Physical Therapy Software | How to Estimate Your Real Visit Documentation Costs
If you are trying to increase the profitability of your physical therapy practice only by adding new patients you may find yourself suffering from increased anxiety at the end of the month.
Although patients are the lifeline of your business, you also need to focus on increasing your efficiency along with your patient flow. But before you can make any kind of improvements to your practice performance with physical therapy software or other tools, you need to determine the status quo.
One of the Key Performance Indicators for your practice performance is documentation. Do you know how much your current physical therapy documentation software is really costing you aside from the fees charged for usage or purchase price? Since you are only getting paid for seeing patients, every minute you spent on documenting a visit results in lost income. As a result, the fees for your physical therapy software dwarf when you compare them to the real cost of your documentation.
It is important to know exactly how much income your practice is losing due to time spent on physical therapy documentation. If you replace the assumptions below with your own numbers you can calculate your estimated documentation loss per month, just like in the following example.
Assumptions:
- Your average monthly revenue: $20,000.
- Your average patient visits per month: 280.
- Your monthly hours of operation: 180.
- Your average documentation time per patient: 10 minutes.
Calculations:
- Your average time per visit: 180 hours/ 280 visits = 39 minutes
- Time with patient: 39 minutes – 10 minutes= 29 minutes
- Your efficiency: 29 minutes/39 minutes = 74%
- Your hourly value: $20,000/(180 hours x 74%) = $150
- Total Monthly documentation time: 280 visits x 10 minutes = 47 hours
- Monthly value of 47 hours spent with patients: $150 x 47 hours = $7,000
- Annual documentation time: 47 hours x 12 = 560 hours
=>Annual loss due to documentation: Hourly pay x # of annual documentation hours:
$150 x 560 = $84,000
So if your practice is generating $20,000 in income per month and it currently takes you 10 minutes to document one visit, you are essentially losing $84,000 a year. Over ten years, that’s $840,000 in missed opportunity! If you need help figuring out the real cost of your current physical therapy documentation software you can request an Individual Practice Evaluation here to get help from one of bestPT’s profitability specialists.
