Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Can a Cash Practice Work?

The simple answer is yes. The first prerequisite for a cash practice is to determine if there is a need for the service.

There are over 47 million uninsured in the US and many of them are in need of physical therapy but do not have insurance. There is also a public of hugely underinsured people who cannot afford physical therapy in a cash-based format because the high delivery and overhead costs of your traditional practice does not afford you any profit offering cash patients a truly economical service.

The current healthcare system is suppressive and I’d imagine I have your agreement on that. You have only two options when you are under suppression and those are to handle or disconnect. We don’t want you to give up your fight to provide physical therapy service and resort to other “solutions” to make yourself profitable by diversifying into providing, for example, vitamins and supplements to your patients or opening a Wellness Clinic with the intention to capture your discharged patients and have them pay cash for this service, etc.

We want physical therapists to promote and deliver physical therapy and not become some kind of substitute profession of vitamin salesman or health club operator. We are talking about you keeping your traditional physical therapy practice and opening a separate physical therapy practice that delivers cash only physical therapy services to patients. There is a simple and easy solution on how to set this up and we want to show you how. In my next post I will tell you how we came up with this idea.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Waitng on the next cash-based practice post...!!!!!

Jeff F. Lee and Shaun Kirk, PT said...

Thanks for the kick in the seat! Jeff and I held a roundtable on cash-based practices with representatives from all over the East Coast recently. It was very successful and informative. Since then we have being doing more research into this subject and how it relates to competition. Our next article on this exact subject should be posted today or tomorrow.

Anonymous said...

It is July 2 and still no post...I am waiting to hear morwe a/b cash based pratices. You are seriously leaving me hanging!

Jeff F. Lee and Shaun Kirk, PT said...

Due to heavy demands on the Cash Practice model as well as our New Patient Course, Hiring & Team Building Seminar and other services we are trying to post once a month on our blogs and have a few days left before we miss that target. Thanks for the interest and we will try to live up to the expectations. Do you have a specific area of the Cash Practice model that you are interested in?