Financial and Healing Benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
Financial and Healing Benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
By Walker Porterfield, DC
Chiropractors are always on the lookout for ways to enhance patient care and grow their practice. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is an emerging trend in health and wellness that uses increased atmospheric pressure to deliver higher levels of oxygen to the body. While used for decades to treat certain medical conditions, this noninvasive treatment is now gaining traction in wellness practices, including chiropractic offices.
Here’s a closer look at how this investment can affect your practice’s bottom line.
One of the most appealing financial aspects of offering HBOT is that it operates primarily as a cash-pay service. Many chiropractic treatments require navigating the complexities of insurance coverage, but HBOT allows you to offer a high-value service directly to patients without the limitations imposed by insurance providers. For chiropractors, this means fewer headaches and a predictable, steady, scalable stream of revenue.
“Finding an associate was easy,” said no chiropractor ever. In our profession, hiring additional chiropractors often comes with a significant challenge. HBOT allows you to hire a tech to administer the dive, generating more revenue than a chiropractor per interaction. Prices per session range from $100 to $250, all cash and without your involvement.
LeBron James, Paris Hilton, and Justin Bieber use HBOT, to name a few. HBOT patients are the same people who use chiropractic care. At its core, chiropractic care and hyperbarics focus on the body’s natural ability to heal itself.
By delivering higher levels of oxygen, HBOT enhances the body’s innate healing processes without the use of drugs or invasive procedures. This alignment with the principles of chiropractic care makes it an ideal addition to your practice, offering patients another natural, noninvasive option to support their health.
In many towns, chiropractic advertising can feel like a race to the bottom, especially on Facebook. Advertising HBOT instead of chiropractic allows you to reach the same audience with a new, exciting therapy. Your bottom line will benefit from HBOT, and it opens up a perfect opportunity to remarket to new HBOT patients in the office.
On their walk back to the HBOT chamber, instruct your staff to plant seeds in their minds regarding chiropractic care in your office — a success story here, a fun fact there. When the day comes and they decide they need a chiropractor, guess where they will go.
Bonus tip: Place your chambers near the back of your office. When patients come in for HBOT, they must walk past everyone getting adjusted. Over time, those smiling, pain-free patients will sell chiropractic care better than any advertisement ever could.
The magic of HBOT is its scalability. With one chamber, you’ll recoup your investment, but it takes time. You must buy the unit, train your staff, and start your marketing campaigns. With two or three chambers, you will start to see income stack up. One staff member can easily manage four chambers at a time. Whether you are running one or four chambers, you still must make overhead.
Conservatively, if you charged $100 per session and paid your staff $25 per hour, you would gross $375 per hour running at full capacity. Let’s err on the side of caution and say you operate at half-capacity. That is gross profit of $175 per hour, and after an eight-hour day, this is an additional $1,400 in semi-passive income.
Using the chamber to heal your own body.
Have you ever said, “I would like to go on vacation, but what about my patients?” I am right there with you. Practice management groups will tell you to hire an associate, but like we talked about earlier, they are expensive and hard to find. With HBOT in your clinic, you can take a vacation while still offering a service to your patients that generates income while you’re gone.
Ultimately, what matters is that your patients improve while you earn a living. Hyperbarics allows you to treat patients above, down, and inside out, just like chiropractic. I encourage you to combine these therapies in your office and let the results speak for themselves. Take that vacation and take time for your body, but most importantly, take this opportunity to invest in your practice and set it up for passive growth.
About the Author
Dr. Walker Porterfield is a second-generation chiropractor. He can be reached by phone at 515-957-2703, by email at clarityhbot@gmail.com, or online at www.desmoineshyperbarics.com.
