5 Practical Business Tips PTs an Apply Today to Improve Their Practice

Just like any business, PT practice owners need to stay on top of fast-paced market conditions and constantly-changing compliance requirements. PTs juggle these while making sure that their patients on rehabilitation and therapy progress towards optimum functionality and mobility.

1. Healthy Business Mindset = Healthy Practice

Physical Therapists are business owners. If business management skills are crucial in running successful businesses, practice management is as important for clinicians. Physical Therapists should be: aware of the costs of patient care, marketing their practice and developing their business, monitoring and managing business performance metrics, and employing best practices when it comes to billing and collection. Without a practical (if not a strong) business and financial acumen, PTs are bound to fail in growing their practice.

2. Patient Care is Customer Care

How do Physical Therapists stay ‘in practice’ (ergo ‘in business)? The key is excellent patient experience. In any business, the customer is king. When Physical Therapists extend the kind of attention and care fit for kings, the outcome is positive. When the outcomes are positive, patients either refer other people, and they stay happy customers. The intrinsic value of effective communication and responsiveness to patient needs and conditions naturally becomes the catalyst for building not just the PT’s reputation but growing his practice as well.

3. The Quality of Your Treatment is Your Brand Leadership.

When PTs advocate their practice and their profession, they help inform, educate and create an experience that defines their craft. Rehabilitation, healing and physical therapy affect their patients’ overall quality of life. PTs will do well to invest their time in their community of practitioners and make multiple channels and touchpoints to continue engaging, supporting and adding value for other people through treatment-specific, industry-specific conversations.

4. Fact-based versus Price-Sensitive Treatment

One principle of business management is objectivity. Measurable results should be the ethos of any Physical Therapy practice. Treatments based on patient history, response to treatment, etc. make sound and effective care plans and decisions.

5. Getting Paid Fast Isn’t Easy but It Isn’t Impossible

The first to get hit by slow or low reimbursements or outright claims denials is the PT Clinician’s business bottom line. To stay in business, clinics need to have a health cash flow. Paperwork is only the tip of the iceberg. When practice owners neglect the management of billing and collection, the revenue cycle is disrupted or worse, the business’ cash flow goes down the payment downward spiral. No PT practitioner wants to watch his nightmarish stack of claims denials continue to rise.