How to Efficiently Manage a Physical Therapy Clinic

Introduction

Managing a Physical Therapy clinic is no easy feat. With so much to keep track of for staff, business purposes, HIPAA and compliance requirements - not to mention also treating patients - it is common to feel overwhelmed. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way! These tips can help you optimize your business and manage your physical therapy clinic efficiently.

Stay on Top of Your Finances

Treating patients is at the heart of physical therapy, but a healthy business is imperative to providing good care. Finances can be uncomfortable to talk about, but it's important for the business's longevity and for building the capacity to expand and take on more patients. Be sure you have a good system in place for keeping track of every penny that comes in and out. Make it a priority once a week to review your numbers and be sure you understand where and how monies are flowing.

When you've mastered the basics, it's time to look at optimizing functions like CPT-coding diversity and selection. AI-powered analytics solutions like Practice Intel help identify revenue gaps by comparing coding accuracy against minutes billed, determining over-documentation and under-documentation, and finding coding inefficiency and variability across therapists to unearth hidden revenue potential. Ensure your therapists are billing correctly and everyone is compensated fairly for the care they provide!

Help Your Therapists with Immediate and Frequent Feedback

You can create a culture of high-performing therapists and staff with relevant and timely feedback. Feedback—positive or negative—is an opportunity to validate what someone it skilled in while helping them grow in areas they aren't. This is also how you can remove the angst and stress of wondering, "How am I doing?" Gift your employees the opportunity to make small, subtle changes rather than waiting until something requires a large correction. 

Timely feedback has also been shown to boost engagement, motivation, and performance. Compliance metrics like chart audit scores, error rates on audit components, and copy-forward rates bring visibility to the biggest gaps in compliance and actionable insights into how to fix them.  

Best practice tip: PredictionHealth customers have found that giving their therapists direct access to their own documentation compliance metrics allows them to see their scores and identify how to improve without requiring a manager's lens.

AI solutions take the manual work out of these analytics by reading the structured and unstructured text from therapists’ documentation, so practice administrators have full visibility into metrics like number of visits per episode of care, plan of care completion, utilization rate of appropriate plan of care, and patient improvement. 

Incorporating timely and contextual feedback into your clinic allows optimal growth with maximum efficiency. Practice Intel provides actionable dashboards with data analytics as well as feedback to your therapists in a timely and consistent manner to help reduce the need for practice managers to spend time doing this.

Utilize Technology to Reduce Staff Busy Work

There is always administrative work to be done, especially at a growing and busy practice. The right technology can take mundane and time-consuming tasks off your staff’s to-do lists so they can focus on other aspects of their work. Start by mapping out your processes to visualize what is not operating smoothly and is taking too much time and attention from staff. Get feedback from staff on what they wish they could spend less time on. Perhaps your marketing could be more automated, or maybe you could offer online booking so fewer people are calling in for appointments. Once you have determined what processes are a time suck, it is time to discover if it can be aided by technology. This will take some research, but it can pay off quickly in time savings and higher reimbursement. For a great article on building out your ideal tech stack, check out this WebPT blog post.

Chart audits are one consistent administrative burden that contributes to stress and burnout. Let AI tackle it! But be sure you're using a HIPAA-compliant solution like Practice Intel that's designed for PT/OT. Solutions that cross several healthcare sectors may not be optimized for the distinct compliance requirements of rehab therapy. Practice Intel analyzes every word and every note, reducing administrative chart reviews by hundreds of hours and eliminating the need for peer-to-peer reviews. 

_ _ _

You don't have to tackle this all at once. Incorporating even one of the recommendations listed in this article can have a positive impact on the operations of your physical therapy clinic.