Physical Therapy Software | Improve Patient Retention with Care Plans
Are you worried about paying next month’s bills because your patients don’t show up for their appointments? If your patients are noncompliant with your prescribed care plans, you cannot predict the cash flow at your physical therapy practice. What’s even worse is that your patients won’t get better.
Without consistent patient flow your practice cannot grow or be profitable. But unfinished care plans can also cause compliance issues and hurt your cash flow even further when you have to return payments. You can figure out just how much money your practice might be losing due to unfinished or unused care plans. Simply replace the assumptions below with your own practice numbers and complete the calculations.
For example:
Assumptions:
- 1 visit = $89
- 1 care plan = 10 visits
- Average number of no-shows per care plan: 5
Calculations: Potential income and losses from unfinished care plans per patient:
- Potential income from 1 care plan: 10 visits x $89 = $890
- Potential loss from no-shows per care plan: 5 visits x $89 = $445
Conclusion: You risk losing half of your income when patients don’t finish their treatment plans!
Identifying patients who don’t understand  the need for multiple visits to achieve their health goals is easier said than done, however. You really need to know what the entire plan looks like in order to track multiple visits. For instance, you need to track any patient that goes through a traditional  treatment step-down ladder, such as four visits per week for the first four weeks, then three visits per week for the next three weeks, and so on. Such unique nuances on many patient schedules are difficult to track manually, and this difficulty grows dramatically with each added care plan. Not to mention, tracking the respective discounts given for each care plan is nearly impossible without a tool.
Thousands of care plans are created for new patients every month to schedule multiple appointments and then track all payments and visits with your bestPT EHR software. When patients don’t show up for their appointments you can receive automated alerts on your physical therapy software workbench. You can also receive alerts via tickets when patients don’t have a future appointment scheduled or when they cancel their existing appointments. That way you can assign your staff the task of scheduling the next appointment. Another useful tool for helping your patients stay on track with their care plans are appointment reminders sent via phone, text, or email. bestPT physical therapy software has integrated several apps which serve this purpose.
To set up care plans when your patients come into your practice, simply go to bestPT’s Scheduler and click on the “More” tab to open the wizard. You can also create a full care plan from the patient account. Make sure you turn on the settings in your bestPT physical therapy software for Patient Relationship Management and Reminders.
