January 2020

Physical therapy is experiencing a boom. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of physical therapists is expected to grow 34% by 2024 compared to 10 years prior. While this is great for the field as a whole, and great for patients who need the help of a therapist, it also results in a competitive marketplace. Patients in need of physical therapy have more options than ever before, including hospital departments, dedicated inpatient rehabilitation facilities and outpatient clinics. 

Patients who have been admitted to the hospital because of injury or illness and who have received treatments up to and including major surgery can receive significant benefits by getting this care sooner rather than later. Physical therapy can help jump-start the recovery process by getting joints and soft tissue mobilized and blood flowing.

Importance of strategic development for physical therapy 

As a hospital leader and stakeholder in your facility’s physical therapy program, it’s critical to have a clear strategic growth plan to remain competitive. From expanded service offerings to staff planning, you not only need to know how you’re going to grow, but who this strategy is for. 

Here are three of the most important groups to consider when developing a strategic growth plan for your physical therapy department:

1. Your current patients — Like much medical care, physical therapy is something that most people don’t think about until they need it. Physical therapy services should reflect your patient profile to increase utilization. Additionally, the patients under your care should have an awareness and understanding of their treatment options. 
2. Potential patients — An effective strategy should also focus on building awareness among the general public about the benefits of inpatient physical therapy for hospital patients. This can be accomplished through community outreach, educational opportunities and marketing efforts. 
3. Your internal staff — It’s critical for your other service lines, from physicians to nurses, to understand how physical therapy interfaces with the care process. Strategic growth for your department should be a comprehensive organizational effort that stresses education and encourages buy-in from your entire staff. 

Due to the highly specialized nature of physical therapy, many hospitals turn to the expertise of a dedicated organization to assist them in developing a strategic growth plan.

Alliance Physical Therapy Partners can help you 

Alliance Physical Therapy Partners offers a wide range of services for hospital physical therapy programs, including strategic support and growth planning. We have decades of industry-focused experience and can help understand the needs of your hospital and your patients to develop the right strategy for your physical therapy department. 

Want to learn more about how we can help? Contact us today and ask for an assessment of your program by one of our clinical leadership team members. 

You’re looking for assistance in building or developing your hospital’s physical therapy department, so you’ve decided to work with a consultant. However, to ensure the relationship is collaborative and productive from the beginning, you want a solid idea of what exactly a physical therapy consulting service will be looking for. 

Any physical therapy consultant should represent an organization with solid industry experience in inpatient care. By identifying areas of opportunity and offering practical solutions, you and your new partners can work together to achieve both exceptional patient care and operational excellence. 

A physical therapy department assessment should look at these areas

To establish a baseline understanding of your current program and to begin developing a strategy, physical therapy consulting services should explore your: 

1. Training and development programs — Training and continuing education are just as important as having the right people, and they can help you keep them. 
2. Charting and documentation practices — These should be fully audited to ensure that they are compliant with current regulations. 
3. Billing and revenue cycle practices — Reducing billing errors can be one of the easiest ways to increase revenue. 
4. Therapy management software — Outmoded systems can slow your whole department down and create duplicate work. 
5. Expansion plans — A consultant can identify new service offerings and treatments that can benefit your facility based on your patient profile. 
6. Staffing needs — Your therapists are the backbone of your program. By working together, you and your consultant can identify your staffing goals and optimal levels to develop an action plan.

At Alliance Physical Therapy Partners, our experienced team of consultants will take an in-depth look at these and other areas and help you develop a customized strategy. 

Alliance has industry-leading physical therapy consulting services

We’ve established a track record for long-term, collaborative and successful relationships with hospitals of all sizes, budgets and locations. From urban to rural, we understand that all patients deserve the same level of care. 

To learn more about our services, contact us today. We’ll be glad to help you schedule an evaluation with one of our friendly consultants to identify your unique needs.

Succeeding in health care often means walking on a tightrope. Patients always come first, but delivering that care requires meeting incredibly stringent regulations, constantly shifting billing practices and ensuring staff efficiency seemingly down to the minute. This applies just as much to the realm of physical, speech and occupational therapy services as it does to other service lines. 

Providing high-quality therapy services to your patients can have a host of benefits to your facility, provided your program is managed properly. To help fully utilize these advantages, hospital leaders can turn to an experienced organization with a dedicated focus in physical, speech and occupational therapy. However, not all providers are the same. By finding a company that’s the right fit for you, you’ll be able to work together to realize your goals. 

