How to Grow Your Physical Therapy Office Through Metric Tracking
As a physical therapist, your first concern is the quality of care you provide to your patients. However, you’re a business owner, too. That means that in between treating patients, you’ve also got to think about the profitability and growth of your physical therapy office.
At HENO, we understand how difficult it can be to find the time and energy to do both things. But here’s the good news. You can use metric tracking to grow your physical therapy office. In fact, using metrics can make help you provide better care to your patients, make your marketing plan more efficient and your practice more profitable. Here’s what you need to know.
Improve Patient Satisfaction
Your practice’s overall patient satisfaction rate is a key performance indicator, or KPI, that can have a direct impact on your practice’s growth. When patients are happy with their experience, they’re more likely to:
- Refer you to their friends, colleagues, and family members
- Write a positive review of your practice online
- Return to your practice for their future physical therapy needs
You can and should track your overall patient satisfaction rate, but it’s also essential to track other healthcare KPIs that impact patient satisfaction. These include:
- Average patient waiting time
- Appointment cancellations
- Patient to physical therapist ratio
- Patient drop offs
- Patient understanding of the documents you provide
If patients wait a long time in your reception area, don’t understand the paperwork you give them, or feel that they can’t trust you with their confidential medical records, it’s unlikely they’ll report a high level of satisfaction.
In other words, a key use of metrics is to improve the care you provide and ensure that your patients are happy.
Fine-Tune Your Budget
Budgeting is about more than math. To create a workable and accurate budget for your physical therapy office, you’ve got to consider your needs, your patients’ needs, and the bottom line.
Some of the metrics that can help you with budgeting include:
- Revenue growth
- Profitability over time
- Revenue sources
- Revenue concentration
One mistake we see a lot is when physical therapy practices hire new employees to meet their needs and fail to consider the consequent increase in their overhead expenses. When you hire new staff, you must make up for the increased overhead with increased revenue. That means you’ll need to do at least one of these three things:
- Attract more patients
- Increase your prices
- Decrease your spending in other areas
You may, of course, choose to do all three. In any case, metric tracking will help you identify areas where you can save money. At the same time, it can help you identify the areas of your practice that might not be profitable, giving you an opportunity to adjust your prices.
Revise Your Marketing Strategy
Growing a physical therapy office is impossible without marketing. Your marketing mix might include blogging, social media marketing, search engine advertising, and other things. But whatever you’re doing, there’s a chance that you could be doing it better than you are now.
Tracking key marketing metrics can help. For example, you should look at:
- Your average cost per lead from each lead source
- The ROI for each marketing campaign
- Your conversion rate (how many leads become paying patients?)
- The bounce rate on each page of your website
For example, when you review your average cost per lead, you might notice that you’re paying far more for a lead from your Google ads than you are for your Facebook ads. There are two ways to adjust:
- Pull some of your marketing budget from Google and put it toward running more Facebook ads; or
- Split-test various headlines, images, copy, and calls to action on your Google ads to see if you can improve their performance and reduce your cost per lead.
You could even do both. The same is true of your ROI. If your ROI for a marketing campaign is low, you can test new ad elements or redistribute your budget accordingly.
Tracking the bounce rate on your website can help you decide whether you need to redesign your site or refresh your content. Patients sometimes bounce from a site if it loads too slowly or isn’t mobile optimized. They may also navigate away if they’re unsure of which treatments you provide or whether you’re in their area.
The key here is that you can’t fine-tune your marketing unless you know which things you’re getting right and which things you’re getting wrong. Metrics can provide you with the answers.
If growing your physical therapy office is a priority for you, the tips and information we’ve provided here can help you achieve your growth goals with metric tracking.
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