WebPT Blog - technology
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0 CommentsMay 15, 2013| Matt Stone
Matt is WebPT’s email marketing specialist. He’s an Aries and is pretty sure unicorns are real. His monthly column will cover all things email marketing and how it can help your clinic.
There are plenty of things to worry about as a small business owner—so does it make sense to add email marketing to the list? Absolutely.For starters, email marketing returned $39.40 for every dollar spent in 2012, according to the Direct Marketing Association. This return far surpassed the next closest marketing initiative ($22.38 through Web search).
And besides revenue, email marketing makes sense in so many other ways, including:
- It’s cheap (many email marketing tools have free or low-cost plans for small businesses based on number of emails sent)
- It’s easy (you write emails every day, and most email marketing programs have turnkey templates to get you started quickly)
- It allows you to maintain relationships with patients and create brand awareness (think monthly newsletters, holiday cards, and birthday notes)
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Apr 10, 2013| Charlotte Bohnett
We’ve all seen the commercials: the catchy music paired with a montage of all the awesome things you can do with an iPad. The iPad—and Apple, in general—is all about the “wow,” the cool factor. So why wouldn’t rehab therapists use it in their clinic? We sat down with two occupational therapy clinics and asked them to share their experiences using iPads in their practice.
Nick Roselli, OTR/L, CHT, of Nick Roselli Occupational Therapy in New York initially purchased laptops for his multiclinic practice. However, when he lost internet connectivity one day, Nick decided to use his iPad (with 3G internet connection) for that day’s patient visits and documentation. “I saw it was very user-friendly, and I could use it on the go as I visited my other clinics,” said Nick. In the case with Dynamic Rehab in Arizona, Tania Shearon, OTR/L, CHT, brought in her own iPad to use within the clinic, knowing that it would expedite her EMR documentation. “The iPad works awesome with my daily notes...much quicker,” Tania said.
In general, Tania says the iPad is portable, fast, and easy. Nick listed similar qualities when speaking about the iPad in his clinics, emphasizing the user-friendly aspect and the ability to create quick notes. While Nick admits he’d rather use his laptop, especially for notes loading greater amounts of data, he says the iPad is just so much more mobile. The zoom feature on iPads is also a plus, too.
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Feb 28, 2013| Charlotte Bohnett
Today’s blog post comes WebPT President and CTO Brad Jannenga
Earlier this month, I packed my bags and headed off to Washington DC along with Courtney Klein Johnson and Chris Petroff, founders of social incubator and fellow Phoenix tech startup, SeedSpot. Why were we heading to our nation’s capitol? Aside from wanting to see the famed cherry blossoms bloom, we were invited to take part in Startup America’s Champions Take DC event. Packed with amazing dialogue, brilliant insights, and lots of awesome people, the experience was a lot of things—exciting, educational, inspirational—but most of all extremely humbling.
Here are my top four most awe-inspiring moments: -
Jul 23, 2012| Charlotte Bohnett
In a recent post, mHealth Insight explained that we’re more likely as consumers to drop the “health” in mHealth rather than the “mobile,” because mobile cannibalizes all things pocket-sized and digital. Anything plus mobile eventually just equals mobile. For example, camera phones and music phones are both now just phones. So, mHealth will soon just be mobile, too. Folks won’t look up from their giant touchscreen phones and say they’re “engaging with the Healthcare system;” they’ll instead say “oh, I’m just using my phone.”
But when will mHealth be that intrinsically mobile? Let’s look at the healthcare side first. According to Mobile Business Briefing, Vodafone, “one of the strongest operator proponents of mobile healthcare technology,” says that first healthcare must be accessible on a global scale. They’ve identified five key areas driving the digital health sector:
- Remote monitoring
- Mobile flexible working
- Access to medicine
- Clinical research
- Marketing and engagement
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Jul 5, 2012| Charlotte Bohnett
We all want to lead a healthy lifestyle but can too much technology be problematic? This past Tuesday, Erica and I covered 12 personal health monitoring devices for the health 2.0 lifestyle. In today’s post, let’s talk about real user experience: the good, the bad, and the gimmicky.
