Nitin Chhoda shares the real value of planning ahead and setting your goals for your practice. Although collections from your physical therapy services can be unpredictable, allocating your expenses with regards to your marketing and business plan can help determine your goals for the practice.

Physical therapy marketing and budgeting is an absolute necessity for every physical therapy business, but it is especially important for someone who is hoping to run a successful physical therapy practice.

Healthcare and physical therapy marketing professions are especially difficult to budget for, because in so many cases, you will not know whether patients and their health insurance company will compensate the practice as you bill.

Collection Is Unpredictable

Even if you do collect the full amount, the timing of collection may be very impractical and unpredictable.

Because there are so many unknowns, it is even more important to plan ahead when allocating expenses. For the first few years, it is possible that your practice and physical therapy marketing will not run at a profit.

This means that you should factor extra cash into any loan you take out. If you plan ahead for expenses, you will eventually come out on top when you do begin to make a consistent and significant profit.

Most Expenses are Obvious

The majority of the expenses of any practice are completely predictable. You know what rent will cost every month, and you even know when and if your rent may increase.

You also can determine pretty quickly what utilities will cost, and of course physical therapy marketing and management staff salaries will also be set and predictable. These are the major expenses that you can expect to pay every single month.

In many ways, expenses are much more reliable than income. This is one reason that many people are afraid of budgeting; nobody wants to stare down a long list of known expenses and only see a few uncertain income streams.

At first, you will likely take out a physical therapy marketing plan and business loan to cover the predictable expenses. You will only be able to include legitimate income expectations once the physical therapy marketing practice has opened and your patients start to pay for visits.

Income Can be Estimated, Too

But it’s not all doom and gloom for a new physical therapy practice. With a good physical therapy marketing strategy, you can get the word out about your business even before you open your doors.

You can start scheduling appointments for the first week you’ll be open, even before you start paying your bills. And the truth is, you know how much you’ll charge for each appointment, and you know how many hours there are in every workday.

Of course, not every day will be full of paying clients, even if demand is booming. There will time  when all other things must happen in a physical therapy marketing practice. But you can probably come up with a rough estimate of how much you can expect to make if you have a decent flow of patients coming through the doors.

Bringing it Together

The really important thing to do is to figure out how you will pay your bills. If your income estimates can never cover the estimated expenses, you’re going to have a problem. But if you budget your physical therapy marketing plan and business ahead and do a good job in advance, you can find solutions before you are faced with a failing practice.

Making income goals for your practice is a must, just make sure they are limited and realistic especially if your just starting out. Nitin Chhoda explains why setting your goals with realistic income is important in order to meet the expectations of your practice.

In addition to hiring a qualified physical therapy marketing staff and organizing your practice to be efficient and effective, you should already have a plan on how you’ll pay your bills before you even sign the lease.

That means coming up with at least an estimated physical therapy marketing budget based on a few known quantities, such as expenses like rent and an estimate of how many referrals you can expect from alliances with other medical practices. There seems to be a tendency among practice owners to fluff up numbers or at least be very optimistic when budgeting.

Limiting Expectations

Don’t make your own success harder than it has to be; budget according to real numbers and realistic expectations. If your goals are attainable, you can reach them and make even bigger goals. But if you start with goals that are almost impossible to reach, you’ll find yourself barely treading water.

Every practice owner has to be at least a bit of an optimist. Now is a great time to start a business with a great physical therapy marketing plan, especially with incentives from the government to hire people and to take out loans.

In fact, the physical therapy marketing plan is likely to pick up in the coming decade like never before. The baby boomers are aging, and that means the largest elderly generation the United States has ever experienced.

The Good News

This is good news for physical therapists, but it means that things like physical therapy marketing are going to become even more important than ever before. There may be many potential patients, but there are also a lot of other physical therapy practices that are expecting an increase in business.

Physical therapy marketing is a necessity these days, so don’t forget to budget for a great physical therapy marketing plan and implementation strategy.

