Physician Groups


Physical Therapy Practice Management
for Physician Groups

To remain competitive in the face of declining payments and escalating costs, physician groups must expand services and maximize ancillary income. PTM helps physician groups establish and optimize the performance of physical and hand therapy programs.

PTM provides comprehensive support for PT/OT programs. Whether you are considering the start-up of a new therapy practice or seeking to improve your existing practice, you can count on PTM’s expertise and experience to help you develop and manage a successful PT/OT practice that meets your patient needs and business objectives.

Start-Up

PT Program Start-Up

PTM has an exemplary track record of helping physician groups successfully add profitable ancillary PT/OT practices. Physical therapy practice management and practice start-up services include:

  • Feasibility Studies – Recognizing that every physician group is unique, PTM determines whether adding ancillary PT/OT can benefit your patients, and how to do it in a way that fits your practice’s needs while generating a healthy return on investment.
  • Facility Search – PTM helps determine how much space is necessary, helps find the ideal location, assists in lease negotiation, and then works with you to design and build-out a clinic that will ensure maximum patient and staff satisfaction.
  • PT Staffing – PTM’s specialized recruiting team helps physician groups recruit the optimal mix of skilled therapy providers and support staff, and offer a competitive compensation package that includes incentive compensation plans to encourage both highly skilled care and productivity.
  • Equipment and Supplies – PTM helps you select and price the right PT/OT equipment and supplies.
  • Training and Education – PTM trains front desk staff to efficiently schedule patients, minimize cancellations and authorize care. Specialized training is provided on therapy billing and collection best practices, following up on insurance denials, and maximizing the submission of clean claims. PTM’s clinical team helps ensure that all therapists possess the clinical skills required for exceptional patient care.
  • Compliance – To ensure regulatory compliance in today’s complicated health care environment, PTM provides ongoing guidance and training on all relevant federal, state and local regulations, ensuring your rehab staff is aware of all compliance requirements.
  • EHR – PTM helps develop and refine electronic health record templates to ensure compliance with Medicare and other payer requirements, while minimizing provider and support staff time required for compliant documentation.
Management Support
We draw on our diverse expertise to help physician groups manage daily physical therapy and hand therapy operations and long-term strategic growth.

PTM’s practice management support services include:

  • Benchmarking for Physical/Occupational Therapy – Using our database of more than 5 million PT/OT visits and PT/OT financial and productivity metrics, we compare your PT/OT practice to similar practices to identify strengths and weaknesses, improve productivity and maximize income.
  • Human Resources/Recruiting – To deliver exemplary care while controlling staffing costs, PTM helps physician groups determine the optimal number and skill mix of therapists, assistants and aides and, more importantly, recruit and train the best candidates. To help build the best team, we help develop and implement incentive compensation and professional development programs designed to increase staff satisfaction and retention.
  • Contracting – PTM helps analyze PT/OT payment rates and negotiate higher rates. We also help monitor claims to ensure that groups are receiving full payment and effectively contesting denials.
  • Strategic Planning – PTM helps groups determine whether and how they can benefit from adding specialized therapy programs, such as fall prevention, wellness and sports performance programs. We also help evaluate whether the opening of one or more satellite clinics will help provide patients with more convenient access to your therapy services and provide an attractive return on your investment.
  • Compliance – PTM helps physician groups navigate federal, state and local laws and regulations, making sure clinical documentation, coding and billing consistently meet Medicare and other regulatory requirements.
  • Education/Training – To help increase productivity, optimize outcomes and boost profitability, PTM provides physical therapy practice management training to providers, support staff and billing staff. For example, communication and customer service training helps promote teamwork and improve the patient experience, while training front desk staff to efficiently schedule and authorize treatment allows therapists to focus on patient care.
  • Space/Equipment/Supplies – We have helped dozens of physician groups select clinic locations, negotiate leases, design clinic layouts, evaluate the need for satellite operations and purchase the right equipment at the lowest cost. And, because PTM leverages the purchasing power of all of its clients, each client can take advantage of volume discounts to reduce costs.
Assessment
Many physician groups have engaged us to conduct comprehensive assessments of ancillary physical therapy and hand therapy profitability, operations and regulatory compliance.



Financial – PTM can compare your individual PT/OT providers and practice to other physician-based physical therapy and hand therapy practices using national benchmarks to determine whether your group is maximizing PT/OT profits and, if not, where to focus improvement efforts.

