For clinicians, building relationships with the referral source is a vital part of practice. Therapists must first find out who the referral source is, whether it is a physician, claim adjuster, case manager, or third-party administrator. Once that is known, two major components play into building relationships:
When it comes to work comp, referrals won’t come beating down your door unless you know how to bring them in. It is not difficult to bring them in if you know and understand the needs and interests of the referral source. This can vary depending on the service. Let’s focus on post injury services.
How many hats are you wearing 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.