What a therapy services provider brings to the table

A therapy services company can introduce important changes to your program, including streamlined workflows, strategic development, expanded service recommendations and compliance support, among others. By working together to fully build your program’s potential, you can improve your ability to achieve these important benefits: 

1. Increased patient satisfaction — Patients who receive physical, speech or occupational therapy services from a qualified and caring provider tend to have positive outcomes and decreased readmission rates. 
2. Increased revenue — Improving your therapy services operations can result in fewer billing errors, new billable service offerings and other benefits that help you increase contributions to your facility. 
3. Decreased overhead — From eliminating unneeded in-house administrative work to saving time, the right partner can streamline your expenses. 

A therapy services company should help you achieve this through open communication, a personalized approach and proven practices that are backed by decades of industry experience. 

Alliance Physical Therapy Partners can help you 

Alliance Physical Therapy Partners brings more than 50 years of dedicated experience in physical, occupational and speech therapy management services. More than just a therapy contract services company, we believe in building long-lasting relationships with our partners that are built on trust. 

We’re happy to provide a comprehensive assessment of your therapy program to determine how we can best serve you. Contact us today to learn more. 

Everyone, from rural to urban, deals with limited resources has to deal with limited resources. If you’re a hospital executive with a hand in managing your facility’s physical therapy department, it can definitely feel like every penny and minute counts. While this can make it seem easy to discount physical therapy as a “nonessential” service, managed properly, it can have a profound impact on patient satisfaction and even be a significant positive contributor to your balance sheet. 

As an allied health profession, this discipline has a specialized set of best practices, regulations and workflows that must be implemented properly in order to get the most out of your physical therapy resources. For this reason, a large number of hospitals join with an organization that is focused on physical therapy services. This allows for the development of solutions that can scale to any size facility and budget but are backed by the expertise and resources of a large, specialized organization. 

Experience and expertise for better resource management

To truly streamline operations and get the most out of the time, personnel and other resources in your physical therapy program, here are some tips: 

1. Hire the right people — Talented and caring staff with the right work ethic are the backbone of an efficient department.
2. Emphasize long-term development — Staff turnover can be one of the biggest drains on your resources. 
3. Implement efficient workflows — If there are unnecessary steps that don’t provide better patient care, they should be identified and phased out. 
4. Minimize billing and documentation errors — These are often low-hanging fruit but can be a significant drain on revenue or even result in costly fines. 
5. Update your systems — Outmoded and incompatible systems can result in lost time and even unneeded task duplication. 

At Alliance Physical Therapy Partners, we’ve built long-lasting relationships with hospitals and hospital networks that are built on solid communication, mutual respect and making every effort to fully maximize your physical therapy resources. We’ve been successfully implementing changes such as the ones above for years. 

Learn how to schedule your assessment 

Interested in learning more about how we can help you? We’d love to talk to you and discuss how we can perform an in-depth evaluation of your program to identify the solutions that are right for you. Contact us today.

Administering a physical therapy department that meets patient needs while also meeting the ever-tightening budgetary constraints faced by hospitals today is no small task. Whether you’re a large facility in an urban area or a critical access hospital that is more remotely located, your patients deserve the same level of care. However, for executives who have to manage multiple service lines without a therapy-specific background, physical therapy programs can be especially challenging. 

While one potential solution is using an independent contractor physical therapist, there are other options. Leveraging the resources, experience and knowledge of an organization that specializes in physical therapy can provide a whole range of key advantages, including the ability to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. 

What the right physical therapy partner can do for you

How can a therapy partner help your facility overcome obstacles and reach critical objectives? In these important ways: 

• Assessing your program — From identifying opportunities for improved efficiency to expansion of services, a physical therapy partner should always start with a comprehensive evaluation. 
• Performing compliance and billing support functions — Staying within regulatory bounds and receiving full and timely reimbursement from payers requires highly specialized knowledge and resources. 
• Providing staffing support — Physical therapy organizations can provide access to top recruiting networks and help you prioritize staffing needs. 

If your goals are increased patient satisfaction, increased efficiency, increased revenue and decreased expenses for your physical therapy program, you need a committed partner who shares and knows how to achieve them. While an independent contractor physical therapist can help in the short term, a dedicated physical therapy organization can help you achieve long-term success. 

Alliance Physical Therapy Partners

For our growing family of hospital partners across the country, Alliance Physical Therapy Partners brings more than 50 years of industry expertise to the table. Our range of services can be customized to any size facility and budget to help provide better patient outcomes while meeting operational requirements. We also offer proprietary management software that is designed to interface with all major EMR systems. 

To schedule your initial assessment with one of our experts to identify areas of opportunity in your program, contact us today.

Running an operationally sound hospital — that still provides exceptional patient care — requires particular attention to revenue integrity in the modern environment. Ensuring that your facility receives full reimbursement for the services delivered to patients is more complex than it’s ever been before. For physical therapy, this highly specialized field can come with unique billing management challenges that can begin to take on an outsized role for hospital leadership.

