The ICT resource could help with PT's delimma

Recently, I visited a rehabilitation center and talked with some people working there. From our conversations, I felt that the competition in rehabilitation centers or hospitals is getting intense; some of them are planning to expand their geographic territories and some are thinking to broaden the service programs, such as massage. The former one takes a lot of time to assess the feasibility as well as capital to bolster the expansion. Most of the small clinics, for example, those in the Chinese communities have added the massage service to their service program.

Adding massage services might be a good move regarding generating more customers, or patients. However, the PTs in US are highly regulated not only in the professional skill sets but also in the scope of their practice. Although the cost of the massage service can be covered in many healthcare plans (Procedure Code# 97124), the hospitals should remain the “main” PT practices such as the seating and mobility clinic and the hand therapy and upper extremity services, to name a few.     

Now PTs are faced with the dilemma: should they add in the massage service to their current programs? What are the concerns that may influence their decisions? What kind of information they should be looking for? How to source the information they need?

Just as one corporation has to think in its customers’ shoes, the PTs should also take good care of the overall need of their patients. For example, since the PT treatment session are usually long-lasting and time consuming, the patients are more willing to go to the rehabilitation clinics that are closed to their home or office, especially for the elderly and those on the wheel chairs.  Therefore, the geographic information should be critical for evaluating the plans.

A patient on the wheel chair

An elder patient

Here are some free resources on the website that could provide the rough geographic data: the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S Census Bureau and many other census websites. The following is one of them: 

The allocation map of the aging population in US

The information like this may be too broad to be used effectively for small clinics. For small organizations, the data could also be found in state, city, or county levels. In addition, to find the more refined information, the PTs could consult with the specialists or consulting firms. Many of the highly integrated analytical institutions have their in-house searching engines that could help PTs better evaluate their plans.

Quick facts from Hoovers.com:  
Rehabilitation Therapy Practices
"The rehabilitation therapy industry in the US consists of about 30,000 establishments (single-location companies and units of multi-location companies) with combined annual revenue of about $20 billion. Major companies include Select Medical, Physiotherapy Associates, RehabCare Group, and US Physical Therapy. The industry is highly fragmented: the top 50 companies account for less than 25 percent of revenue."