Medical Software to your benefit your Physical Therapy Practice

Whether you are a physical therapy practice, an occupation therapy practice, a physicians group, a home health agency and on and on, it is important to know various statistics about the field of practice that you are in. Knowing certain statistics, such as productivity of your clinicians, income each day, overhead costs, new patient referrals, and many other valuble tools, is a necessity to operate a successful practice.

If you are using multiple, disconnected systems for EMR (electronic medical records), billing and collections, scheduling, marketing, faxing, then you really won’t know the true statistics without a lot of excel spreadsheets and time-indusive data input from you or someone on your team. We all know time is money. So why spend your time caluclating these data points, if you can have a program that does it all for your instantly.

The main, important statistics you should know on a daily basis are:

1. Profit/Loss. If you can’t narrow down what you make in a day, you’re really losing out. It is not helpful to your practice to know what you made at the end of the month. At that point it is too late to make any corrections or adjustments if you’re not doing particularly well. Some practices do all of these calculations by hand to find out what their profit and loss was for that day; and I commend them. At least they are figuring this out! But if there is an easier, instantaneous way to know this, would you do it?

2. Provider Productivity. Knowing exactly how many patients each provider is seeing each day is really important. Also knowing what percentage of their patients cancelled or no-showed to their appointment is crutial. In the physical therapy arena, I want to know how quickly my therapists are getting patients better. I am able to pull stats by ICD-10 codes, current caseload, and so on (by filtering what I want to see), and then I can see how useful each treatment is for that patient and how quickly my team can get them to recover. Without these stats, I would be digging through charts and notes and it would probably take me FOREVER!

3. Cancel/No show rate for patients. Being able to know exactly what patients canceled, why they cancelled, what provider they cancelled with, and their history of cancels and no-shows is vital. These stats will help you to become more profitable. Who actually knows what their no-show/cancel percentage is? If it is more than 8% each week, you have a lot of room for growth in this area.

4. Marketing Efforts. If you have an employee designated to going out in the community and bringing in new patients into your office, then it is really important to know where they are coming from and what marketing efforts help more than others. Being able to track data points like these and have an alerting system to following up with certain accounts is extremely beneficial. Being able to pull a report to match all of your patient referred by Dr. X in the last week, month, year, is a necessity. Being able to track the patient referrals following a speaking engagement, or health fair, is crutial in determining whether that time and cost was worth it.

5. Accounts Receivable. If you cannot open your billing accounts and quickly and easily see who owes what and how far outstanding payments are, then you’re doing something wrong. If you outsource your billing and don’t have access to this information on your own time, this can be a problem.

If you can get each of the above five points automated and easy for your practice, you are golden. If you need some help, reach out to me!