Episode 26
Allison Jones
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the Therapy Matters podcast, your one-stop resource for expert insights and advice on everything therapy and rehab.
I’m your host, Allison Jones. Today, I am joined by Vu Nguyen, Chief Product Officer at Raintree Systems. Vu, thank you for joining me today.
Vu Nguyen
Thank you, Allison. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Allison Jones
Excellent. Vu, before we dive into today’s topic, I want to give our audience a little bit of background on who you are. Take a minute to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your experience.
Vu Nguyen
Sure. Thanks, Allison. As you mentioned earlier, I’m the chief product officer here at Raintree. I’ve been here for over a year now, and so I passed my one-year mark in February. However, I’ve been in the health care space for quite some time. I started my career in the health care spectrum at Siemens Healthcare IT. I was there for about seven or eight years and then migrated over to Cerner. I’ve been there for about six or seven years.
I’ve been new to the health care outpatient rehab space. However, I’ve been in the health care space for over 16 and 17 years of my career. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to help bring what I’ve learned at my hospital system, EMR, into the world of rehab therapy.
Allison Jones
Vu, tell me, what exactly is the role of a chief product officer?
Vu Nguyen
The way you want to think about it, my goal in life is to make sure that we provide the best solutions for our clients, to make sure that we understand the problems that our clients are having, and then to provide solutions to solve them and do it on a very grand scale. That requires understanding a strategic product roadmap, building a product vision, and putting that all together with a lot of client feedback as well as market feedback to then develop products that really solve what our clients need.
Allison Jones
Excellent. That is going to tie in nicely with today’s topic. In today’s episode, we’re going to focus on the key considerations for leaders who aim to expand their practice and scale their operations. It’s a really important topic. What are the big things that business owners and business operators need to consider when they’re looking to expand and scale their practices?
Vu Nguyen
I’ve talked to a number of clients from an enterprise perspective, where they have 400,000 visits a month, to even the smaller clinics, where they’re over 1,500 a month. What we’re trying to do is understand where their problems lie and how you can help them scale up their businesses, where a person with 1,500 visits per month would become 2,000 to 3,000, or 400,000 visits per month could be 500,000. This also applies to the number of clinics, which can range from three to five to hundreds to thousands.
What I’ve heard, talking to a lot of clients, is: Where are the demographics? The first thing they want to do is determine how many people are in the locality that you’re in. They also look at the age differential, which includes the boomer, Gen X, Gen Z, and Gen Y generations. Based on that, they determine whether they need a clinic there. They look at how many clinics are in this geographical area, what the demographic information is, and what the supply and demand are. From there, that’s where they would start looking if they’re adding clinics in that space. They might either add more clinics within a three-mile radius, which is fine if you have a densely populated area, or maybe one clinic in a very large area because maybe it’s not highly dense there, but you still have enough of a population to include there.
I’ve heard a lot of clients look at those areas and consider supply and demand. There’s a larger demand from the older generation for physical therapy. This is not to say that those in high school, college, and collegiate sports don’t have sports injuries. However, you see a lot of the higher age population. That’s what they tend to look at when they try to grow their area.
Other things that I’ve seen also include therapists who are actually around the area, particularly for the brick-and-mortar clients. These are the people who are around the area. This is who we can go after, because either we have to hire somebody and then move them to a site, or they can find talent around the area to support that. You have that supply and demand as well that I have seen.
Allison Jones
You mentioned something that I think is really important. You talked a lot about the boomer generation, and what we’re seeing in the market right now is that the aging population is growing. It’s growing at a pretty fast rate. Those folks are increasing the demand for physical therapy. That is causing growth in the need and demand for physical therapists over the next five to ten years, which is driving the demand for the expansion in practices and the overall need for therapy.
Vu Nguyen
Yes, and just to delve into that a bit further, what we have seen is that people are living a little longer. The boomer generation is actually still very active and they want to be active. Physical therapy enables them to become more active and stay engaged. Because of that, there’s a large demand for physical therapy. That’s why the field is growing at a pretty good growth rate year over year.
