And I know it might, let's just see, we'll see what bubbles up. And then like, what are the common themes of things that you really enjoy helping owners with? So I do small and very large. So I do solo practice, just one PT and an aide. And I help equity-backed companies as well in multi-states. So it's all across the board. It's all across the country.

[00:15:33] We have knowledge of state-specific rules of even just how to process medical records that people don't even understand. A lot of times it's like, oh, well, I thought I could do it. And it's like, well, there's laws that are constantly updated that you have to follow. Here's your policy. Let's go execute it. What gets me excited is the ability to calm people down when the worst day happens to them. So some incident will happen or something terrible will happen. And the idea is that you could just address it.

[00:15:59] You could just address it and minimize the damage where it could be a breach. It could be anything, right? You may not think your laptop will get stolen out of your car, but the truth is that happens all the time. Or an email gets sent to the wrong mailing list. And all of a sudden you have PHI floating all over the place. How do you investigate that? How do you minimize the exposure immediately because the clock's ticking? That's what excites me to be able to help people that, and owners specifically, that they don't want to deal with that. That's not why they went into this.

[00:16:27] This is their bad day is something that immediately we could address. And I value everyone's time. And I think being available when they need it is also critical. It's not this, we'll call you in the next three weeks. It is, you'll hear from me in the next five minutes because this is important to you. We need to deal with it right now. That's just the way I want to be treated. Hey, practice owner. No one else can build your dream practice. It's all on you.

[00:16:57] One of my favorite quotes is, you can't outsource being a CEO, but you can create space to get clear on your vision and focus on your mindset, your skill set, and your ability to execute. Our coaching programs help you build not just a profitable business, but a life that you love and one that aligns with what matters most. So if your business feels heavy, it's time to shift. Check out the show notes and click the link titled coaching to learn how we help owners

[00:17:27] just like you. Let's get committed to what you really want. So I sign up for your stuff. Well, how does it work? So the stuff is compliance. So think of it this way. Everything that you need from a compliance perspective, from a department, we solve for. So even if you're a large company or a small company, we customize all this for you. And you don't have to waste. It's January, right? So everyone's working on their work plan and their stretch goals and all this great stuff,

[00:17:56] but they're burning weeks and months recreating the wheel. And the simple answer is you don't have to. Even something as simple as like education, right? Your compliance training for your stuff. Just review it. We do a quarterly compliance. We do chart audits. We do all this stuff. So do you take students? Do you have any like questions? We do. So generally they don't get formal compliance training. And we see this all the time in cases when it comes to incidents and stuff like that,

[00:18:26] which involves students where it's usually, it leads directly back to there was no education that we didn't train them on that because we thought the school was going to be training them on it. So we simply solve for all of this. So we said, you need training. We gotcha. You need your annual compliance. You need your student training. We're not going to make it a financial burden for you. It's just going to be a flat. I think it's like $12, right? It's ridiculous. And it covers everything you need to know on a student clinical affiliation for compliance, HIPAA, OSHA, you name it.

[00:18:53] And it comes to your foundational resources, everything that you need to implement a program, including front desk operations, clinical. We have it. There's department specific items. Like if you need IT policies, we've got that. HR, marketing, it's the whole gamut. So everything that falls under this very large umbrella, we take care of. If there's something that's unique, like you need your insurance reviewed. Obviously, we specialize in that.

[00:19:25] If you're doing peer reviews, I'm begging you, stop doing peer reviews. It's meaningless. Nobody does it. It's considered an industry standard 20 years ago. Nowadays, there's better ways to do it. It's quicker. Nobody wants to do it. And no therapist ever got hired going, yes, I can't wait to give up my lunch every quarter. Yeah. So it's just wasting time. And the hours do matter. They do add up. So I think when people and staff realize that you're investing in them, again, it's not even

[00:19:55] the money. It's just simply you're solving for a thing that they don't want to deal with. That's the biggest benefit. And there's other people that do this, of course. But we are unique in the sense that we're so dialed into what owners need from a uniqueness for customizing exactly what they're trying to actually accomplish. So we understand what those goals are. And then we deliver. Got it. So I'd get like a huge library of resources. Exactly. From pretty much any domain or area of the business that I could think of.

[00:20:25] Front desk, marketing operations, taking students, hiring people, all the things, right? Medicare compliance. Even weekly. Even weekly updates. So it's like, hey, Adam, were you able to... Yeah, there's tasks. So it's like, are you checking? They're all just like liability exposure tasks. Like making sure that you have certain things in place. And it just keeps you on track. And we don't just tell you what to do. We show you how to do it. So that's really different where it's not just here's a nice idea or here's a website to go look at and figure it out and read it.

[00:20:54] We actually tell you exactly what you need and how to do it. Got it. So you implement that system, plug it into the practice. So if just simply follow the checklist and you should be more compliant than most practices. And then we're on demand. So the idea is once you're in, you're in. So you've got a quick question. It costs nothing to send a text. And I think people really, really like that because that's what I love. I love having access to other services where it's not complicated. And I feel like that's what people also want it for me and my business, where it's you have a quick question.

