Not more paperwork?
If you come to Alliance Physical Therapy as a patient, you will find you have some additional paperwork to complete. Before you roll your eyes or wonder if you are buying a used car – let me show you how valuable it is to you.
In today’s blog, we explore the third of our four values, an “Outcome Oriented Service” and examine why it benefits you. Encapsulated in this value is a recognition of the need for us to constantly analyze, tweak and refine what we do. We have to keep learning and improving in order to offer you, our patient the best care possible.
A current buzz phrase in physical therapy is “functional outcome measures”. Functional outcome measures are a way of objectively rating a patient’s report of their ability or lack of ability to perform activities in their daily life. There are many versions of these functional outcome measures; some completed with paper and pen while others are computerized, some are specific to a body part whereas others try to evaluate the person more holistically. Some measure “ability” while other measure “disability”. Regardless, the idea is to have objective data of your improvement over time. Helping to ensure you are getting better in the response to treatment in the right timeframe. Using a measuring tool like this improves transparency and facilitates the patient-therapist partnership.
Another popular phase is “patient satisfaction”. Although the health industry is a little different from many other customer service related industries it’s still crucial for us to have a strong customer service model. In fact, there is a trend in healthcare where patients, like yourself, are increasing moving towards being health consumers. That is to say, you are taking more control over your health and healthcare. Playing a more active and discerning role in deciding what treatments and services you want to receive and paying attention to the cost, effectiveness and quality of those health services instead of being passively passed along the healthcare factory and spat out the other end. Being able to collect, track and respond to patient satisfaction is invaluable to us at Alliance Physical Therapy as we strive for excellence.
Although this paperwork takes a few extra minutes for you to complete – they provide many benefits that we feel make it worthwhile. These include:
1. Helping you know how long it might take for you to get better
2. Keeping us accountable to those goals
3. Helping you make treatment decisions
4. Helping us make decisions about staff training and development
5. Helping us always improve and offer a better service and experience to you
At Alliance Physical Therapy, we believe these things are crucial to creating an effective and efficient practice focused on providing high quality and cost effective care to you, our health consumer. In fact, we use a computerized program called Focus on Therapeutic Outcomes (FOTO). FOTO is an outcome management system used internationally in nearly 5,000 clinics by more than 22,000 therapists and now has nearly 6 million completed patient episodes. This huge database allows us to compare ourselves against our competitors and peers. It challenges and facilitates us to be the best that we can be so that we can achieve our mission of “getting, you better quicker”.
Phil Chamberlain, PT, MSPT, Cert DN, Cert OSM, Cert VRS
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