Practicing physical therapy, while remaining profitable, has never been more challenging. Physical therapists today face an increasingly difficult reimbursement landscape that is squeezing already compressed margins and pressuring practices to increase patient volume for already exhausted PTs. With many PTs spending hours each day after work wrapping up notes, it’s no surprise that WebPT’s 2022 State of Rehab report cited worklife balance as a chief concern of PTs or that PT turnover was ~9% in 2022...3 times the national average for the broader healthcare industry.

To stay in business, PT practices are going to need to find ways to reduce PT burnout, increase clinic volume and improve profitability and cash flow for each case. Although it seems like an impossible mix of objectives, NYSSPT, an out-of-network PT practice with four locations throughout metro NY, managed to find a way to do just that.

NYSSPT’s founder, Karn Santikul, graduated from Columbia University with his Doctorate Degree in Physical Therapy. He opened NY Sports and Spinal Physical Therapy (NYSSPT) in February 2008 and has since expanded it from a single location in Scarsdale to four locations throughout the metro NY area. In the last few years, Karn, who also provides business coaching services, has seen and heard all about the pain of diminishing margins. PT retention has also become a
common theme, with documentation burden and worklife balance being two of the most commonly cited
reasons for PTs deciding to leave.

ScribePT’s Note Prep, Transcription and
Scribe services all addressed Karn’s goals to varying degrees, but Karn decided to start simple with ScribePT’s Note Prep service. Note Prep allows PTs to create personalized note templates, then uses those along with information from intake forms and the clinical schedule to pre-populate case information in the EMR prior to the actual visit.

Before rolling the service out to his entire clinical team, Karn enlisted the help of his Clinical Director, Karl. A veteran PT, Karl was already familiar with the process of Note Prep. At the beginning of each day, he was accustomed to coming in early, checking the schedule and pulling up all of his initial evaluations for that day. For each, he would reference the chief complaint along with a few other key factors, then pre-populate sections of the SOAP note based on what he would expect to see for a typical patient with those characteristics. After evaluating the patient, he would then update the note to reflect what he actually observed.

For Karl, the value of Note Prep was twofold: it dramatically cut down on the time he spent on notes after seeing the patient and it helped ensure he didn’t forget to fill out critical pieces of the note in the rush between patients or at the end of the day.

At the start of the pilot, Karl worked with ScribePT to define an initial batch of pre-note templates. Karl set expectations for when he wanted pre-notes completed and what information he wanted added or updated from intake forms and scanned documents. After trying the Note Prep service out for a couple of weeks, Karl and Karn decided to roll it out to their entire clinical team.