Early this month, Charlotte talked about the importance of evidence-based practice and listed some tools, like Dartfish, that could help you with consistency, autonomy, and correctness. Here, I tackle another tool: FOTO.

Focus On Therapeutic Outcomes, Inc. (FOTO) is a medical rehabilitation company that has been providing patient evaluation tools and aggregate data management services since 1992. Almost 2,000 clinics across the US and Israel use the FOTO Outcomes Data Collection System today.  

This national benchmark database and reporting service provides outpatient rehabilitation professionals with risk-adjusted national comparisons of treatment effectiveness and efficiency as well as patient satisfaction. It’s the largest and most valid external directory for rehabilitation that measures functional outcomes for orthopedic, neurological, work hardening/work conditioning, pain management, cardiovascular, and pelvic floor dysfunction patients. 

FOTO’s data collection process for measuring outcomes is comprised of three main components:

1. Patient Intake

2. Patient Status

3. Staff Discharge

After the completion of each component, FOTO produces a patient-specific report allowing you to access individual as well as single and multi-practice performance. The system then rolls up this outcome data by care type, impairment, clinician, practice, and organization, and compares it, quarterly and annually, to similar risk-adjusted data from almost 2,000 clinics.

“By measuring our performance against providers all over the country, we can identify our strengths and improve on any areas requiring focus as it relates to functional outcomes and providing an exceptional experience to the patient,” says AthletiCo, a physical and occupational/hand therapy provider in Illinois, Milwaukee, and Northwest Indiana. 

In addition to measuring outcomes, FOTO also measures treatment quality. Here are three Quality Indicators available:

• Actual vs. Predicted FS Score Outcomes
• Actual vs. Predicted Number of Visits Benchmark
• Patient Satisfaction Comparisons

According to the FOTO website, this data-driven “comparative analysis reveals bright spots as well as areas for improvement. The clinician, manager, or practice owner is empowered to improve quality by directing training resources, personnel, and patients in a way that maximizes overall quality and patient experience. In a competitive market landscape, our customers are armed with one of the most important tools to have in a knowledge-driven industry—data on quality.”

Benefits of Implementing FOTO

• Risk-adjusted comparisons of level of quality and value to other providers of similar medical rehabilitation services. Risk adjustment parameters include such factors as care type, severity, age, acuity, and gender.
• Level of functional improvement comparisons for each patient at discharge and the efficiency of the care as compared to similar, risk-adjusted patients seen by other medical rehabilitation providers.
• Individualized patient outcomes reports.
• Patient satisfaction measurements to better understand and respond to patient needs. 

Plus, the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) has approved seven of FOTO’s functional status measures for 2011. And, similar to WebPT, FOTO is an approved PQRS Data Registry, which means that clinicians can submit data to CMS through FOTO rather than from claims.

Users can access FOTO’s fully electronic data collection system via the web or from installed software. In the web-based version, patients have the option to complete the intake survey outside of the clinic freeing up valuable office time.

Want to learn more? Register here for a free FOTO PI-Web Outcomes Data Collection System webinar on Thursday, June 28, from 3:00 to 4:00 PM EDT. Or check back here for additional dates as they become available.

Do you use FOTO? Tell us all about your experience below.