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Episode 216 | Topflight Apps Zefanja Floris on Creating an App for Your Practice

zefanja

WITH Zefanja Floris

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  • Episode 216 | Topflight Apps Zefanja Floris on Creating an App for Your Practice 00:00

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Hey Group Practice Listeners! Do you want to maximize the use of technology in your practice? As we face the rise of applications and innovations, it is beneficial to know how to make money creating an app.

We are graced to be joined by Mr. Zefanja Floris, the Product Manager at Topflight Apps, a company developing healthcare applications. He will be grounding us with the knowledge of creating an app that will be a guide in achieving success both in managing and leveraging client retention and income sources.

Episode Highlights:

  • How is it beneficial to use mobile applications in exceeding the limitations of time and location?

  • What are some of the working implemented methods in today’s healthcare apps?

  • Where is the challenge from a business perspective on the Electronic Health Record System?

  • When does a niche-specific EHR help a better choice of features for a compact group of practitioners?

  • What is the cost of creating an app for a business?

  • Why can content creation offer exponential audience growth and be considered a monetization strategy?

 

To connect with Mr. Zefanja Floris:

You can visit his website at www.topflightapps.com & www.linkedin.com/company/topflightapps/mycompany/

Check out his LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/zefanja-floris/

Reach him through his email at [email protected]

 

This episode is sponsored by TherapyNotes. TherapyNotes is an EHR software that helps behavioral health professionals manage their practice with confidence and efficiency. I use TherapyNotes in my own group practice and love its amazing support team, billing features, and scheduling capabilities. It serves us well as a large group practice owner.

Do you ever wish for a financial therapist who could relieve you from the last few months of bookkeeping, talk you off the edge when you’re running into issues with Quickbooks, or help you work through a profit plan for growth? GreenOak Accounting does just that! GreenOak Accounting is an accounting firm that specializes in working with group practices. Their value goes WAY beyond bookkeeping; they can help you get on track for financial success. Schedule a free consultation by going to http://greenoakaccounting.com/tgpe

 

Transcript:

Maureen Werrbach

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Group Practice Exchange Podcast. Today I have Z Flores who is with Top Flight Apps, and he is a product manager at Top Flight. And we’re gonna be talking about creating apps that can improve client retention and business outcomes. Hi, Z. How are you? Doing well, thank you.

Thank you. I am really excited for this one because I feel like I’ve been talking to just a lot of business owners that support group practice owners in some way, and so talking about apps and things that are more innovative is really exciting to me, and I think something that will resonate with a lot of our business owners that listen.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, like one of the things about. That I always talk about with people, you know, you are an individual and you have a certain amount of hours in your day. And you know, obviously in in the practice setting, one of the things that we’re noticing is that the time that you get to spend with the people that are in your practice, right, your clients or your patients is getting less and less, uh, and you know, you have to have a higher, higher output.

And so, you know, mobile apps are a really great way to kind of. Call it duplicating yourself or duplicating your time, right? You can make yourself more readily available in a mobile app, whether that’s, you know, your actual time, because you know, a lot of the admin stuff can probably get automated a little bit better.

And you know, you can kind of do the simple things as like making sure no shows are less, or information is readily available, but also, you know, it allows you to kind of manage the client from a distance, so to speak. And so you kind of get to duplicate your time and sharing knowledge right? If you tell a client in the office like, Hey, go read my blog, because it’ll answer your question right by the time they get home, they’ve probably forgotten most of it, but obviously, all that content that you do have, if you have content or maybe a podcast video series that you do, or any information that you’ve gathered from other websites that you’ve pre-vetted, right?

They can all be stuffed into that app. And so, you know, that mobile app from a business point of view, really allows you to do two things, right? Duplicate your time exponentially sometimes, but also, yeah, it does create other sources of revenue for your practice as well, which is always, a nice thing to dig into.

Yeah, and I’m gonna ask a little bit about that in a little bit, but I wanted to ask, what are some of the like already implemented methods or solutions that are working when it comes to mental health apps right now? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of general apps out there, right? You have the mindfulness app, the stress relief, the calms, then, you have those, and so, Those are available.

You can obviously direct clients to it. It may not help your business case. It definitely helps their business case, right? So those are there, but we see a lot of them. People kind of going in towards telehealth, that’s definitely a big step. And then adding kind of the features that they need to manage their specific practice use case, um, which can be anything from, you know, scheduling to video calling obviously cuts out a lot of overhead.

