The Patient Referral Course: What is it all about?

by Shaun Kirk

If there were a way to suppress private practice PTs, how would you do it? Well, I thought about it recently and started to look at how things are compared to how things used to be. Back about eleven years ago when I had my practice I would get reimbursed about $116 a visit, my average physical therapist was paid about $30,000 less than the average physical therapist today, I saw 70 patient visits per week per clinician and was very profitable. Today the average private practice owner collects about $75 a visit and physical therapists are paid significantly more. There is also more administrative red tape then ever and there are certain government regulations that limit the number of patient visits that you can see in a period time, specifically with Medicare patients.

So, if there was a way to suppress the profession. I would think it is well underway. And that would be to reduce reimbursement while increasing the amount of paper work and driving salaries as high as possible.

How does one overcome this? That’s a very good question. One of the things we see more and more are patients who, due to ever increasing co-pays and deductibles, start modulating their own care. The patients will start cutting back on the frequency of service that they receive from physical therapy. I also see physical therapists rolling right along with it. Physical Therapists will meter out their care based upon the patient’s insurance plan or their ability to make that co-pay versus doing what’s right for the patient and seeing that the patient gets the service that will truly rehabilitate him or her.

Looking into how to overcome the suppression that is occurring in the field of physical therapy, we realized there were a couple of weak areas. One was in the area of getting patients better by not falling victim to insurance pressures. This requires the ability to push patients through by getting them to comply with their treatment program.

Sometimes you will see the practice owner who is extremely good at getting his or her own patients to keep their appointments and continue on through their care until they are well. They personally have a very high patient compliance rate and they discharge their patients versus that patient deciding on their own to reduce the amount or frequency of treatment.

We also found that many practice owners wish that the rest of their clinical staff and all of their staff for that matter were stronger in this area but don’t know how to do anything about it. That is why we developed the Patient Compliance Course. This course deals with specifically how to get a patient to complete his plan of care improve his or her condition no matter what. No matter what the out of pocket expense, no matter what the insurance situation is - no matter what.

It is important to know the skills necessary to “close” your patients on their treatment program. This is more important now than ever due to the rising co-pays and deductibles that the patient pays out of pocket.

In order to get the patient to complete their treatment program regardless of insurance issues, you have to believe that it is the correct program to handle their condition in terms of frequency and number of visits. I am sure you believe in the frequency of care or you wouldn’t recommend it. You really have to close them to receive that service and it is a technical skill. It is sales.

The Patient Compliance Course handles that.

Practice owners and physical therapists that have completed this course one for one stated that they have an increased ability in this area and they see that this fulfills to a large degree the purpose they had initially for becoming a physical therapist and that was to get people better and to help people. Now they can see that they can do it on a much broader scale.

What you find with patients who are happy with their care they want to give something back. When you have fixed them when others would have given up or let the patient control the care they never forget you. They want to help you but they don’t know how. These happy patients will generally bake you cookies or drop off some sort of gift for you at Christmas time but what’s also important is that they know people who need your help. These patients would like to refer business to you but they don’t know how. No one told them how.

That is where the Patient Referral Course comes in. The Patient Referral Course has as a prerequisite the Patient Compliance Course. The Patient Referral Course deals with what the physical therapist and the rest of the staff can do on a regular basis to increase the number of referrals coming directly from your patient base. As a competent clinician you see patients through their care and by doing so they want to refer their friends to you. It is another level of sales on how to get your patients to refer and refer their friends and family and in volume.

I once had a patient send me twenty-six patients in a three-month period and another patient sends me eighteen referrals within a four-month period.

How? Because I asked for it and I knew they would do it. You can too.

The Patient Referral Course deals with many things but one thing it truly deals with is that marketing is something that occurs across an entire organization and not in just one specific little area. It occurs organization wide. The Patient Referral Course deals with activities that the clinician can do, the administrative staff can do, and the Patient Representative can do. These things are very powerful tools that you can use to market your practice and create a magnate for more new patients generated by your current and past patients.

How does this help handle the suppression? You might wonder where I am heading on this so now I will tell you. The typical new patient you worked so hard to get into your practice by effective marketing and doing very good work and getting excellent word of mouth generally is not in your practice for the same number of visits to discharge as they used to years ago. Also the reimbursement per visit is lower as well. The health care is metered out but the amount of effort necessary to get that new patient remains the same. So if you can get a new patient into your practice that gets the concept that they must replace themselves with another patient. Simply put, that patient needs to refer somebody just one person.

If you can get a high percentage of your patients to refer just one new patient in the door you've made up for all the weaknesses that are present with the current economic climate that lessens the number of visits that you are allowed to see with that patient due to insurance suppression. New patients comes in and get treated by pushing them through their program using the Patient Compliance Course data regardless of their out of pocket or insurance issues. Those patients will be happy. That patient is glad you cared enough to push them through. That patient wants to refer. The Patient Referral Course deals precisely with how to handle that.

It is a package. The Patient Referral Course although valuable is not as powerful without the sales data underneath your belt. That’s why the Patient Compliance Course comes first. I hope this data was helpful to you and pushes you in the right direction and gets you to see the value of this overall service.