According to Larry Patten, the key to this college’s success lies in thinking outside the box.

What started as a concept to expand clinical curriculum and introduce innovative technology to chiropractic students has evolved into a philosophical change for Palmer College of Chiropractic. The CLRC (Clinical Learning Resource Center), once planned as a high-tech training ground, is now a single floor within the wide-reaching philosophy behind the facility known as the Academic Health Center in Pisciottano Hall.

“The AHC has changed the way our faculty participates in preparing our students to enter the professional world of chiropractic,” said Larry Patten, chancellor. “We started transforming our clinic to be more patient centered by switching to a pay-for-performance payment method. This gives our doctors more opportunities to benefit from the overall success of our facility.”

The next step was changing how the students were trained. Historically, most college clinics are student driven. Although that may seem an obvious choice for educational institutions, student-driven methods accommodate specific needs and graduation requirements, rather than focusing on patient needs early in the game. Under the new system, Palmer faculty is more involved, motivating students to help the patients and working with them through complicated adjustments.

Larry Patten

“We’ve transitioned from training or teaching to mentoring students in their final trimesters,” Patten said. “In the earlier trimesters, the students still go through the basics, learning chiropractic techniques and adjusting friends and relatives initially, but we’ve enhanced the sophistication of their last months at Palmer.”

The business of academics
Part of that sophistication involves teaching students the financial aspects of being a successful chiropractor. Palmer has raised its clinic fees significantly, moving in the direction of customary fees to both signify its standing as the best chiropractic school in the country and create a real-world scenario for its students. In the past year, Palmer has started charging customary chiropractic fees in its clinic and now accepts most forms of insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid.

“If we show students they can bring someone in here and get them adjusted for $10, they don’t feel they should charge more than that in the real world. They can’t make it charging so little,” Patten said. “And if we don’t handle insurance while they’re in school, they won’t know how to handle it when they’re running their own practices. We’ve taken all of those factors and have turned this into a real clinical environment.”

In addition, by changing the teaching/mentoring set up and charging market-rate fees, Patten feels the college is telling the community it’s the best, and the best costs money. “It’s not free, but our patients know they’ll never find themselves only being adjusted by a student; a doctor will also be in the room,” he said. “We’ve already seen a significant increase in the number of people coming to the clinic that has surpassed our expectations.”

Down the right path
Although Palmer was founded in the late 1800s, its recent success comes from its ability to evolve to meet the demands of its primary customers—the students. Patten has written several books, including Living as a Champion and Strategic Organizational Development. He is also the founder of World Leadership Institute, a strategic development institution focused on helping companies achieve long-term performance improvement. That organization is now under the leadership of his son. However, Patton did not forget the principles upon which the
company was built.

“If you do things correctly with your company, over time you will go through a four-phased evolution that starts with crisis management, where you spend your time focused on your internal environment,” he said. “Then, when you become aware of an external environment, you’re in phase two.”

The third phase is when a company reacts to the requests of the external environment, and phase four is when the company has become strategic about its reactions. According to Patten, this is where Palmer stands today.

“Your people become well honed on where the company is heading, and each employee makes decisions based on an understood framework,” he said. “This goes beyond developing a whimsical tag line or vision statement. It’s about discovering what your company wants to be, what it believes in, and then developing a vision for the future.”

Although he could throw out ideas of where he thinks Palmer will be in the next decade, Patten believes the next step is talking to those in the organization, hearing their visions, and finding out what they think the college needs to do to reach those goals. “The role of any good CEO is to be a facilitator and coordinator,” Patten said. “The more you have to provide command and control is the degree to which you’re not doing your job well.”