Keeping Pace in a Changing Healthcare Landscape

Rehab therapy practices are having to contend with a whole new world outside of their doors. The internet has created a different type of patient than in years past, and shifting cultural ideas around work are changing the expectations of young clinicians—and seasoned ones, too. The economics of rehab therapy seem to get a little tighter every year, and yet payers still lay on new demands as pay rates fail to keep pace.  

How, then, do practices satisfy the wants and needs of patients, payers, and providers while still finding space to build a stable and hopefully growing practice? It’s about understanding how you can meet everyone’s needs without running yourself or your business into the ground. 

Patients want convenience, certainty, and a smooth visit.

Healthcare is unique in a lot of ways, but over time it’s come closer to other industries in one aspect: competition. A lot of that is down to the visibility now available online; the typical clinic is no longer a black box but a business like any other, with a website, a social media presence, and fans and detractors, in some measure. That creates the impetus for a better patient experience. 

Expectations from patients aren’t unreasonable, either. They want to book an appointment without jumping through hoops, know what to expect when they walk into the clinic and what’s expected of them between appointments, and know what their care will cost out of pocket. 

Providers need the tools to keep up with documentation requirements.

Providers today are struggling to keep pace with demands, but if payers are aware of the issue, they’re certainly not showing it. Documentation burden and administrative fatigue are familiar bugbears for clinicians in our annual State of Rehab Therapy report, and with good reason; both add hours to the workday and often have providers finishing notes well into the evening, for the sole purpose of satisfying payer demands.  

Billing teams need tools to better manage claims.

If we’re talking added work and needless complexity, billing fits squarely in the conversation alongside documentation. We’ve talked before about how healthcare in particular has layered added steps to the payment process, and the end result is a billing process that requires input from every part of the practice and technical considerations like coding and required documentation elements. Healthcare also poses the unique problem of denied claims, which are ideally reworked and resubmitted while billers are juggling the rest of the claims going out the door. Without the right tools or the right processes, denied claims can stack up and money that the practice has earned is potentially never collected.   

Owners need insight into everything that’s going on.

Heavy lies the head that wears the crown. Owners can’t be everywhere at once, or do everything themselves, but they have to have an eye on every part of their practice to make sure they’re all operating at their best. Unfortunately, the eye test doesn’t always give you a clear picture or tell you the whole truth. Being busy is a good sign—certainly better than the alternative—but is all that work translating to results? Are marketing leads turning into booked appointments? Are evals and initial visits ending up at completed courses of care? How much of what you’re billing is ending up in your bank account? With so many operational areas and disparate systems to manage them, it’s hard to have every piece of information at your fingertips.   

Practice management platforms have to be able to solve those problems.

The problem practices have run into with technology to this point is that it hasn’t offered holistic solutions. Different tools can solve each problem reasonably well, and each tool can be somewhat joined together, but the barrier preventing a truly interconnected system is how it’s built. To truly manage the entire practice, you need technology that has access to every data point across every part of the clinic. In total, they can paint a clear picture of performance, pain points, and everything in between. In the current ecosystem, it’s more like a puzzle; different pieces that you can likely put together to create something approaching the whole, but never quite as good, and with way too much effort. 

But just as rehab therapy and the healthcare environment keep changing, technology changes too, and at a much faster rate, fortunately. It’s not far-fetched to imagine a world in which your practice management platform is managing your schedule, with your front desk only having to do oversight instead of shuffling appointments. Nor is it hard to foresee a time when clinicians hardly have to put fingers to keys to complete a note, or when billers have claims that are already set to send hit their inbox. And for owners, any and every insight you want is just a simple ask away, without having to pull reports and collate data yourself. 

That day is getting closer.