Practice Viability Index™

Welcome to the Practice Viability Index™
for Private Practice Physical Therapists!

Evaluate 9 key areas of your practice and identify your strengths and weaknesses.

What do we mean by "viability" in regards to your practice?
Random House Dictionary defines "viable" as having the ability to grow, expand, develop, etc. There are several factors that can inhibit the viability of a practice and limit its ability to grow, expand or develop. We isolated 6 key areas in any practice that if mastered, your practice will be viable and able to sustain any storm.

EFFECTIVE MARKETING THAT LEADS TO NEW PATIENTS
This is commonly a weak area for most practitioners. Most practice owners only get involved with any marketing efforts when the patient visits plummet. Establishing effective and routine actions in this area can markedly increase your ability to grow, expand and develop your practice and improve its overall viability.

EFFICIENT SCHEDULING
Let’s say you can drive in the patients but you also are kicking them out the door as fast as they come in. There could be no real changes in patient volume. Are patients keeping their appointments? What do you do when they complain about their co-pay and wish to come in less? Does the PT control the scheduling compliance or does your receptionist? We commonly see practices losing greater than 80K a year due to scheduling inefficiency. It’s fairly easy to get far better control of this area and doing so can markedly improve your viability score.

INTELLIGENT BILLING PRACTICES
There is much that can be said about this area. PTs that are not up-to-date on reimbursement issues and effective coding are providing in many cases, free services. Sometimes it is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks when it comes to coding but if you are billing like you did 5 years ago you definitely are adversely affecting your viability score. Insurance companies know the codes most PTs use and commonly try to not pay for those combinations. I once helped a PT get greater than $56 MORE per visit by simply looking at his code reimbursement and asking him if there was another way to treat a shoulder impingement than what he usually does. Be very alert on what you are charging. Uneducated PTs could be costing you a fortune.

MANAGED COLLECTIONS ACTIONS
Years ago you could bill it and about 30 days later you’d be paid and with significantly less hassles. Those days are over. Sometimes the difference between profit and loss lies in the management of your collections and the follow-up on ALL of the accounts. There are 8 areas in this area alone that if poorly managed will adversely affect your viability score.

PATIENT REFERRALS
This is a huge and largely untapped goldmine in your practice but very easy to improve. Have you ever seen a patient return to PT after being gone for a year or two? They usually pick up the conversation precisely where they left off when you discharged them. They tell you about the latest things with their family and they remember things you have told them about yours. They consider that they are your friend and they are. They could have sent you a patient but you didn’t know how to ask. Mastering this area can really expand a practice and thus your viability score.

PERSONNEL EFFICIENCY
Many of us do not hire people who are proven to be productive and once we hire them we spend too little time training them to succeed on their new job. This applies to new PTs or the administrative staff.
A practice that grows by only 50 patient visits a year will likely need to hire a new PT no more frequently than once a year. If you master the five areas above, you would definitely, have to hire a new PT possibly every 2 months. Weakness in your ability to pick the correct candidate and train them to be productive will greatly inhibit your viability score in the five areas. This also applies to hiring and training your administrative staff. An untrained receptionist who cannot get patients to keep their appointments or collect all the money due across the desk is worthless to you even if she can do everything else. An inefficient staff only makes YOU work that much harder.

The Practice Viability Index™ is a tool that can evaluate 9 key areas of your practice (6 areas represented here) and show you your strengths and weaknesses. This index score ranges from 0 to 850 and gives an objective rating of the strength of your practice. Clients are always astounded when I show them how to increase their patient volume even without any rise in new patients. It starts with a Practice Viability Index™ Evaluation.

Take 15 minutes right now and fill this out and send it in. We will go over the results in a webinar and show you some things you can do right away to improve your score. As an example I helped one practice owner increase his patient visits by 18 a week in a 150 patient visit practice. This increase he obtained in his patient visits equates to 76K a year in income without any rise in new patients. Just a few simple procedural actions can recover a small fortune.

We look forward to going over the results with you.

First, Last Name*
Company or Practice Name*
Address*
City, State, ZIP*
Phone*	(999) 999-9999
Email*	*=required fields.
Please select the choice that is most accurate for your situation: I am an owner of a physical therapy clinic I am an independent contractor therapist

Your information will be held in strictest confidence.