Our financial assessment services include:

  • Projecting therapy revenue and profits based on reaching appropriate benchmarks.
  • Determining if your PT/OT providers are capturing the appropriate amount of charges per patient visit.
  • Analyzing payer contracts for profitability, and determining whether these contracts should be modified or terminated.
  • Determining whether provider base salaries and incentive packages are competitive and appropriately reward excellent care and effort.
  • Evaluating if provider productivity expectations should be modified and, if so, how.
  • Providing advice to physician shareholders on alternative methods of ancillary income allocation.
  • Providing concrete and practical recommendations on how a group can improve financial performance of its ancillary PT/OT program.

Clinical Operations – Taking patient visit levels and other factors into consideration, PTM determines your appropriate number of therapists, assistants, aides and patient service representatives. Other services provided to assess physical therapy clinical operations include: :

  • Determining whether therapists are appropriately and efficiently utilizing assistants, aides and other support staff.
  • Reviewing scheduling and authorization processes to increase patient access and minimize cancellations/no shows.
  • Assessing whether and how electronic documentation can be streamlined to both ensure compliance and increase provider productivity.
  • Measuring clinical outcomes and patient and physician satisfaction.
  • Determining whether the amount of provider time spent on tasks other than direct patient care is appropriate.
  • Evaluating the benefits and costs of adding satellite locations and extending hours.
  • Exploring the merits of adding specialty programs (e.g. vestibular, wellness or sports-related programs).

Compliance – PTM also performs PT/OT documentation and compliance audits that include:

  • Determining whether clinical documentation complies with Medicare and other applicable payer requirements.
  • Assessing whether therapists are correctly coding treatments and capturing all appropriate charges.
  • Determining whether your PT/OT providers and practice are in compliance with your state physical and occupational therapy practice acts.
  • Assessing the need for additional clinical, documentation or other types of training to improve compliance and documentation efficiency.
Revitalization
For a variety of reasons, ancillary physical therapy and hand therapy practices can lose money or generate much lower than average profits.

We help physician groups throughout the country substantially increase their physical and hand therapy profits using methods that never compromise patient care.

We work hand-in-hand with management and therapy staff to refocus efforts and create a formula for success that is tailored to the specific needs of the practice.

To help revitalize or turnaround a PT/OT program, we provide full management support services with an emphasis on the following tasks, resulting in increased profitability and improved outcomes.

  • Staffing – Securing the right mix of therapists and support staff, rewarding increased productivity and addressing underperformers to create a strong team with improved morale.
  • Education/Training – Upgrading the skills of current clinical and support staff, including technical skills such as documentation and coding, soft skills, such as communications and leadership, and clinical competencies, to elevate the caliber of team members and the practice as a whole, increasing physician confidence and referrals and patient satisfaction.
  • Finance and Operations – Improve charge capture and proper submission and follow-up on claims to increase revenue and profits.
  • Customer Satisfaction – Setting ambitious patient and physician satisfaction goals, and monitoring progress closely to ensure that targets are reached to promote continuous improvement.

By teaming with PTM to use our proven financial, operational, clinical and regulatory expertise, many physician groups have turned their physical and hand therapy practices into thriving, profitable ventures that physician groups and therapy staff can be proud of.
PT Benchmarking
PTM has one of the largest databases of outpatient physical and hand therapy provider productivity, visit and payment information with over 5 million visits. Every month, we continue to update this database by collecting and adding data on tens of thousands of visits.

PTM uses this database to generate benchmarks for the following therapy-specific metrics:

  • Procedures and work RVUs/provider work hour
  • Procedures and work RVUs/visit
  • Visits/day/provider
  • Visits/patient
  • Visits/week/FTE therapist
  • Payments/procedures and work RVU
  • Payments/visit
  • Payments/provider work hour
  • Payments/FTE provider
  • Initial evaluation cancellation rate
  • Follow-up visit cancellation rate
  • Gross payroll/procedure and wRVU
  • Profit margin

We compile and analyze data from each client’s PT/OT financial, practice management and payroll reports to provide a comparison of its therapy practice to other similar practices.

This analysis allows us to highlight each practice’s strengths and weaknesses and to address specific weaknesses.

PTM’s benchmarking analysis also includes each client’s projected PT/OT revenue, expenses and net income based on achieving appropriate provider productivity and expense benchmarks.