And, you kind of see those types of, those moves happening very, very fast. So do you have, um, any? Apps out there that have been built by other group practice owners, and if so, what kind of features are vehicles that you think are really beneficial specifically for mental health group practice owners when it comes to not just the client-facing stuff, like I, I understand, you know, scheduling or having a space to like to create a telehealth portion, but specifically around like retention and just business outcomes as a whole, using an app in that sort of way.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it. Goes into, you know, when you kind of go more towards, I guess the back office, right? That section. But when you do have a mobile app, you know, you can integrate certain things. So you can integrate, let’s say you use QuickBooks or, or Stripe or you know, those other admin things, you probably now have to copy and paste or maybe do quite manually, uh, You know, all of a sudden those Vietnam now become integration possibilities.

And so, you know, let’s say that you have, you know, finished up your telehealth call or whatever it may be, or you have things that you’d like to sell additionally, right now it’s like, Hey, go to the app and, you know, buy this ebook I wrote. You’ll answer half your, it’ll, it’ll get you there. Or buy this, you know, product or service that I’ve created that’ll help you with your specific.

With that specific client, that automatically now gets shot into QuickBooks or Stripe and you know, billing takes care of itself. Yeah. Where previously you may have had that printed out in the office, they had to come in, you’d have to charge their card, right? Invoice. And there’s a lot of manual processes that you now just get to cut out, which obviously leads into.

I mean, a lot of revenue from a business point of view is lost in making manual mistakes or, or things having to take time. Right. Especially now with that time crunch, you have 15 minutes to see your client and that’s it. Yeah. Otherwise, it doesn’t become billable by insurance anymore or something like that.

Yeah. Right. And so a lot of these things now become more efficient and automated, um, which means that, that you can kind of focus your. Attention more on those revenue-generating things. Uh, instead of the manual things are people building apps that are. Client-facing or just for the business? Cause I’m envisioning like, you know, yeah, it’s client-facing, like having video sessions in there or having like Sure.

Worksheets and things that clients can go to, or like satisfaction surveys and stuff like that, but Right? Are there apps being made that are specific to just the business themselves and maybe the leaders within the business? Making sure that. Metrics and things are Yeah, they are, but they’re being built very.

In silos. Yeah. Right. So we’re building, this for the client’s face. We’re building, this is for internal use. Yeah. And then we see a lot of people who build for clients and then turn that into its own business. Right. They obviously have a process. They do that well. They go race funds, and then now that software becomes ready for other agencies or other group practice use.

And then you kind of see that same thing happen with the internal software that is created. Right. Obviously, if you have. Group practice and you, you know, you’ve, you’ve got a lot of expertise there. People kind of, you know, tend to think like, oh, my group practice has different processes from everybody else.

But you kind of notice, like once you see a lot of them or talk to a lot of them, right, that they all kind of have the same practices and the same pain points. Yeah. So people will definitely have those conversations within their networks and then see that there’s an issue there. And then build software for that and then turn that into a business.

Very, it does happen, but where we’re kind of seeing still the miss the gap is, you know when you build these two things siloed, you do and don’t solve a problem because that missed piece that connects the two is still often missing. And so yeah, that’s where I would definitely say that there’s an underserved market there, connecting the pieces.

And what I noticed, and I don’t know that could ever help this problem, but most group practice owners use an electronic health record system. The video components, it has the billing components and things like that. But then from a business perspective, it doesn’t have great reporting features or the ability to see, you know, client retention.

And I can see a benefit of building some kind of app that for leadership can let you know. Based on the metrics and data that are in an EHR, it’s not easy to parse apart. Yep. But I don’t know, like, I dunno, I would say connect with an, to be able to pull that data to manually transfer it. Depending on the year, it is possible, it’s actually one of the number one requests we get as an organization to work with the E H R system because of that problem and because of other things.

Right. EHR is known to be like, they’re very robust. Yeah. And that, they pride themselves in being very robust, which for a hospital is great, but for smaller organizations, robust also means very complex and complicated. And you know, a lot of features get stuffed in there that for a hospital are great, but for a group practice, maybe.

Not e ever used, but still have to be paid for, right? Yeah. And so we’re kind of seeing that move away from like, okay, my group practice is not the size of, you know, Kaiser Medical in California with 26 hospitals, right? And, and kind of like, Hey, I like all these features in this E H r, I want them and so let me build my own thing or integrate them into my own software to run my practice so that I don’t have to deal with right.