This is why many facilities enlist the support of a dedicated organization with the knowledge and resources to help navigate the reimbursement maze faced by many inpatient physical therapy programs. 

Benefits of physical therapy billing support 

Instead of using internal time and personnel in a field that often doesn’t match their background and training, the right partner can help your hospital’s physical therapy billing services in the following ways: 

• Training and development — By helping your staff understand the documentation and billing practices that properly bill for services rendered to patients, they can put these practices into place on a daily basis. 
• Streamlining processes — A partner can help identify systems and workflows that are slowing down billing services and potentially leading to errors. 
• Providing proprietary systems — The right therapy management software can increase your billing efficiency while decreasing your overhead. 

While knowledge and resources are fundamental, it can be just as important to work with a provider that values relationships and truly believes in developing individualized action plans for each hospital. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach can lead to issues ranging from a lack of staff buy-in to implementing changes that aren’t right for a facility’s size or patient profile. The right partner should place an emphasis on long-term goals and the steps to get your hospital there. 

The Alliance difference

At Alliance Physical Therapy Partners, we’re proud to have developed decades-long relationships with hospitals because we treat our partners like family. From billing support to strategic management, we’ll work to understand the challenges facing your program and develop proven solutions for success. 

Want to learn more? Contact us today and we can schedule an in-depth assessment of your department to determine the right strategy for you. 

In terms of improving patient satisfaction and outcomes for a wide range of patient needs, physical therapy plays an essential part of care. From helping the body start the healing process after an injury or surgery to beginning to regain basic range of motion, patients who receive physical therapy during a hospital stay receive a number of specific benefits. 

To ensure that therapists are able to effectively perform this function, it is the job of hospital leaders to deliver physical therapy administration and management that drives efficiency and helps maintain cost effectiveness. Balancing operations with the need for best patient care is at the heart of any hospital leader’s job and this particularly applies to physical therapy. 

A physical therapy services partner can help you in these key areas

The highly specialized nature of physical therapy administration and management is the reason why many hospitals elect to work with a dedicated organization. Working with a partner gives hospitals the ability to leverage the knowledge and resources of a provider that works exclusively in this area. 

Some of the most important administrative and operational areas a physical therapy partner can help your hospital with include: 

• Workflow assistance — A specialized partner can help implement proven practices to streamline your departmental practices and better interface with patients and other hospital staff. 
• Compliance support — Physical therapy management and administration partners have the specialized knowledge needed to stay in line with industry regulations.
• Program expansion — Making important decisions regarding adopting new services in a profitable capacity can be easier with the right help. 
• Recruiting and development — A specialized partner can also provide access to talent networks and best practices in training and staff development. 

Find out how Alliance can help you 

At Alliance Physical Therapy Partners, we bring more than 50 years of industry-specific experience to the table. We serve hospitals large and small, urban and rural, with trusted and proven physical therapy management and administration services. To find out how we can help you, reach out to us today. We’ll be happy to provide a thorough assessment of your program to help determine the solutions that will help you. 

Hospital administration brings a number of unique challenges in the modern health care landscape. New services, changing patient needs and an increasingly complex regulatory environment are just a few examples of the priorities that leaders have to effectively juggle. All of this should ultimately be in the service of delivering exceptional care that gets patients back to health and functioning while minimizing the chances of costly readmission.

Physical, speech and occupational therapy services provided on an inpatient basis can be a critical aspect of ensuring positive patient outcomes. Since therapy services are a highly specialized field, many hospitals partner with a therapy service provider to help develop an effective strategy for clinical and operational efficiency. 

How to develop a healthy partnership with your therapy service provider

Every hospital is different, from size and location to patient profile and service offerings, which is why relationships play such a crucial role in the realm of therapy service providers. Here are a few tips to help you select a high-quality organization and develop an effective working relationship when searching for the right partner for your hospital:

• Communicate clearly and openly about your goals and areas of opportunity for your program. 
• Speak with other service line representatives, such as physicians and nurses, in your hospital about what they are looking for from a therapy services program. Make sure they are involved in the process from the beginning to maximize organizational buy-in. 
• Look for therapy service providers with comprehensive support and solutions, including regulatory expertise, access to recruiting resources and proprietary workflow systems.

Above all, trust your instincts on a personal level. Just like adding someone to your internal team, a therapy service provider should feel like an extension of your facility and take a collaborative approach to helping your program achieve administrative and patient care objectives. 

Alliance Physical Therapy Partners values our relationships 

We’re an industry-leading therapy provider that has helped hospitals increase efficiencies, offering service breadth and revenue while reducing the burden that comes with managing staff. Our primary mission is to create a productive partnership that meets your hospital’s needs while taking financial and clinical performance to a higher level. 

Want to learn more about our decades of experience? Contact us today. We’ll be happy to provide a full assessment of your current program to help you determine your needs.