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.