[00:21:24] You don't need an expensive attorney for the hour figuring this out. Maybe a 30 second text gives me exactly my answer that I need. And then I move on. And I think that should be the standard. But we haven't seen that. And that's what we're trying to set. Yeah. I have those questions all the time, especially like, can I market this? Am I allowed to say this in my marketing message? And Google is good. Google, ChatGPT, they're all good from a compliance and legal standpoint. It's not always accurate. It's not always up to date. And you can't always rely on it.

[00:21:51] So I'll get screenshots of, hey, this is what ChatGPT found out for me. And I'm like, that's good, but it doesn't apply to you because here. And then we give them the reason. So what about the whole dreadful, like, I'm getting audited by Medicare. I just failed. I had one client who's one of her providers' PTAN number was terminated. And they came after her to collect like months of revenue.

[00:22:20] All the scary things that you hear. How do you guys support practice owners with that type of stuff? Well, it depends what it is, of course. We have in-house counsel. We have accounting. We're able to do stuff that other people just can't do. But it really depends. It depends on what the situation is. If it's just, do we need to read the fine print and figure out how to actually respond correctly? When you say audit, that should not scare anybody. Everyone will be audited. I firmly believe that they're fully funded. There's no reason why they're not. They slept for, what, two and a half years during COVID. They're back.

[00:22:50] So if you have not been audited, it's probably a miracle at this point. It should not be a miracle. Yeah, and then they're going to audit and they're going to say, hey, you owe us money. And then we're going to have to do an appeal, right? It takes time and money. Exactly. So just think, if your staff had a game plan and all of a sudden they're now interrupted, their day, their week, their month is now ruined because of this administrative burden. Is it them and your team that's going to be able to fix that and apply what you need?

[00:23:16] Or do you just need someone that could quickly and effectively manage that and address it and appeal it? That's how people should think. And they don't often think like that. They think, well, my front desk, they'll deal with it. And you're like, 40 hours later, you're still dealing with it. And the answer is, there's probably a 30-minute problem. Why couldn't we just address it? That's awesome. That's awesome. So you kind of went on a little bit of a ramp right before we started Repressed Record. And so I want to hear- Because I knew you weren't recording. Right, right.

[00:23:45] So we talked about going on offense. We talked a little bit about what you're feeling called to do and how you support owners. But tell me more about what else owners really should know or need to know about this compliance thing, especially in 2025. There's been some Medicare changes. There have been some updates. What are some things that you see coming down the pipe that owners should be aware of and they need to be aware of as they grow their business this year?

[00:24:15] Yeah, I think that's a good question. That could go anywhere, I guess. I'm a big fan of just having a phone in front. You need to have resources or your roundtable, right? You need to have your roundtable of advisors that if you have a marketing question, you go there. If you have your compliance question, you go there. If you have your whatever, right? You need to have those resources. It's too much to consume. I think it's just people need to realize that you can't do everything.

[00:24:40] But if you want strategies from just simply compliance, there's a lot of free stuff out there. So it costs nothing to go on these webinars. When Start, I guess why I was ranting before is I don't like when people tell me that it's too expensive. It's too expensive to get this compliance information. Oh, they wanted to take this weekend course or they wanted to find out something about something that should be publicly available. Oh, and it's costing money. I'm like, that's not right.

[00:25:08] It's not right for the profession. And that's why I get fired up when I see these things and I see these postings and I'm like, it can't be this way. This is not the way it should be. The information should be flowing directly from either the profession or from commercial players, right? So we're in a world of private practice where we have federal commercial players. We have the APTA, which is fantastic. They try to keep up. But this stuff happens all the time and it's unique to where you are. Your zip code, your state, these things are really, these variables impact how you

[00:25:38] operate. And I think understanding that if you need a state specific question, you need to go to that resource. And you should not be afraid of reaching out to your local representative, right? Your local state chapter. You shouldn't be afraid of going to whoever. I think people don't realize that you have to have these resources or you could just have a resource that has those resources, which is good too. And that's what I do, right? So I have my resources and I'm able to kind of do that in a very quick and effective way to get people the answers that they need.

[00:26:08] So I think you mentioned new CPT codes that come out, understanding the language behind that. The plan of care, right? We learned about this big win apparently for plan of care. It's like, I don't know any billing company that has changed anything that they were doing. It doesn't really affect anybody other than going back, I think, technically now requiring prescriptions again, which is kind of silly. But I understand that the end goal was to minimize the administrative burden. Didn't do that. You still have a huge paper trail that you have to document.

[00:26:38] But it did solve the three attempts to get a signed plan of care myth, right? That was an urban legend that put that to bed. We knew that Medicare has said that many times, that it doesn't actually exist, which is great. Reiterated that now. So people need to, I think, if you're an owner sitting right now listening, you need to understand that 2025, right now Congress didn't bail you out. Year over year, the trend keeps happening, right? I love trends. The whole point of, did your insurance go up? Yes. And it's going to continue to go up.

[00:27:07] Because why? We're seeing just trends that the cost of doing business is expensive. Everything is costing more. So how do you minimize your operating costs? You have to leverage technology. You have to do a lot of different things. And compliance is one of these things, one of these areas that when something goes wrong, it's very expensive. It's very expensive to fix. And maybe I'll give you like a car anatomy, right? But same thing. You could run. You could run the gamut and say like, you know what? I'm not going to do the oil change. I'm not going to worry about it.

