Physical Therapy Software for data driven decisions
Just My Cup of Tea
Can a chart about desserts inspire Shannon to find a solution for her physical therapy practice?
“Tables that update themselves!” Shannon’s voice came from behind Mike as she brought cups of tea to the table where he was working.
“Like in the fairy tale?” Mike asked, half his attention on the screen of his laptop. “Where the boy tells the table to spread itself and it’s covered with food?”
Mike looked up and took a mug. “Or,” he said, “in this case, tea.”
“This tea didn’t make itself,” Shannon assured her husband. “But did you make all those charts yourself?”
Mike looked back at the computer screen. “What, my dashboard? No, this is the software I use to run the restaurant. What are you talking about, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Just today I was telling my office manager that we needed tables that updated themselves. Are those charts on your computer automatically drawn from the information in the restaurant’s books?”
“The books, plus the customer database, the reservations schedules, the inventory” There’s too much data to keep track of without automation. This gives me a visual interface so I can see pretty quickly what’s going on at the restaurant.”
“When we were talking about KPIs, you didn’t mention this,” Shannon observed.
“I have a few numbers that I track as they happen,” Mike agreed, “but I told you my accounting software generates reports for me. I was checking them when you kindly brought me this cup of tea.”
“You keep your accounting software on your laptop?”
“I keep it in the cloud, along with the rest of the management software I use. It’s all integrated, and if I have time in the evening to sort out some question or to get a quarterly report ready, I can pull it up at any internet connection.”
“Must be great if you’re stuck in an airport.”
“You know it.” Mike took Shannon’s hand. “I’m not sure that this particular software would work for you, but there’s bound to be a program that’ll do what you want.”
“Maybe it would work for me,” Shannon said. “I have appointments — that’s like a reservation. Let me see.”
Mike pushed his laptop around. “This is a custom dashboard, which means that I told it what KPIs I wanted to watch. That’s a radar chart. It’s good for showing how different kinds of data work together. Like if you plotted no-shows and revenue you might find that there’s a strong inverse relationship between no-shows and revenue.”
“And then if I included whether I might see that there are more no-shows in the winter.”
“Right. And then you might decide to bring in an extra technician just for the warmer months or to require payment in advance during the holidays or something.”
Shannon laughed.
“Okay, maybe not exactly that. I didn’t have time to prepare.” Mike returned to the screen. “This is a trend chart — it shows me that our set-price menu is getting more popular over time. Maybe you have trends you wouldn’t notice without having the data. If things change gradually, it’s easy to miss it.”
“What’s this one?”
“That’s a histogram,” Mike said. “It’s a special kind of bar chart that shows distributions. So I can see the most popular desserts right now, and that helps me make the right number of servings of each.”
“Wow. I had no idea you were this organized.”
“The profit margin for restaurants is not large,” Mike pointed out. “The reason mine is successful is that I really pay attention to these things. Better data means less waste and more profit.”
“I’m sold,” said Shannon, gathering their mugs. “Now I just have to find something that works with a physical therapy practice.”
Can a chart about desserts inspire Shannon to find a solution for her physical therapy practice?
Disclaimer: For HIPAA compliance, all characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.
For Shannon, a dashboard is just the thing to present practice data in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-interpret format. From there, she can use the data to make informed decisions in a timely manner — something that’s absolutely essential for a successful practice.
Spreadsheets are a thing of the past, a comprehensive dashboard that updates with every keystroke by any member of your staff through out the day; that is just fantastic!