Allison Jones
Absolutely. Great points. Let’s take a look at the broader landscape of rehab therapy from a financial and operational point of view. What are some of the important market trends and challenges our listeners should keep in mind?
Vu Nguyen
When I look at it, particularly in the eyes of our clients, what are the problems they have today? If you look at the reimbursements that they currently have, the reimbursement numbers are going down 15% to 30% year over year. Whatever they got paid last year is actually decreasing this year. That’s causing a bit of a challenge. The second thing that I’ve seen is the staff management and the turnover that’s happening there. A lot of the staff is getting burnt out. They’re leaving, which is leaving a vacancy rate average up to 17% at the client side. The demand is there. We are seeing the demand be there.
A lot of the things are not about lead generation, but really their problem is not about trying to find patients. The problems our clients are having are supporting and servicing their current load that they have in order to support their care all the way forward. Thus, hiring PTs and such, as well as other therapists in our market, is also a challenge.
Other things we have seen are organizational shifts where the consolidators, the big guys, are buying the smaller guys. They’re buying them to increase their footprint. We talked earlier about scaling the organization. One way of doing it is by acquisition. They’re buying them to acquire and grow into their target markets as well.
The other ones are the costs going higher from a people perspective as well as from a building and infrastructure perspective. Interest rates are higher. People are getting paid more money. I have heard that normally you get paid X amount of dollars for a physical therapist starting out. But now they’re in such high demand that they actually have to pay even 20%, 30% more for a physical therapist. So, you’ve got reimbursement dollars going down, your cost of labor is going up, and your infrastructure is still increasing year over year. The problem they have is: How do you drive a profit with all those factors coming in?
Allison Jones
You mentioned that it’s not hard for them to find patients, but there still is a dynamic there around: Once you have patients, you do need to keep them. So, there is an aspect of managing patient engagement, managing that patient journey and making sure that you are keeping those patients engaged, making sure that they’re receiving the care that they need to receive at the quality that they want to receive it once you do have them in your practice, correct?
Vu Nguyen
Normally, a visit or a treatment is about 12 visits. As they go and they inquire and they get a patient in the door, they’ll have an evaluation. You go through a series of treatments associated with that. We want them to be healthy. We want them to get better. So, going through the full level of treatment is important.
How do we help enable the clinics to be able to do that? We have campaigns which really help us out. We are able to send emails out about specialty events and really focus on churn areas. We also have opportunities where we can send out mass emails about, for example, a closure due to a snowstorm that’s happening. We keep people informed, but also do marketing campaigns on specials and such just to have a level of engagement.
Some of our clients are really big into patient engagement and outcomes. It’s about how the patient feels when they leave, and even when they get there. What is the core of our patient journey and how do they feel the moment they get in and the moment they get out? There are a lot of outcomes there, and then surveys behind the scenes of how they can get better.
As long as we can keep a patient happy because they’re not going to physical therapy because they want to, they’re going to physical therapy because they have to. It’s not like you go see a doctor when you’re sick and you get medicine and you go home. It’s a repeat service and it’s harder to go back and forth, back and forth. So, how do we do that especially when you have a busy schedule and then continuously keep them motivated to come in?
It is extremely important. We have tools in place, but we also work and listen to our clients about how they’ve done it, and then try to augment the system in order to help them out.
Allison Jones
Absolutely. There’s a lot there when you’re talking about managing the financial health of your practice, overseeing your patient engagement and making sure your patients are happy and healthy, making sure that your staff is engaged and that you’re keeping them happy, and that you’re filling the holes that you might have in your staff. You’re also managing organizational shifts if you are acquiring other practices and building out your overall organization. It’s a lot to take in. If you are a practice that is looking to grow over the coming years, what are those key areas that they’re going to need to consider in order to make sure that they are successful?
Vu Nguyen
It’s a lot. I’ve seen it starts with a great leadership team and a great strategy for growth. If you carve out exactly your plan and how you’re going to do it, everything else starts to fall in place. Then the next question is: What’s the target region you’re going to go after? What’s your EMR that’s going to allow you to scale? What are the price points we get from a reimbursement perspective from our payers? So, there are a lot of elements in place.
