WHY PHYSICAL THERAPY DIDN'T WORK FOR YOU
You’ve probably been down this road before or at least know someone who has. You sustain some sort of injury, are recommended to physical therapy, and schedule an evaluation with a therapist. The evaluation then results in being told that you have 100 things wrong with you from your “imbalances” to your “bad posture” and that you should return 2 times per week until the apocalypse, at which point you can then reduce your visit frequency to 1 time every other week if your insurance allows. Oh, and if you were able to spend more than 30 minutes with your therapist then you can consider yourself lucky.
As ridiculous as this may sound, the truth is it is all too common in the world of physical therapy these days. Now, before we continue we want to make it clear that we are not placing the blame on individual clinicians themselves. The staff at Headquarters Physical Therapy recognizes that the problems with traditional physical therapy falls largely on the system and less on the practitioners. In fact, there are many physical therapists that operate within the traditional model that we greatly respect, admire, and would entrust with the rehabilitative care of our closest loved ones.
But we can’t ignore the fact that the traditional model has made it increasingly difficult for clinicians to deliver and patients to receive the quality of care that everyone should experience. Let’s explore why some of that is.
Traditional physical therapy is covered in red tape
We’ve written about this previously (Why you should see a cash based physical therapist). Unless you have a pretty generous insurance plan, receiving physical therapy is not always so cut and dry as making an appointment after appointment until your goals are all met. Rather, insurance companies are turning more and more to third-party reviewers to act as gatekeepers to your physical therapy benefits. These gatekeepers have 2 primary objectives:
Save the insurance company money
Make sure you, the patient, can do the BARE MINIMUM level of functionality as required by a human (and sometimes even less than that depending on your demographic data such as age)
We won’t speak on your behalf, but we’d venture to guess that your personal rehab goals are a bit more extensive than the 2 listed above.
So just because your therapist recommends (and rightly so) 9 continuous months of physical therapy to rehab your ACL reconstruction before you get back on the field or the court, the reviewer is likely going to step in and say that as long as you are able to walk, take the stairs (maybe), and get around minimally without debilitating pain you will not be allowed to use your covered visits for your ACL rehab after about 8-10 weeks.
This process of requesting and approving physical therapy coverage is called “authorizations”, and all companies are using them these days. So, within the traditional physical therapy model it quickly becomes a game of proving that a patient is benefitting just enough from physical therapy but is not improving fast enough that the insurance company cuts them off. The time that the therapist then has to spend under a mountain of paperwork or on the phone arguing with a representative often results in providers having to take paperwork home or if they’re lucky enough to have documentation time at work then the cost of that time is paid for by the treatment cost to the patient.
At the end of the day the red tape in the traditional physical therapy model often serves as a roadblock to patients receiving the care they truly need to achieve the goals that matter to them.
Corporate demands leads to overwork and burnout
We aren’t opposed to having a viable business. As a matter of fact, having a viable business means more people have jobs, more professionals have the opportunity to practice at the top of their licenses, and more people have places to go to receive the healthcare that they need. However, corporate backed physical therapy companies tend to be considerably more detached from the day to day and the ins and outs of the physical therapy experience. The problem starts when both patients and providers are seen as numbers. Patients are discussed in terms of their lifetime revenue rather than their progress towards their goals. Providers are discussed in terms of their productivity of keeping patients on the schedule rather than the quality and honesty of care they deliver. Career development for these providers is often progressed based on their salesmanship above all else.
And these little things can be overlooked at first, but, slowly over time the demands get tighter and tighter and heavier and heavier until the providers crack under pressure. As insurance companies become more tight-fisted and the investors of the traditional physical therapy models demand greater profit margins the clash meets in the middle and the end result is often a jaded therapist and patients who are left wondering why they are being billed hundreds of dollars for low-level and distracted care.
Corporate demands ultimately lead to a clash of values between providers and their employers and the one who pays the most is the person who just wants to be able to run again without knee pain.
Welcome to the Headquarters Physical Therapy model
Being an out-of-network, cash-based company we are able to be 100% transparent with our patients without any hidden surprises in the costs. Sessions are kept longer than the standard to ensure that the patient never feels rushed through the process and that all questions can be answered while having enough time to participate in a treatment program that guarantees actual, biological change. Documentation is simplified without time spent haggling with insurance companies to ensure providers are focused on the quality of care they deliver. Career development is crafted with an “out of the box” mentality to allow providers to truly flourish in a way that drives more value into the community they serve.
At the end of the day we were tired of the traditional physical therapy model telling us how you should be treated. We felt that you deserve better. Don’t you feel the same?