Are you wearing too many hats when it comes to treating work comp patients???
It’s true that you can’t be “just” a physical therapist when working with the “industrial athlete”, but it doesn’t have to leave you crazy! Let’s explore some of the roles you’ll play and how to manage your personal cast of characters.
Do you ever feel like you are shooting in the dark when it comes to the return-to-work process for your workers' compensation patients?
Are your recommendations based more on guesswork than on objective data?
Or maybe you’ve disagreed with a return-to-work (RTW) decision on one of your workers' compensation patients but felt powerless to influence the decision?
When doing Functional Capacity Evaluations (FCE) or Pre-Hire Physical Abilities Testing (PAT) some clinicians and FCE vendors pull a bit of a testing protocol from here and a bit of another from there, slap it together and call it a defensible, functional test. While that might help get the job done, it won’t be anything close to defensible – unless you’re talking about the martial arts maneuvers that you, the physician, insurance carrier or employer will be doing - when the test is legally challenged.
If you’re not familiar with the world of pre-hire testing, it may seem a bit surreal…You may feel like you’re traveling through another dimension with your next stop, the PAT Zone!
Providing pre-hire Physical Ability Testing (PAT) helps both employees and employers, while generating cash-based revenue for your clinic. But developing and implementing these tests can be a bit daunting unless you have the right tools and training.
Making the decision to offer Pre-Hire/Post-Offer testing is one thing. Actually going out and marketing that service is something altogether different – definitely different from marketing to physicians. The process can be a bit intimidating.
Long-term sustainability – it’s what keeps most PT practice owners up at night.
And as insurance payments continue to shrink, more and more clinic owners are looking at recurring cash-based revenue as the key to future stability. Chances are, you’re searching too.
What are you considering? Have you thought about occupational health prevention services?
If you are treating workers compensation patients and performing Functional Capacity Evaluations, offering impairment ratings is a relatively easy way to expand your clinical services and increase your value to referral sources.
What is an impairment rating? In a nutshell, it is an evaluation performed on a patient to assign a percent of impairment. These impairment percentages are used in settling workers’ compensation cases. The American Medical Association (AMA) has developed a very prescribed methodology for performing impairment ratings. This methodology is published in The AMA’s Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment . The “AMA Guide” covers the process of determining impairment in all the systems of the body. However, the sections on musculoskeletal and neurological impairments are the sections most relevant to physical and occupational therapists. The typical extremity musculoskeletal impairment involves taking goniometric range of motion measures and then using tables and graphs in the “AMA Guide” to determine the percent impairment.
Communication is the Key
When marketing to workers comp adjusters and case managers, your best marketing tools are your skills as a therapist and understanding how to communicate with these individuals. These “tools” will allow adjustors and case managers to develop trust in your skills as a therapist and are more likely to send patients. This type of marketing is not pounding the pavement, it is relationship building. To do this effectively you must understand the roles of the adjustor and case manager.
When an employee is injured on the job a therapist may be recruited to help with treatment and rehabilitation. Understanding the role of the each individual person involved in the case is crucial. In these workers’ compensation cases, the therapists spend a majority of time with the patient throughout their rehabilitation and communication with the insurance adjuster, and sometimes depending on the severity of the case, a case manager. These two roles are inter related and can be marketed to similarly.
The whole area of work related injury prevention and industrial rehab requires a very different approach to marketing. Some clinics struggle to figure out how to do this kind of marketing. The next series of blogs is geared towards this topic and helping therapists understand how to accomplish smart marketing in this area. The posts will address identifying the buyers and their needs and interests, understanding how to do market research, how to reach the buyer, how to make a sales call, and how to track the outcome of your marketing program.