For me, I’ll focus on the Raintree side, which is the EMR. We always keep saying that we are the last EMR that you will ever need and that’s true. If you look at it, we are the end game. If you’re looking to grow to the magnitude of thousands of clinics, we can support that. We have clients who do that today, and we will always invest in the scalability of our infrastructure.
But we also know that it’s all about the bottom line for a lot of the large clients. We’re trying to tie in all the services that our providers do and automate the entire billing process so you effectively have a clean claim. That way, you can go and get your dollar much faster. Our DOS is much lower than most of our competitors and even in the industry. So, we really pride ourselves on how much better we can support your scalability and your growth going forward. We will continuously invest in that area and improve there.
Allison Jones
From a technological standpoint, how can practices set themselves up to hit some of the KPIs that they’re going to need in order to be successful? And what are some of those KPIs that they should be tracking?
Vu Nguyen
From a technology perspective, it’s really about implementing our EMR and then being able to make sure that your payer tables are up and running. You need to ensure that your providers know your entire workflow and really start using it from a practical perspective. I will say it takes some time to build the system up to exactly your specifications, from the growth type of clients to your enterprise client. But once you have that system fine-tuned for your enterprise, you should be ready to rock and roll.
I would encourage our clients to think about your KPIs ahead of time. What is your denial claims rate and what do you expect? What is your return type for your clients? What is your DSO? What is your lead tracking from the moment that a potential patient decides to come in to the moment they’re scheduled? There are so many KPIs that you can follow in order to make sure that you have a successful, and long-lasting system of record for you to go forward with.
I would also encourage you guys to work with us and determine what else we can do to improve this, to help us scale, and then what are the KPIs that we can go after. But yeah, we have a number of KPIs that can help you achieve the growth that you want.
Allison Jones
Excellent. One of the reasons that we’re here today is to talk a little bit about a webinar series that Raintree is going to be kicking off later this month to cover a lot of these topics. It is quite a bit of information to try to consume and understand. So, we’re going to bring this webinar series to our clients and to folks that are looking to learn a little bit more about Raintree. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what this webinar series is and what we’re going to be covering?
Vu Nguyen
I’m excited to talk about it. We’re going to break down this webinar series into four main topics.
In April, we’ll be focusing on billing and payment portals. We’ve previously discussed the strengths of our billing solution, and we’ll delve deeper into that, providing insights on how Raintree can assist you.
In May, we’ll shift our focus to the patient journey. We’ll discuss how to acquire patients and how to leverage the strengths of our system in that process.
In June, we’ll talk about referrals, which are a crucial part of the patient journey. We’ll focus specifically on the capabilities we have for driving referrals into your business and optimizing that process.
Finally, in July, we’ll discuss how to derive insights from your data using your platform to measure ROI. We’ll delve into business intelligence and insights. One of the great things we offer is valuable insights to aid in your business management outcomes.
Allison Jones
That’s fantastic. So, the title of this webinar series is “Focus on Growth”. It’s four strategies to help you reach your business goals and thrive in a competitive market. We’re going to start this off with four topics focused on billing, then patient engagement, referrals, and then we’re going to wrap it up with analytics. The series is going to start in April. In the episode description and episode notes, you’re going to be able to find a registration link – https://www.raintreeinc.com/webinar/. You’re also going to be able to find this on our website.
Vu, I want to thank you so much for coming on and telling us a little bit about some growth strategies that businesses can consider when they’re looking to expand and grow their operations. Also, taking the time to talk a little bit about this new webinar series, we’re super excited to kick this off. Thank you for taking the time to join us today.
Vu Nguyen
Thanks, Alison. It was a pleasure to be here.
Allison Jones
Excellent. Thank you so much. I want to thank our audience for joining us today on the Therapy Matters podcast, your one-stop resource for expert insights and advice on everything therapy and rehab. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
About Us
Resources
Regulatory
Copyright 2024 © Raintree Systems. All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions
Wait! Want to boost your revenue and patient satisfaction?
Don’t leave without this free guide for PT, OT, SLP and multi-disciplinary therapy.
