You know it better than most: physical therapy and rehabilitation care takes time. However, as a CEO, clinic owner, or practice manager, you also know that time is money — especially when you’re understaffed or facing high demand.
To provide the best patient outcomes while managing a profitable practice, your goal is efficiency. But how do you get there? By analyzing your practice’s performance and identifying areas for improvement, you can make informed decisions that will boost productivity and reduce waste. In this blog post, we’ll explore five essential metrics that you should start tracking today.
Productivity Metrics for Physical Therapy and Rehab Practices
Evaluation of your clinical data is essential to measure and make decisions about the growth of your practice. But you might be wondering: How do I measure productivity?
Let’s start with a helpful definition:
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the critical (key) quantifiable indicators of progress toward an intended result. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.
KPI.org
Choosing the right KPIs is essential — not just for existing practices, but also for newly launched ones — to measure the health of your operations. But don’t worry, we’ll make it easy for you! Here are the five top KPIs to use when you evaluate your rehab or physical therapy clinic productivity goals:
- New Monthly Patients
- Discharged/Completed Patients
- Percent of Vacant Hours
- Number of Visits per Patient
- Cancelation Rate
How KPIs Can Help You Improve Efficiency and Patient Satisfaction
Now we’ll dive into the numbers that matter most and discuss how to make actionable improvements.
1. Number of New Monthly Patients
The number of patients you book every month is a great indicator of your practice’s performance overall. Evaluate your monthly new patient bookings and devise a strategy to maintain or increase this number, depending on your goals for growth. If you run multiple locations, you can break down the data to calculate each clinic’s productivity or each PT’s new caseload.
If you see an unexpected decrease in monthly visits, you can adjust your acquisition strategy using a SMART goal. Setting up referral and lead-tracking tools, for example, can help drive new patient volume while streamlining workflow, improving patient care, and saving valuable time and resources.
2. Discharged Patients
Another way to better understand your productivity is by looking at patient data for those who have completed their treatment at your practice. How many patients have reached their treatment goals? How efficient was their treatment plan? What was the number of average visits per patient, and what was the amount of time spent during each appointment?
By looking at data from discharged patients, you can create benchmarks to compare against future plans of care.
3. Vacant Hours
Measuring vacant hours is one of the primary productivity metrics for physical therapists. To do so, calculate the percentage of unused time in a therapist’s schedule compared to their total available time for patient consultations. Understanding the rates of service delivery per hour can help you understand clinician and therapist productivity. Having a high percentage of vacant hours, for example, can indicate non-productive time.
That said, you can maintain a low rate of vacant hours by:
- Rescheduling cancelations to fill in the vacant hours
- Scheduling ahead for all patients
- Increasing the weekly frequency of your cases
- Incentivize your PTs to keep patient engagements longer
- Informing your patients about a financial penalty for not showing up after booking a visit, which can be part of a broader or stricter cancelation policy
Aim to keep your rate of vacant hours per day around 2–3%. A low percentage indicates a high utilization of your therapists’ billable time spent with patients.
4. Number of Visits per Patient
How many times each patient visits your practice can tell you a lot. For example, you can determine the efficiency of care plans at your practice by comparing patient visits to appropriate treatment schedules. For an outpatient practice, you might aim to have at least 10-12 visits per patient. However, this number should be higher for specialty practices such as sports therapy or chronic pain management.
When you use data to optimize the process of treating patients, you can increase clinical efficiency while improving patient satisfaction. After all, every patient’s time is valuable, too, and they’ll thank you for a streamlined experience.
5. Cancelation Rate
Another critical component of efficiency standards for physical therapists entails monitoring patients’ cancelation rates. Watch out for booked treatment sessions that are canceled throughout the week. After all, cancelations can affect your revenue and profitability. It can also drive up your clinicians’ vacant hours or indicate low satisfaction among patients.
If your cancelation rate is higher than previously noted, find a way to increase this KPI by looking into the root cause and adjusting your strategy.
Reach Your Practice’s Productivity Goals
Tracking these key productivity standards for physical therapists is essential to achieve clinical efficiencies in this profession. Looking at the data will enable you to identify weaknesses and inefficiencies in your unique practice, rather than applying a cookie-cutter strategy. And by making the necessary adjustments, your practice can become more efficient and productive.
Ease of access to productivity data is essential for successful business management. One of the best ways to track productivity in a physical therapy and rehab practice is to utilize electronic medical records (EMR) software. It’s important to regularly analyze and review data to determine areas that may require improvements or adjustments.
Here at Raintree, we have the tools you need to stay on top of these metrics and ensure your physical therapy and rehab practice runs smoothly.
