Growing your Practice with PT KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essentially snapshots of how your clinic is doing from a business perspective. KPIs are handy for gathering your clinic’s most important data and understanding your operations on a macro scale. In a rehabilitation setting, these KPIs could include vital information such as the volume of your visits over time, the amount of money brought in by your payers, and even your payer mix and patient population.

Though most business owners know how important understanding KPIs is to your business, interpreting raw data can be challenging. Healthcare in particular is complex, and there are many data points to evaluate when determining your clinic’s KPIs and the health of your business.

Every business owner should be empowered to understand their metrics, and metrics are fundamentally about people just as much as they are about numbers. This is where trended reports come in. These reports are more user friendly and person centered, helping you to take those KPI snapshots and compile them into a scrapbook to evaluate your performance over time. A good trended report should be user friendly and help you to get an idea of the story behind your past performance data.

Some KPIs which may be helpful to guide your clinic and grow your practice:

1. Trended Adjustments: How does the rate of adjustments in your payment change throughout the year? Are your Medicare adjustments going up over time? Has a particular provider’s adjustments suddenly dropped this month? A trended adjustments report can be used to look at your adjustments with a wider lens and help you get the full story behind your clinic’s financial health.
2. Trended Charges: Are some of your providers underbilling? Is one of your facilities spiking in charges? How much money are you billing to your auto insurances throughout the year? A trended charges report can help you to identify missed opportunities for revenue and identify trends before you start to see them reflected in your bank account.
3. Trended Evaluations: Is a particular referral source sending you more evaluations than usual? Which facility has brought in the most new patients this year? Which therapist are performing the most evaluations this week? A trended evaluations report can help build context for the growth of your clinic, get an idea of where you may need more resources, and even reward the staff who is building your patient base day-by-day.
4. Trended Payments: How does your revenue fluctuate throughout the summer? Which provider brought in the highest dollar amount for the first quarter? Are your referring physicians sending you high value patients? Exactly how much money did you receive from your cash pay patients last month? A trended payments report is used to examine your financials at both a micro and a macro level. This report helps you to break down the nebulous numbers in your bank account to really understand where the money is—and isn’t—coming from.
5. Trended Visits: Is your second location seeing enough visits to consider opening a third location? Has there been a shift in Medicare visits compared to last year? Exactly how many appointments did your see this month? A trended visits report helps you to understand the volume of visits in your practice from all angles. This report lends some context to the day-to-day operations in your clinic and helps you to visualize your scheduling data.

By looking at the data from the past, you can draw conclusions and make predictions about where your clinic headed. This can help you to make key decisions for your business strategy; such as expanding to a second location or how to manage your referring physician relationships. Knowing where to allocate your resources can be pivotal in making the right decisions for the future of your business and ensuring that you are able to meet your goals and stay ahead of the ever-changing rehab industry.