In an article posted on AllThingsD.com, Andy Smith, CEO of IAC-owned DailyBurn, told reporter Lauren Goode that today’s fitness tracking devices border on gimmicks: “I feel like these are not quite a gimmick, but are close to it...You get people to spend $100 to $150 bucks on something that’s just a glorified accelerometer—which, by the way, you have in your phone, too.”
Smith’s company, the Daily Burn (once upon a time known as Gyminee), is a fitness-data-tracking company that pivoted to focus primarily on fitness content because data tracking just wasn’t all that effective. -
Jun 29, 2012| Charlotte Bohnett
On our blog in June, we covered innovative equipment for your practice as well as some exciting WebPT announcements. Click on any of the links below to access this month’s posts. Hope you all had a fantastic June, and here’s to a great July.
- Big Time Benefits for Members Only
- Surface Electromyography Gives PT Clinics a Competitive Advantage in Treatment
- Front Office Game Changers for Your Clinic
- Increase Patient Performance With Dartfish
- WebPT at PT 2012
- Innovative Exercise Equipment for Today’s Therapy Clinic
- Discover Ideas in Action, June 2012: Introducing the WebPT Member Network
- #Solve PT: Do You Stand for Something?
- Wanted: Evidence-Based Practice
- Top Five iPad Apps for Pediatric Speech Language Pathologists
- The Road to a New Payment System for Physical Therapy
- Motion Therapeutics Empowers Patients and Therapists
- Do You Wii-Hab? Using Motion Gaming in Your Therapy Clinic
- PTs Implement FOTO for Better Evidence-Based Practice
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Jun 28, 2012| Erica Cohen
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.
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Jun 27, 2012| Charlotte Bohnett
WebPT bloggers Lindsay Bayuk, Charlotte Bohnett, and Erica Cohen co-wrote today’s post.
Video games are no longer the exclusive pastime of teenage boys. Now, interactive and health-centric videogame software allows people of all ages to stay fit, improve range of motion, and battle out a seriously competitive game of Wii Tennis—all from the comfort of their living room.
Image from http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6397566899_7c29f47a67_b.jpg -
Jun 20, 2012| Charlotte Bohnett
therapy is, and always will be, about exceptional patient care. Therapists want to improve the lives of their patients. From Ancient Greece to World Wars I and II to today, physical therapy has been about treating people, not research methods. It’s no surprise, then, that the profession isn’t as evidence-based as other medical professions.
But times are a-changin’, and everyone from insurance companies to the educational and medical fields are craving uniformity, autonomy, and validity. Evidence-based practice has become essential. WebPT owner Heidi Jannenga, PT, MPT, ATC/L, puts it quite succinctly: “It’s time to prove what we do works.” How do we do that?Conduct Research
What better way to prove what you do than to set up and complete studies within your own facility? Easier said than done, sure, but you can enlist help. Find nearby schools with therapy programs. Students typically must complete capstone projects for their doctoral degree, and a study within your clinic makes a fine final project. Plus, college students totally understand that whole research methods thing. For an example of a therapy student study, check out Lauren Baier’s undergraduate thesis. She studied how video and photos in WebPT’s Home Exercise Program influence patient compliance. -
Jun 14, 2012| Charlotte Bohnett
Today’s post comes from Ian Kornbluth, PT, MPT, Neurac Cert., and owner of the Neurac Institute for Physical Therapy in Princeton, New Jersey. Thanks, Ian!
Today's physical therapy clinic faces pressures from declining insurance reimbursements, increasing facility and staff expenses, and a fierce competitive landscape. But you can change the game by investing wisely in new equipment and corresponding treatment programs.
As an out-of-network provider, I offer a unique perspective when it comes to selecting equipment; I constantly search for creative ways to maximize use of my valuable treatment space and get better results for my patients while differentiating myself from the competition. For example, we embraced Pilates roughly five years before it went “mainstream” within the therapy realm. Now, we have the revolutionary Redcord system (see below to learn more) developed by physiotherapists in Norway.