Just don’t expect everything to work out perfectly at first. Starting any business takes a lot of work and a huge financial risk. The only way to mitigate that risk is by keeping your expectations low and reflecting low expectations in your budget.

If you know how much it will cost to pay for your physical therapy marketing each month, find out how to make at least that much with the minimum amount of effort and time.

Take Your Time

Another easy-to-adopt mistake is to rush into a fast-paced and busy physical therapy marketing environment. Remember that every member of the staff is essentially new and they are all learning to work together.

Everyone needs to start with enough time to do their jobs right, so they can form good habits rather than bad ones.

A rushed and over-worked staff member will make mistakes and work inefficiently. That includes the owner and manager.

Plan for a slow ramp up, expect limitations at the beginning, and set realistic income goals and targets. You should always err on the side of pessimistic, if only because it’s better to overshoot your physical therapy marketing goals than to not reach them at all.

It’s never to late for your physical therapy business to provide cash-paying programs in order for your practice to receive income in real-time.

Nitin Chhoda shares how by putting up some cash-paying programs for your patients you will help them stay connected, as well as provide an alternative source of income for your practice.

The secret recipe for a successful physical therapy marketing plan of a practice sounds like something that any owner would pay a lot of money to obtain. Sadly, there is no secret recipe.

There are, however, very open and public ways that physical therapy practices have been able to increase their cash flow.

This doesn’t mean that physical therapists are charging more for services or scheduling shorter sessions and charging the same amount. Cash paying programs from an effective physical therapy marketing are ways that a practice can offset the lag that comes from billing insurance companies for most patients’ expenses.

Making Insurance Companies Pay

The best way to get the cash to your practice is to streamline and improve your claims submission process. For some practices this will mean hiring a medical billing and coding service.

For others it will mean implementing a medical EMR that integrates the clinician’s notes with the coder’s system and the biller’s system. An EMR can drastically improve the rate of accepted claims and that is big physical therapy marketing business plan for any type of service.

Changing the Way Patients Pay

Some EMR systems of business actually improve the way medical billing and physical therapy marketing happens to the point that the biller or receptionist can collect the patient portion of the payment the same day as the appointment. Getting to that point may take a bit of time and energy, but getting payment up front is well worth your time and effort.

An incorrect claim to the insurance company will be rejected. If you have done the research and figured out just what the insurance company will cover before you send the claim, you can not only improve the rate of accepted claims, but you can ensure that cash owed by the patient is paid in a timely manner.

Changing the Way Patients View Physical Therapy

This point cannot be made strongly enough. If you want a real cash paying program to exist as part of your physical therapy marketing practice, you must incorporate preventative and non-billable programs.

Because the challenge for physical therapy practices, as well as almost every other healthcare practice, lies in the billing of insurance companies, it can be hard to change the way you think about cash income.

These can be as simple as exercise classes for elderly patients who want to avoid injury. Each patient may pay in cash for the class, and overall, the practice earns the money that is paid.

All businesses, including physical therapy, have to have an effective marketing strategy. Nitin Chhoda reveals a few techniques on effective physical therapy marketing that will help your practice succeed.

Physical therapy marketing has changed dramatically over the past decade. Nobody looks at the yellow pages anymore, and people move so frequently that relying on word-of-mouth is less and less practical.

Instead, everyone is finding the information they need online, using online word-of-mouth tools like social networks and consumer review websites.

Health care providers such as physical therapists, have to market themselves too, and they have to have effective physical therapy marketing even to their current patients.

Knowing the Physical Therapy Marketing Niche

The first step toward effective physical therapy marketing is to understand the market that you are trying to appeal to. Most people don’t want to have to go to the doctor, or to the hospital, or to a physical therapist.

When they do go, they are apprehensive, and not just because they are concerned that something may be wrong. They are also always worried about what it will cost them to find out if they need more healthcare.

One way to attract patient using modern physical therapy marketing is to present a modern and confident sense of health care and great physical therapy marketing. Of course, having a comprehensive, integrated EMR in place will put you in the position to demonstrate modernity and efficiency.