Paying the, the epics of the EHR world a ton of money. So it’s definitely a. One of the largest requests we get. And so you’re built essentially like you’ve built like E H R integrations? Yeah, for sure. The second part of that is it, it is not the easiest thing. They don’t make it very easy because obviously they want everybody in their system and all be all to run your practice.

But yeah, no, it is, it is, it is very possible and it’s definitely the number one request we get when it comes to, from a single physician’s office that has one physician, two group practices, and, and even smaller agencies that they really want the eh r integration. That’s awesome. So like, what makes it so that some EHRs you can integrate with and others you can’t, to have an integration, you need to have a, a API connection.

Yeah, and API is pretty much the bridge between one software to chat to the other one and send information back and forth. And so, Obviously, that means that there has to be a two-way street. So if I say I want a P connection and DHR says, I’m not letting you touch my a p I connection, then that two-way street can’t happen.

And so communication can’t happen. Some EHRs, just have it on their site, right? You can just, you know, look it up, you know, usually. You can Google the EHR name, API and results will pop up. Okay. Um, some EHRs will have a partner program, so you have to be vetted by them to be able to apply so they have all the leverage to say yes or no.

And then of course the EHRs are very robust and so often, you know, the integration time to make it happen can be quite large, depending on the no, depending on what you need from your system. And so that’s actually where we are starting to see a lot of. People actually starting to kinda like build their own e h r hand like, you know, depending on how often you have to communicate with other EHRs or other, if the disease that you’re managing or the symptoms that you’re managing are quite like, okay, I don’t need to have a lot of other input from other medical records.

Mm-hmm. Obviously the more the better. But some people say, I, I just, then they kind of create their O D H R. Yeah. And then they just kinda work within that world. And so we, we are seeing, you know, that happen, but since those EHRs are getting so big, right? Once that drawing out happens, then holes in the market start to pop up.

Yep. And then obviously people dive into those holes because they see that that’s a necessity. Yeah. Well, that’s one of the things that is like EHRs, I use Therapy Notes and I’m connected with the development team in Therapy Notes because I have a large following group practice. Sure. They’ll ask me like, what are some of the things you’re hearing?

In terms of features and stuff like that, one of the things that come up often is that they’re like, we won’t ever be able to do what everyone wants, because some things are like in direct opposition of another thing, like what one person wants. If we put that Yeah, for sure. The problem for someone else. And so this is where like, you know, for some people having a very customized app where you build out your own EHR that fits your own processes could be really helpful.

Yeah, no, for sure. Like, uh, as a product manager, are, you talk to a lot of, you know, a lot of our clients when we’re trying to build software, you get feedback a from a, from a client’s customer and feedback B, and they’re complete opposites. It’s like, I’m going to make someone mad, and so we need to figure out which one that’s So it happens, it’s a, it’s a dichotomy quite often.

And so now what you’re starting to see is obviously like a large ehr, they kind of have to do a one size fits all, which then turns into very robust, complex software where you almost need an implementation team to get it going. Right? Yeah. And for a hospital, that’s fantastic, right? They can deal with that.

Obviously if you run a, a group practice or you have an even smaller practice or an agency that. Is usually not within your budget, and so we are starting to see. Niche-specific EHRs or like a group? Yeah, yeah. Or just owners who all specialize in, I don’t know, EMDR come together to split the cost of building, uh, an assist, uh, an app-specific.

Sure. Yeah. Something that works for them. Right, because. You know, obviously, even though it may not perfectly fit everybody’s user journey the way they like to run their practice, if it hits 95, right, it’s already better than that 70% E H R you had earlier, that costs probably more. Yeah. And you now have ownership, right?

There’s an equity ownership control part of that where you get to the side, right? As a group, as a much smaller group, what that feature should be, instead of being independent of E H R, like Epics decides. Yeah. And so obviously Epics is great for their use case, but you know, you see the smaller maybe not be the best word, but like the more compact groups get together and fill their own niches.

Yeah. I wanted to shift before we close out to mm-hmm. Monetization strategies for mental health. Talk to me about that. Cause, uh, obviously, Group practice owners who are kind of in this stabilization phase where they’re maybe not growing their group practice physically, are looking for ways to diversify their income and obviously doing it in a way that’s ethical.

