How to balance physical therapy billing with patient flow and compliance

You can avoid sleepless nights and eliminate worries about your physical therapy practice’s performance by using bestPT’s Radar Chart to monitor the health of your practice. Practice management is a balancing act of optimizing multiple aspects of your physical therapy practice simultaneously so you can reach your goal of building your dream practice. Tracking physical therapy billing performance with patient flow, cash flow, and compliance stats automatically and simultaneously will help you keep an eye on the big picture while also getting the necessary details to make the right management decisions on a daily basis.

How to see the forest without losing sight of every tree?  You may perfect your physical therapy billing process, but without solid patient relationships you will have no growth. You may perfect your patient referral processes, but without a compliant visit documentation system you are exposed to post-payment audits and risk your cash and practicing license. While it’s important to evaluate every physical therapy billing performance detail, you cannot afford to lose sight of the big picture and risk focusing on a wrong priority.

You can configure the Practice Health Monitor/Radar Chart to match your physical therapy practice’s goals, as well as allow individual staff members to track relevant metrics that contribute to the overall goals. Unlike other reports within bestPT’s software platform, the Practice Health Monitor displays multiple selected metrics on a single, easy-to-digest snapshot (radar chart) with the option to view more detailed information in individual graphs when clicking on each metric. This can help you discover if you are meeting your personal performance goals, including physical therapy billing metrics. Even more importantly, you can compare current stats to past performances to discover any positive or negative trends.

Physical therapy billing performance tracking is not only good for teamwork but also for your practice’s overall bottom line. Taking time to do this before the actual go live date can help you as physical therapy practice owner hit the ground running in the right direction and allow every staff member to take ownership of their role in your practice’s success.

Before you or your team can benefit from this powerful Practice Health Monitor, though, you need to review the individual physical therapy billing metrics for each team member with your assigned account manager (a.k.a. SPOC). Your SPOC will then configure each user’s home screen with the appropriate charts and radar metrics. For example: you, as a practice owner, may want real time insight into physical therapy billing metrics, such as charges, cash collected, claims paid, visit volume, no shows, no future appointments, workbench claims and PIP performance. However, you may only want your front office staff focused on no shows, no future appointments and work bench claims.

Here is how you can configure and use your radar chart once it’s on your home screen:

1. Define Your Radar Chart (configure settings)

• Click on “Personal Preferences”
• Select any of the 18 available metrics
• Choose which KPIs to display on the Radar Chart with the check marked boxes under the Show Heading (incl. minimum and maximum growth)
• Configure colors

2. Use your radar chart

• Select the specific practice (if you have more than one, type at least 3 letters of the practice name in the Lockdown Text Box in the upper right hand corner of Vericle, then click it.)
• Select the initial month to define the maroon background radar, and select the final month to define the green foreground rada
• Click on specific KPIs for detailed graph

At the end of the day, the success of your physical therapy practice depends on more than one variable or one person. But keeping an eye on the metrics that matter will help you reach your destination.