Unified Practice

Matt Maneggia, L.Ac., has been running Connecticut Family Acupuncture for over 12 years, which has continued to grow since inception. In fact, the clinic used to be named West Hartford Acupuncture, but as the practice expanded, so did its geographic radius. Maneggia and his team have been using Unified Practice’s practice management software since 2016 and have experienced multiple benefits, such as:

• Cost savings when expanding to new locations
  
  
• A lower number of no-show and missed appointments
  
  
• Money saved through insurance and billing processing
  
  
• Time saved through iPad charting

About Connecticut Family Acupuncture

Connecticut Family Acupuncture is built on the belief that true health doesn’t come from a bottle of pills. Instead, the body already has everything it needs to reach optimal health — it just sometimes needs a kickstart.

Maneggia and his team provide a variety of services, including acupuncture and herbs. Through their work, each team member strives to achieve the clinic’s mission: to help as many people as possible realize their optimum health naturally, without the use of pharmaceutical or surgical interventions.

Before Unified Practice: Challenges

Prior to Unified Practice, the Connecticut Family Acupuncture team was allocating a lot of time and money in areas that were not always necessary, such as scheduling appointments by phone and outsourcing insurance billing. Meanwhile, they had hopes of expanding to new locations yet were not thrilled about having to hire separate administrative staff for each clinic.

“What drove us most [to adopt an online tool] in the early stages was having an online scheduling system. At the same time, the ACA was becoming established and it sounded like every practitioner would have to move to EHR. We like to think we’re early adopters of things and tech-savvy.” — Maneggia

While Unified Practice definitely could solve their team’s scheduling conundrum, there was more to it than that. When making their decision, the team wanted to ensure their new technology solution would be easy to learn. They appreciated that Unified Practice was built for acupuncturists by acupuncturists, which made adopting the EHR less intimidating and more intuitive.

“Finding Unified Practice made a lot of sense in terms of how streamlined it was to transition.”

How Unified Practice Helped

Here are the biggest benefits Connecticut Family Acupuncture received from using Unified Practice:

Cost savings when expanding to new locations 
Perhaps the most exciting outcome of using Unified Practice is how it helped their team open up new locations. For a few years, their team entertained the idea of opening up another office location, and after adopting Unified Practice realized how easy it could be.

“Unified Practice made it much more possible for us because we weren’t able to afford a new front desk person at a second location; the ease of adding multiple locations within Unified Practice and scheduling each individual practitioner in various locations at different times made that whole leap a lot easier and a lot less daunting. We still to this day just have one front desk person at our headquarters.”

A decrease in no-show and missed appointments
By utilizing online scheduling and SMS appointment reminders, patient communications improved and the number of no-show and missed appointments were drastically reduced.

Money saved through insurance and billing processing
Prior to Unified Practice, Maneggia was using an insurance billing service that took a 10% cut of their insurance money. To make matters worse, he didn’t feel like outsourcing the task was saving him time keeping track of denied claims.

“I was skeptical that it would be so easy to submit claims and handle the insurance ends of things through Unified Practice, but that has been a breeze. I feel grateful that I was able to make that transition.”

Time saved through iPad charting
As a bonus, Maneggia describes both himself as an “Apple person” and was elated to see that Unified Practice has an iPad EHR for charting. Maneggia trained his team on how to use SOAP note tools to chart more efficiently while still staying present towards patients and their needs.

Appreciation towards a proactive support team
Maneggia noted that Unified Practice is quick to ask for feedback and thoughts on current and future features, a gesture he appreciates as his own clinic evolves — along with his software needs.

“ I think a lot of changes frighten acupuncturists; Unified Practice does a great job at making it easy.”

What’s Next

Maneggia and his team have an exciting road ahead of them as their practice continues to evolve. He’s looking forward to continued growth while looking forward to some new features that Unified Practice will roll out soon, many of which are undoubtedly being released thanks to feedback from Maneggia and our other loyal practitioners. 

If you want to see how Unified Practice can help grow your practice, save you time, or help increase revenue, get started today.