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."

Healthcare Communication makes the Manual Therapy a Fascination

From Far-East Asia to the United States, the manual therapy has been adopted by the Physical Therapists (PTs) as a commonly used treatment because of the similar curative effects of manual and physical therapy. A definition given by the US chiropractors described manual therapy as “Procedures by which the hands directly contact the body to treat the articulations and/or soft tissues.[1]"

The “manual therapy” in the United States generated the public’s attention due to the effort of Dr. Andrew Taylor Still in 1874. Dr. Andrew Taylor advocated the study, “Osteopathic medicine.” He believes that the human body should be viewed as a whole and every body part is connected to one another. He also contended that since one’s frame and muscle are key factors to one’s health, the Osteopathic Therapists (OTs) should obtain the practice license as the physicians have done. After passing the standard four-year college education and the standardized exam, one can get a DO license, Doctor of Osteopathy.

In East Asia, the manual therapy has been popular and refined for thousands of years. The ancient Chinese even created a human body map that precisely pointing out the pressure points all over the body. To date, people often generalize various kinds of Asian-orientated manual therapy as the same thing and call them “massage” that sometimes make people relate to pornographic profession. 

Furthermore, there was no standard license or certificate for the manual therapists to take. Almost every excellent manual therapist has been marketing themselves through the word of mouth, which is effective but not efficient enough in this rapid and dynamic world.

Treated differently by the public, the Asian-orientated traditional massage, on the one hand, is often considered as a type of leisure activities, helping people relax and relief the pain.

Foot massage at Travel Channel TV

Thanks to the internet generation, the value of massage or manual therapy is now flourishing. By merely surfing YouTube, one can find millions of video teaching how to perform manual therapy. 

Online Teaching of Manual Therapy 

 

On the other hand, the regular physical therapy is considered as a more serious curing process that is time-consuming and painful. Now the PTs are faced with a dilemma: should they include the massage service in their rehabilitation centers or not?  

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[1] Gatterman MI, Hansen DT. (1994). "Development of chiropractic nomenclature through consensus". J Manipulative Physiological Therapeutics 17 (5): 302–309.

ICT Stimulates the New Trend in Rehabilitation Centers

In the next two posts, I will go through the recent trend in the rehabilitation centers and the physical therapy clinics—a trend to introduce the Asian Manual therapy, or “massage.” The idea of infusing the value of East into that of West may not be news at all, but the way the idea was transferred is keep evolving for the sake of information and communication technology.

In Far-East Asia, for instance, my homeland Taiwan, physical therapy was just introduced several years ago. Compared to the conventional medicine, it is very novel for the public. Also, people there are used to count on the traditional manual therapists rather than physical therapists (PTs). The fundamental differences between traditional manual therapists and the PTs are the education and training program, the license system, and the public image. Later on, we will explore about the ecology in the highly overlapped market and how PTs in Taiwan has been using ICT to adjust their business scope.

Since 2002, many rehabilitation centers located in Chinese communities in the United States added on the manual therapy to fulfill the strong demand of “massage.” The service could be provided without medical devices or with small devices, which means there is a possibility to launch small clinics near households and make it easier for patients to access the health care service. Perhaps it is a good strategy for those regular, standard rehabilitation centers or hospitals to differentiate themselves and to stand out from their competitors.