But beyond that, you will want to let you patients know that they can trust you to deal effectively with their insurance companies.

Because so many patients don’t even know what is covered by their insurance plan, they are even more anxious about the billing process. One way to help patients is to talk frankly and openly with them about what they can expect.

Insurance Plan Coverage

Finding out just what the insurance plan does cover before the patient comes in for an appointment is not always easy, but it does give you an incredible physical therapy marketing message.

What if you could tell patients that you will work with their insurance company even before they walk through the doors, so they know what they’ll pay even before they accept any health care services?

Patients are a difficult market to target with a convincing and inoffensive physical therapy marketing ideas and strategy.

You don’t want to infer that they aren’t getting the care they need or that they have been doing things wrong. But you do want to offer them something they haven’t been getting: convenience and transparency when it comes to paying bills.

Establishing Relationships

Physical therapy marketing doesn’t have to be focused solely on commercials and advertisements. You should also establish relationships with the complementary practices that may be able to send you referrals.

You want the confidence of anyone who can send you a referral, because referrals are one of the most consistent forms of marketing you can get. Patients are much more likely to go to you because someone they know and trust sent them.

And physical therapy marketing doesn’t stop when the patient makes an appointment. You’ll continue to share your marketing messages with your patients during and after each visit.

This may mean improving as you go and taking feedback, but the end result will be a practice that actually caters to the needs of patients and ensures that when they do need health care, they will come to your practice.

Marketing your physical therapy business doesn’t rely on producing creative brochures alone. It also depends on how you treat your patients before, during and after each visit. Nitin Chhoda shows how treating your patients can make or break your practice.

Most healthcare practice managers think of physical therapy marketing as something they buy. You can hire a physical therapy marketing professional to handle your advertising and published materials.

You can also ask them to research competitors and find ways to incorporate successful competitive messages into your marketing plan.

But physical therapy marketing is also something your practice does whenever anyone has contact with a patient. The overall impression that patients have of the entire practice is what will determine whether or not they’ll come back.

Referrals: Professional and Personal

You probably have a pretty good idea of how important professional referrals are to your practice. If you work with a few other, complementary practices, you probably have a consistent stream of referred patients.

But there are other physical therapy marketing referrals that happen all the time, and you may or may not even realize how much of a difference they are making.

Personal referrals from current patients to potential patients are very powerful physical therapy marketing plan. In fact, it is worthwhile to think about the potential patients when making decisions about how to run the practice.

Patients Feedback Are Important

What do you want your patients to say about the care they receive when they come to your practice? As an example, on a Facebook feed a friend wrote about her dentist. She said they take very good care of her, have a very comfortable waiting area and even some other perks.

She looks forward to going to her dentist. If all 800 friends of hers saw that post, a percentage of them will actually take action and check out that dentist. How many people do you know that say they look forward to going to the dentist’s office?

It’s the same thing when it comes to your physical therapy practice. Having a great physical therapy marketing should always consider the word-of-mouth referrals.

You want this kind of referral to be a physical therapy marketing tool that works for you. It can just as easily work against you, with people complaining about long waiting times, rushed appointments, and disorganized offices. Making a good impression is marketing at its most basic.

Post-Visit Physical Therapy Marketing 

Another critical part of your physical therapy marketing plan will be the follow-up after appointments. Take every opportunity to learn from your patients by asking for feedback in a few different ways.

Have a comments box in the waiting room, communicate via email when scheduling future appointments, and periodically send a card to ask patients how they feel about their experiences in your practice.

Continue to Care for Your Patients Even After the Visit

Your patients should feel that they are cared for, that their clinician is not just doing their job, but is someone they can rely on to communicate with them and educate them about ways they can stay healthy. Rather than treating a visit to your practice as a burden or because there’s something wrong, a visit should be a simple check-up to make sure things are going okay.

The best physical therapy marketing you do will be to frame the work you do in a positive light, communicate messages that inform patients about how your practice wants them to feel good, and ensuring that the experience is always refreshingly honest, open, and relaxed.