How to quantify your physical therapy practice potential in 5 steps
If you have been struggling with making your physical therapy dream practice a reality, you can discover what has been holding you back using bestPT’s Opportunity Analysis. Comparing your practice’s current performance stats in five key areas with possible improvements will reveal the full income potential, weakly performing areas, and potential savings in fees.
The numbers will basically show you which key areas of your practice need improvement so that you can develop a SMART plan with specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based goals. This can save you a lot of frustration typically resulting from lack of control and feedback.
Best PT’s Opportunity Analysis evaluates Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in five key areas of your physical therapy practice:
1. Documentation Time
2. Billing Performance
3. Patient Relationship Management
4. Administrative Overhead
5. Claims Processing
1. Documentation Time
Starting with the Documentation Time, you can find out how much money you are losing by spending too much time on your physical therapy documentation. If you are like most other physical therapists, you would probably rather spend more time with your patients or family than catch up on paperwork in your well deserved free time. An easy improvement for this issue would be switching to a better-performing EMR system so you can reduce your documentation time while increasing your profitability and happiness.
2. Billing Performance
Losing sleep over the cash flow of your physical therapy practice can be extremely stressful, especially if you have no way of tracking unpaid and underpaid claims. Your Physical Therapy Billing Performance evaluation shows you how long it takes for your claims to get paid by calculating the AR percentage past 120 days. Needless to say, your practice’s cash flow is directly impacted by the amount of outstanding, unpaid claims. As such, you can improve your physical therapy billing performance and sleep better with an optimized claims processing system that detects errors before you even submit them to the payers.
3. Patient Relationship Management
Lack of feedback from your patients can create a lof anxiety as it leaves you clueless about potential issues affecting your patient flow. Analyzing your Patient Relationship Management paints a clear picture about your practice’s growth. By looking at how many no-shows as well as how many new patients your physical therapy practice sees on a monthly and annual basis you can determine your current patient flow. You can then eliminate your anxiety by fixing any existing problems with patient education tools and patient alerts.
4. Administrative Overhead
Do you feel frustrated with your practice management performance? If your staff is out of control while your Administrative Overhead expenses exceed your monthly collection you will definitely need to make some drastic changes. Using physical therapy software with a built-in task management system that encourages teamwork can restore order and improve practice performance.
5. Claims Processing
Is the price you are paying for your physical therapy billing staff right? Or do you worry that you might be paying too much while the majority of your claims seem to end up unpaid or underpaid? The Claims Processing analysis evaluates how much you pay your physical therapy billing personnel and how many of your claims require follow up with the payers. It’s safe to say that there might be room for improvement if a large portion of your claims are underpaid or denied in spite of any follow-up efforts from your billing person. BestPT’s Claims Scrubber can restore your peace of mind by detecting any claims errors before you submit them to the payers
Without this Opportunity Analysis you will never really know which KPIs are affecting your practice’s performance– and ultimately, your physical therapy practice will never reach its full potential. Needless to say, not knowing your practice’s weaknesses or potential areas for improvement will set you up for failure in an uphill battle against the insurance companies.
Granted, you may not be able to control all variables that affect your physical therapy billing performance, such as fickle patients or denied claims. But you can put yourself in the driver’s seat and take your physical therapy practice to new heights by comparing and contrasting current and potential future numbers. Essentially, your dream practice is only an Opportunity Analysis away.
How to use it?
1. Current bestPT clients: Request Opportunity Analysis from your SPOC
2. If you are not yet using bestPT software, simply schedule your Initial Practice Evaluation via web form here.
