Article from PREFERRED Network News (PNN) November 2003, A PREFERRED Therapy Providers Newsletter

Strategic Planning For Phisical Therapy Practice by Tom Coplin, PT, Tom Coplin Consulting Services Pllc

This article will present information needed to properly develop the five steps of a strategic plan.

Step one: Getting ready, is the most critical stage of the plan. Identify the issue(s) at hand . Skill at properly identifying the substance of the issue and not the symptoms will determine who is effective in responding to their environment (threats or opportunities) and, ultimately, who will or will not survive. An example would be trying to plan to avoid managed care plans for marketing more lucrative payors when the real issue might be a re-engineering of your practice. Create a committee to develop a plan. Planning should be an inclusive process. It should include everyone interested in the success of your practice. It is a good idea to include board of directors, staff, former patients, lenders and anyone else vested in the success of your practice.

An average of five people is the most workable. A member from the board of directors should be present so that issue, mission and plan get board approval. A staff member from each operational section of the practice to ensure realism of the plan, develop staff ownership and loyalty of the plan, involve future leaders in identity with the practice and help unite everyone to support the plan into a single collective effort. Including former patients is the best way to assess practice performance and receiving guidance for future patient needs. Including lenders/bank will help solve any future financial needs. An example of an external interested party for a sports medicine oriented practice would be an athletic director. Decide who does what. The best plan is developed by the people who ask or volunteer to perform needed tasks. Assignment of tasks should be a last resort.

Develop your practice profile. Evaluate the effectiveness of your practice programs' effectiveness and efficiency. The most important criteria of your practice programs' effectiveness is your profitability. This evaluation will provide data about whether to continue or discontinue each program, maintain its existing level, expand or change its direction, market it aggressively, etc. Identify information that must be collected to make decisions. Important measures of your practice effectiveness is fact based information like but not limited to:

Payor mix (including most valuable payors), process for timely identification of changes referral patterns, numbers of patients per day trends, visits per patient, average charge per patient, new patient registration trends (including visits per referral) etc. Also, looking at or developing outcomes of effectiveness of patient care by your practice. One simple and good way is to identify the average cost per referral for your top ICD-9s.

Any practice assessment should also include looking at operational procedures and looking for more efficient ways to put patients through your system. These could be changing paper process to computer, identifying idiosyncrasies in payors reimbursement requirements and training staff to make sure they are aware of these and the documentation requirements to support the CPTS that properly support the ICD-9s. It is important to know how your practice is viewed from the outside. Surveys by patients, referral sources and payors are crucial to helping structure how you present yourself to the public. At the end of step one there is a work plan . The work plan is a blueprint of the process of developing the strategic plan.

For a copy of the sample work plan that accompanies this article, please call us at 800.664.5240 and request the sample work plan for strategic planning.