WORRIED ABOUT AN EMPTY SCHEDULE HEADING INTO THE HOLIDAYS AND NEW YEAR?

So often, this is a problem for many private practice physical therapy owners.  We got into owning our own practice to give us more free time to be with family, take up and enjoy some hobbies, and maybe even make a little more money if we were super lucky.

But what happens to often is that we get all caught up in the day to day of worrying about the schedule being full.  After all it is the schedule being full that drives whether the doors stay open, whether you can make payroll, whether you can hire that new staff member, and much more.  So, what is the real answer to keeping the schedule full?  Most of the time as owners we think that if we had lots of new patients all our problems would be solved.  But is that really true?  Do you know how many of your patients are?

• Discharging themselves?
• Being discharged early by your staff because of money issues?
• Being discharged early by your staff because the patient “doesn’t have the time for therapy anymore”?
• Cancelling their appointments and not rescheduling?
• Not attending the full plan of care as prescribed by the treating therapist.

1. SCHEDULE CONTROL.  Many of you are actually pretty good at “getting new patients” (heck I see so many things you can do on Facebook every day) but when push comes to shove, are we as good at  “keeping them” and truly helping them get to what in my office we now call a “SUCCESSFUL DISCHARGE”.  The main reason why most practices don’t do well at keeping their schedule full and their staff busy is that there is not a system or process for staff to follow when any of the above things happen.  Controlling your schedule means having someone “in charge” of it who knows exactly what they are supposed to do, how to get it done, and best of all GETS PATIETNS TO ARRIVE AS SCHEDULED AND COMPLETE THEIR FULL PLAN OF CARE.  This means that everyone must understand and get their “product” each day.  Their product is a patient who schedules their full plan of care and attends each appointment.  We always must know what our Arrival Rate metric / statistic is.  This tells us whether what we are doing is successful and getting us the outcome that we need and want.  It’s one thing to have the phone ringing all the time but are the patients showing up as a result.  Watch my white board Wednesday video to find out more about the Arrival Rate and what it is:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLgMyv4eJVY&t=13s
2. DON’T FORGET – ALL YOUR STAFF ARE SALESPEOPLE AND THEY NEED TO BE TRAINED TO SELL APPOINTMENTS.  Over the years of being a private practice owner I have found that training my staff (all of them) is the number one thing to help control the problem of an empty schedule.  Take a look at the first problem I listed above; Patients discharging themselves.  So, here is the scenario; one of your PT’s evaluates a patient, they are totally on board and they start coming to therapy.  The patient starts getting better and then next thing you know they start canceling a visit or two and like the flip of a switch they say something to the extent of “I think today is going to be my last day.  I’m felling pretty good and I’m going to just continue doing my exercises at home.  So, there it is.  A discharge at visit # 7 instead of your average length of a plan of care at visit # 12.  We will talk more about what the financial cost of those 5 lost visits is in another blog but for now that means you, as the owner, have 5 empty spots on your schedule.  In order to handle this type of a patient (which you encounter way more frequently than you probably realize) your staff need to be trained as salespeople.
3. HAVE A PROCESS THAT ALL STAFF FOLLOW TO GET PATIENTS TO SCHEDULE AND SHOW UP FOR APPOINTMENTS. Here are some questions for you…..
   1. Do you have all your evaluations schedule their full plan of care at the time of the evaluation?
   2. How do you confirm every appointment with your patients, and are you sure that the message you want delivered is received?  Does a patient really know what you expect of them related to their appointments?
   3. Do you have a cancellation policy in place, and do you explain it to your patients?

If the answer to all the above is “yes” then great, KEEP IT UP, make sure everyone is doing the same thing and START using #1 and #2 as well, your condition will improve.  If the answer is “no” I ask you this….  “what is keeping your from doing these things?”.  Sometimes I will hear things like “our patients will get upset with us if we have a cancellation policy.  To which I answer – no they won’t if you explain to them WHY you are putting this policy into place.  The reason you are doing it is that you want to help them, and you can’t do that if they don’t come to therapy.  So often I will hear “we use a text reminder service to confirm everyone’s appointment”.  While I think this is great my question is this – “do you have a way of knowing that the message was received and more importantly that it was READ and will be complied with.  When a patient calls to cancel, no shows, or tries to discharge themselves, do you have a process to handle this.  This does bring us back to # 2, TRAINING, but you want to know that your staff have a method to follow so they stay in control of the situation and don’t get agreeable with the patient as this will always end up in empty spaces on your schedule.

As a private practice owner, I found Measurable Solutions at a time when I thought things were going pretty good in my practice.  What I didn’t know at the time was how much money I was losing with an 80% arrival rate, a 15% cancellation rate, and a successful discharge rate that I am embarrassed to say was below 60%.  I quickly learned that there was a whole lot of Non-Patient Compliance going on in my clinic and that I was losing a ton of money and gaining more and more grey hair by the day.

So I have put together the Patient Compliance webinar to help you start to think about the different things you can to do control this issue big or small in your practice and best of all so that you can start to ACHIEVE THE FREEDOM YOU DESERVE.  Join me by clicking on the link and registering for the Patient Compliance Webinar.  See you there.