Um, there’s a difficulty when it comes to selling things to clients. So maybe short of that, what other? Ways are you seeing people sort of monetize apps? I know you mentioned one, which was like, yeah. Building out, uh, an EHR or a system that works really well for you that they can be, you know, sold over to other group practices.

Sure, sure. Yeah. That’s kind of a larger undertaking, right? There are some lower-hanging fruits, I think. No, not everybody is good at content creation, right? But with tools out there, with AI out there, like content creation can really become a powerful tool to utilize, especially because. You know, obviously depending on how active and how long you’ve been in the field, right?

You have a certain expertise that other people don’t. Mm-hmm. And what do you believe or not if you, yourself as interesting, right? That’s always other people that have no idea about your field are always very interested. Um, and so I. Being able to put that content into a mobile app or even into some form of the easy, accessible place, even if it’s just a URL, download URL behind a paywall on a website does give you additional revenue.

I used to do a lot of work with dieticians. I. And so you’d see the, you know, how to solve X, y, z, you know, insert symptom with x, y, Z diet. And so obviously, you know, there’s a mislabeling of, of a lot of like fad diets in there that may not work for everybody, but do get, you know, obviously put on a pedestal that’ll work for everybody.

That’s, a due diligence thing, but obviously, that expertise that you can generate in there could lead to like a $5 a hub. The ebook that somebody could really actually use to where you don’t have to sit there and repeat yourself over and over Yeah. To different clients. Now all of a sudden, you have bulk information where you’ve got all the knowledge that you have onto a, a, you know, an easily digestible, uh, e-book with cool pictures, infographics, right?

Yeah. That you can now sell for $5, $50, sometimes $50, $190, right? Set your price where you want to, but now all of a sudden, You kind of have duplicated yourself and have an extra revenue stream. And you’ll notice that if you are in a physical location, right, let’s say it’s Chicago, then you can only serve as that group of people.

But now, if you take yourself online, especially if you are on social media or do other things, now you can go to us, right? And so your part of the audience exponentially grows. That allows you to generate another form of revenue. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I wanna say that I appreciate you coming on and just even getting people’s brains.

I feel like anyone who’s listening now is just swirling with ideas. That’s how it goes. Yeah, that’s how it goes. So if people that are listening are interested, in learning more about whether Top Flights is able to help them build out an app that mm-hmm. Maybe think about, how can they reach you.

Yeah, so the easiest way to get the top flight is top flight apps.com. So obviously that’s our site. We have all our services there, all, our tabs, and everything you need. And if you want to go directly to me, I think LinkedIn would be the best. So my name is Zanga, that’s my full name. Z E F a n j A. And then my last name is Flores, f l o r I s.

And you’re married and welcome to send me a connect and uh, I’ll get you to the right person. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming on this morning, and uh, absolutely. All right, well, have a good one. You too. Thank you again. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to the Group Practice Exchange Podcast. Like what you heard. Give us five stars on whatever platform you’re listening from. Need extra support. Join the Exchange, a membership community just for group practice owners with monthly office hours, live webinars, and a library of trainings ready for you to dive into.

Visit www.members.thegrouppracticeexchange.com/exchange. See you next week.

Thanks For Listening

Thanks for listening to the group practice exchange podcast. Like what you heard? Give us five stars on whatever platform you’re listening from. Need extra suppor? Join The Exchange, a membership community just for group practice owners with monthly office hours, live webinars, and a library of trainings ready for you to dive into visit www dot members dot the group practice exchange dot com forward slash exchange. See you next week.

Resources

Here are the resources and guides we recommend based on this episode

* I am an affiliate for some of the businesses I recommend. These are companies that I use in my own group practice, and make recommendations based off of my experience with them. When you use some of these companies through my links, I receive compensation, which helps me continue to offer great free information on my podcast, blog, Facebook group, and website.

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Meet your host

Maureen

Maureen Werrbach is a psychotherapist, group practice owner and group practice coach. Learn more about her coaching services here:

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The podcast is structured so that you get practice building tips in small doses, where an episode can be listened to (and a group practice building lesson can be learned) in a single car ride.

Episodes are structured into categories: coaching sessions where I coach a group practice owner on a specific topic, tips of the day by yours truly, real talk where you get to be a fly on the wall while an established group practice owner and I talk about the highs and lows of ownership, and trainings done by experts in the field.

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* The content of this post is intended to serve as general advice and information. It is not to be taken as legal advice and may not account for all rules and regulations in every jurisdiction. For legal advice, please contact an attorney.

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