A successful physical therapy practice does more than provide one-of-a-kind healing care. A good physical therapy clinic should also focus on doing well in business. The more healthy the business, the more patients the clinic can heal. By paying close attention to the below clinic success metrics, you can better track and measure the strength of your physical therapy practice. Then you can use these measurements to create growth goals or modify your current business practices.

Keep track of these key success metrics to help build a thriving PT practice.

New Patient Referrals

One of the first, and most important, metrics your clinic should be tracking is patient referrals.

New referral patients have an incredible low cost-of-acquisition. In fact, the cost of a referral is often something as small as a conversation.

Training and building a process to develop a strong referral practice can take time. Here are some tips for creating a strong referral system:

1. Go above and beyond to provide patients with fantastic service. The better a patient’s experience, the more likely they are to provide you with a referral.
2. Remind your clinicians that referring someone isn’t just about a “sale,” it’s about your mission to help people feel better.
3. Make it simple for your patients to refer their friends and family. If your system is to complex it’ll act as a barrier to the referral process.
4. Automate your referrals to make it easy on new patients and your clinicians. You can create a specific landing page for referrals or cards that direct potential new patients to your practice.
5. Reconnect with past patients. Reach out to them and see how they’re doing and if they know anyone in need of physical therapy.
6. Network with your partners, referrals don’t only come from your patients, they can come from area physicians and (yes) other clinics.  

Clinician Productivity

Pinpointing your clinic’s productivity can have immense benefits for your practice. As much as your clinicians would love to spend hours with each patient, the reality is you only have a fixed amount of time to spend together. The more productive your team is during this time, the more they can use this fixed time to better attend to and heal their patients.

As an added bonus, setting metrics for your practice’s productivity can help to improve employee satisfaction and morale. As the old idiom goes, what gets measured gets managed (and rewarded).

To measure your clinic’s productivity, keep an eye on these metrics:

• Patient wait time
• Patient on-time arrival rate
• Average visits per case
• Average new patients per clinician
• % of time spent with patients (versus handling admin duties)   

Billing

Billing is a necessary part of running a successful practice. Setting, tracking, and measuring billing metrics like average visits per patient, average charges per visit, and total charges billed can help you identify any holes in your revenue.

You should also keep an eye on your cash flow to ensure that the bills going out are being paid in a timely manner.

Smooth billing practices can help increase the number of referrals and help with patient retention. Don’t be afraid to re-train your current admin staff on billing codes and other billing best practices regularly to reduce billing errors.

Measure Your Marketing Efforts

In this business, word-of-mouth (referral) marketing may be king when it comes to gaining new patients but digital marketing can produce some seriously lucrative benefits for your practice.

Key marketing metrics to keep an eye on include:

• Conversions – How many site visitors turn into a new patient or potential patient?
• Quality of leads – Are the new patients coming to your clinic qualified?
• Website traffic volume – How many people are coming to your website?

If you don’t have a website, you can sub your online presence for a social media page on Facebook. However, having a website aides an air of professionalism to your clinic. It also provides you with plenty of online real estate to share the story of your clinic, your clinic’s healing philosophy and your hours, contact information, and easy access to any new patient forms they might need to be filled out prior to an appointment.

Our Final Tip

When you start tracking the billing, productivity, marketing, and referral metrics that matter, you soon realize that they are all tied together. When all systems how growth and run smoothly, they act as indicators of a successful practice.

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