PT Clinic Control 5 | People, Process, and Technology
 Work Smarter, Not Harder
By Chris Martin
A physical therapy practice owner must get used to thinking about his or her time in terms of revenues and costs, and a successful enterprise must generate more revenue than costs. The top three reasons for sub-optimal practice performance are problems in any of the components of the service: namely, process, people, and technology. When the physical therapy practice owner neglects any one of them or fails to operate all three of them correctly, the practice starts bleeding cash.
[youtube_video] 9KZo5OdqnyI [/youtube_video]
Control is the key. The people component is about control, and it starts with the owner.
Control is also the most important part of technology – and it too starts with the owner. Control is always about your ability to make changes to your process, people, and technology so that you are on track to accomplishing your long term financial goals for the practice.
If your technology does not support your processes and your people, and if you are unable to customize it, to tweak it every time when you make a change to your processes or your staff, then your technology will impede you and prevent you from reaching your goals.
Next, practice owners’ time is the most expensive component of their practice. Obviously, when they spend that time seeing patients, they maximize their value; and when they write notes, they reduce their value.
The cost of visit physical therapy documentation is much higher than just the cost of the SOAP system because it takes YOUR time to document. You need to compute the cost of writing a SOAP note. Actually, you need to compute the cost of writing all your SOAP notes for the next ten years.
Process optimization puts it all together. This highly effective process results in a “working smarter not harder†atmosphere.
