Floor to ceiling televisions on each wall, rows of silent box houses, and replicants replacing my friends? Okay, okay… clearly my imagination gets the best of me from time to time. Fahrenheit 451 and Blade Runner are a bit too fresh on my mind. Realistically, though, it’s easy to feel cynical about the future of in-person interaction given the current state of our world. By the time we can return to “normal,” will everyone have decided that it’s easier to remain remote?
On the other hand, technology has been instrumental in bringing us together during this time. As I mourned my inability to be with loved ones this spring, I reflected on those who, years ago, sent their loved ones off to war without any way to communicate in real time… often not knowing if their loved ones would even return.
Today, we have the ability not only to speak from afar in real-time, but to see each other’s faces, coordinate scheduling, and conduct appointments.
Enter telehealth.
Telehealth has arrived and is here to stay. Thankfully, the emergence of telehealth brings with it an abundance of new opportunity, the greatest of which is arguably the ability to serve individuals in rural communities. Without telehealth, patients in rural communities must often travel long distances if they wish to see a physical therapist.
This deters the receipt of care to begin with, and limits the frequency of engagement for those who do choose to receive care. Telehealth breaks through geographical barriers, opening the door to a new market for traditional physical therapy practices.
In addition to HIPAA-compliant telehealth, PtEverywhere.com equips therapy service providers across the globe with cloud-based scheduling, documentation, billing, and home exercise programming tools to enhance both the effectiveness of patient outcomes and of the practice’s bottom line.
Organization and efficiency foster optimal time management and, as follows, the potential to take on more patients and grow one’s practice. What else? More patients and less admin time — not to mention decreased overhead costs associated with remote and traveling practices — afford physical therapists the ability to serve patients at a lower cost.
For cash-based practices especially, providing the highest quality care at a fair and competitive price proves essential to creating a competitive advantage and sustaining continuous practice growth.
In these challenging and ever-fluctuating times, we hope you too will employ PtEverywhere to drive and blossom your therapy practice. We may be unable to dictate our circumstances, but we can certainly dictate our response. Through innovation and connectedness, we will emerge stronger on the other side.