[00:27:36] But you're like, maybe I should. You know, it's only about 100 bucks. Maybe I should just get that oil change done. And that's the concept that I take with everything really in life. If you could just do it now, and it makes a lot of sense, you probably should. If you need to train your workforce, what are you waiting for? Just simply giving them the power and the tools to make really good decisions instead of saying, you know what? I didn't know. I didn't know that was a standard. I didn't know that was a requirement. I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to encrypt my email.

[00:28:05] I didn't know, right? So all these things that happen, it's all preventable from a compliance perspective. You could prevent all this great exposure to your company or even simply having necessary things that you could get in trouble for. So for instance, even having translators, right? I've talked many times about it's very expensive, but yet there's a law that requires that you have to have this type of translating services for 15 of your top languages, blah, blah, blah, right? But there's ways to do that. There's really effective ways of doing that.

[00:28:34] And there's very, I don't want to say clever, but there's creative ways to do this. And it doesn't just have to be black and white. So when you speak to other people in my space, it's just very black and white. It's just simply recommended or is not recommended. But the truth is there's a lot of ways to get things done accurately and effectively. So I think that's what people should do. I think owners should really sit back and say, okay, where's my pain point? What do I hate doing? Do I really want to spend my Sundays creating policies? Probably not.

[00:29:03] It's probably not a great idea, but more power to you if you do, which is cool. You know, if you enjoy giving up Sundays to be drafting front desk policies, that's okay. And these are things that have to be reviewed every year. So your HIPAA manual, your OSHA handbook, your clinical, right? Your documentation standards. These all have to be documented in order to reference in the event of, right? That auditor that walks in or your staff that files a complaint against you. It doesn't matter.

[00:29:30] All these things, they have to be documented and they have to be up to date. Love it. Yeah, I think it's so fitting just to have this conversation because we're actually going to be reviewing our compliance program this year. We also have our in-person conference that we're going to, we haven't, this is the first time we're leaking this, but we're going to have another in-person conference the first weekend of October. And it's all going to be about how to scale your practice. Like the successful actions that people take to scale their practice and compliance is a huge

[00:29:59] piece of it, right? Like if you're going to grow to three, four, five, six, 10, 20 clinics, probably want to make sure your compliance is dialed in because otherwise the risk just continues to, it grows exponentially every time you open another location. You're just a bigger target, right? And again, I've seen owners who are, they're just so risk adverse and I'm like, let's have a talk. I think we need to, I think we need to just turn the dial maybe down a little bit. And that's what's unique. People don't expect to hear that from me. They don't expect to say, you know what? Pedal down. Let's go.

[00:30:29] We need to take this risk because it's a good risk. And we're not seeing even, I'll give you an example with group coding. I don't know if you're old enough for this, but 15 years ago, everyone got audited for the 97150 code because it was being widely abused. It was terrible. Same thing with the reval code, right? Many, many years ago, you couldn't, everyone billed for it every 30 days. It was just a thing. It got abused and then it got audited. And then it was a hard stop. People stopped billing these codes.

[00:30:54] And anytime I look at CPT code distribution, I'm like, how are you not billing this code? How is that happening? How are you effectively managing your schedule without, this is a great code. It's very valuable because one minute is equal to 20 minutes. It's a fantastic opportunity that you're completely avoiding. People are like, ah, I remember back in the day. I'm like, it's that historical stuff. You can't bring that to the table right now because you have to know what's accurately taking place now. And right now that is not an issue.

[00:31:23] That's not a concern. And I think that's kind of refreshing to a lot of people. People are kind of like, oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that I could actually take advantage of this, which is great. I love how you think like an entrepreneur. I had my practice and I think it's one of these things where we need advantages everywhere that we have control, right? It's all about, do we have control? 2.8% for Medicare? We don't. We are not controlled at the APT level or any kind of like larger scale. We're just not in control of that. But certain things we really do.

[00:31:53] I firmly believe that owners need to take advantage of that. And that's what I'm here for. How do people want to get into, like if they wanted to get in touch with you, if they wanted to reach out and learn a little bit more about your service, how would they do that? The easiest way is online. Risk and Compliance Analytics dot com is the website. They can find me on LinkedIn. Just even my name, Daniel Hirsch. And it's one of these things where it's not hard to find. There's only like both of us do compliance for therapy. But we are, again, we're proud to be unique.

[00:32:21] We don't play the whole game of fear mongering and this kind of whole the sky's falling thing. It's no, we could control a lot and we should take advantage of it. Totally, man. I appreciate your time. Let's definitely schedule another time to do this and we'll do an update maybe like the second half of the year. All right. Sounds good. Thank you. To the Private Practice Owners Club. If you enjoyed this episode, would you mind doing us a huge favor and leaving a review?

[00:32:51] This helps us get the podcast out to more clinic owners to help them create greater freedom and profits so they can own their future. And visit our website, ppoclub.com to find more resources and connect with us.