You’re several months into the running of your physical therapy practice, busting your butt, but just not seeing the growth or revenue you imagined.
Or maybe for you it’s been longer… you experienced booming growth up front but more recently, progress has plateaued. Whichever way it may be, this post is for you! Here are 5 reasons your PT practice isn’t generating revenue:
1. You aren’t realizing your efficiency times.
What time of day do you work best at? I am a serious morning person and have usually exhausted most of my mental capacity by about 2pm. Because of this, I choose to get my “think-heavy” tasks done early in the day, saving my more social and physical tasks for the afternoon.
Not only does this help me to maximize my productivity and efficiency, it gives me a much-needed mental break when I hit my afternoon slump.
Determine when you best perform different types of work and put this knowledge to use! You will likely get more done, and feel better while you’re doing it.
2. You are wearing too many hats in one day.
Wearing too many hats in one day creates yet another efficiency problem. It is difficult to produce the optimal quality of work when you’re requiring your brain to jump back and forth between too many subjects in a given day.
Rather than cramming to-dos between your clients, attempt to segregate your tasks by day so each receives your full attention. For example, you may have three days per week when you see patients and two when you handle practice management and marketing tasks.
Your newfound presence of mind will likely be observed and appreciated by your clients, increasing their overall satisfaction!
If this degree of separation is not feasible for you, try block scheduling. Simply dedicating specific hours to specific tasks can create a ton of mental organization and productive capacity. For more on this, listen to Danny Matta’s podcast on “Two Ways to Improve Efficiency Today.”
3. You lack clear physical therapy management systems.
Effective systems are the key to shifting staff reliance away from the owner, directly to pre-established methods and procedures.
This reason is simple, but often overlooked. Any well-oiled machine is reliant on replicable systems that all components either fit into or adhere to. Concrete systems produce consistency which helps to both manage patient expectations and increase satisfaction.
4. Your PT clinic staff aren’t adhering to the systems you have in place.
It’s one thing to have systems in place and an entirely different thing to have adherence to the systems in place. Often, simply telling your staff to follow your systems is not enough to produce consistency.
Guide your staff gently through the systems you’ve created and illustrate the problems that arise when systems are not followed.
Helping your staff understand why you do things the way that you do will help spark intrinsic motivation and avoid feelings of constraint. Breakthrough’s “5 Steps for Empowering Physical Therapy Staff to Help Scale your Practice” takes you step-by-step through this process!
5. You aren’t tracking your patient outcomes.
Outcomes tracking is instrumental to PT practice growth, as it puts concrete numbers to the successes and trajectory of your business. Outcomes tracking allows you to employ evidence to remedy weak points and increase your quality of care.
Additionally, outcomes tracking provides physical therapists with tangible means of demonstrating to payers the value of what they are receiving. This can build and reinforce PT-first pathways with payers, encouraging them to seek out PT care before options such as prescription opioids and invasive procedures.
We hope this post will help guide you in your troubleshooting! Learn how PtEverywhere can help you increase your efficiency, chart your outcomes, and grow your PT practice.
