Another great example of volunteerism by PT’s helping and caring in their community. Looks like done and provided thru oversight of the University of South Florida PT Program in Tampa, Fl.
I am a huge fan of the perspective, passion, volunteerism, and view of work/life balance of PT students throught the country.
The fact that they often get ruined (and ripped off for that matter) by the current model of clinical internship training is another matter and another post for another time.
larry@physicaltherapist.com
Or you will be in trouble!
Great work University of Kentucky.
larry@physicaltherapist.com
AAOMPT
Annual Conference
October
29-November 2, 2008
Seattle, Washington
Pain:
From Science to Solutions
On-line
Registration and Program Information is Now Available!
The 2008 AAOMPT
Annual Conference is the national conference where persons having a common
interest in orthopedic manual physical therapy (OMPT) may meet, confer and
promote research, practice, and patient care.
The conference
programming will focus on the various types and causes of pain providing
attendees with state of the art treatment strategies.
Don’t miss this
opportunity to participate in this important conference with your peers and gain
information and resources to advance your skill level and increase proficiency
in OMPT.
Please
forward this info to all of your PT colleagues who are not AAOMPT members. Let
the secret out that the AAOMPT Annual Meeting is the most exciting and
informative PT conference in the US!
Make the decision to
attend and register today!!!
Click here for on-line
registration!
Exceptional
Educational Opportunities will be offered.
- Pre-Conference
Sessions. These sessions
will offer in-depth information and interactive group dynamics to present best
practices, tools and applicable solutions in four hot topic areas.
- Keynote
Presentations: Manipulating the
Brain by
David Butler, Neuro Orthopaedic Institute Australasia Pty,
Ltd., Treating
Chronic Back Pain: Can There Be Too Much of A Good Thing? By Richard
Deyo, MD, MPH, and How Does Manual Therapy Inhibit Pain? By Steven
George, PT PhD
- Educational
Breakout Sessions.
A
full day of educational breakout sessions will be offered in repeating time
slots to allow you to attend as many as possible.
Updated
program information is now on-line!
Click here
for the conference agenda and detail on educational sessions.
Inclusive
Registration Fees
- Full Conference
Registration fees include the Keynote Presentations, Breakout Sessions, Research
Day, entrance to the Exhibit Hall and networking meal functions including two
lunches, Welcome Reception, Poster Presentation Meet and Greet reception and the
Friday evening Reception and Dance.
- Registration
Packages are available to combine Pre-Conference Course Registration and Full
Conference at a cost savings!
A couple of truths:
1. The real health care decision making is made by women.
2. Women are way more apt to tell folks about the value of your service thru word of mouth marketing than men.
3. Women are much more likely to look up information about their healthcare than anybody else.
4. The typical PT patient is a slightly older soccer mom.
5. If you had to choose to provide the best in customer service to one patient, it had better be a woman. Per EVEolution “Women don’t buy brands, they join them”.
So, why the fuss about women on the EIM blog? First, I believe that the value of outpatient PT will be told by women. They are key ambassadors for our profession and the better we understand the issues and their power in the market place, the better off we are as practicing PT’s.
Secondly, because I am ticked!
Most of my favorite bloggers are women-especially mommy bloggers and amongst my favorite is sk-rt.com who actively promotes my absolute favorite blogger-Jenny the Bloggess (if not in your readers, now is the time. Fair warning, her blog is way more risqué than our whore of the month club and 10x funnier than the EIM team could ever be). She also writes a cleaner column for Good Mom/Bad Mom that appears in the Houston Chronicle.
If you noticed, I didn’t hyperlink sk-irt.com because some idiots at Morris Publishing have a supposed girl power magazine named skirt magazine and have forced sk-rt to change their name. In fact, they filed a lawsuit. It is well chronicled here and here. Skirt Magazine is hypocrisy at its best-kind of like ACN of United Health Group.
So, don’t get Skirt Magazine but be an avid reader of sk-rt.com’s new name kirtsy.com.
It will lighten your day and make you forget about the Insulated Idealists and their quest to ruin PT as a profession.
Larry@physicaltherapist.com
And I really mean it.
There is a raging debate within the PT profession. Over past several weeks, I have seen it as part of many discussions and it was recently manifested on a PT listserve of the administrative section of APTA. I know that listserves are “old technology” but it actually works well for PT’s who tend to be slow adapters and certainly if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it!
The debate is centered over a seemingly growing movement that unfortunately has far reaching consequences: Do all services rendered within a PT clinic have to be one on one and performed by a PT or a PTA (I personally would prefer to leave the PTA out of any discussion but since medicare in much of their policy implementation makes us reimbursement equals, I will include). The debate unfolds something like this:
The Players:
Practical Practitioners: PT’s mostly who are in private practice or typically on a day to day have some encounter with the repercussions of the economics of their practice. If not in private practice, they oversee a department or a clinic and its financial performance and thus are faced with reimbursement realities, compliance, and trends and the pressure to keep their department or facility above water.
Insulated Idealists: PT’s in the industry who don’t practice at all (e.g. some academics), or who make their living not in PT practice but in lecturing to PT’s on reimbursement or coding, most members of the federation of state boards, or PT’s who are in a niche industry (e.g. they do 100% cash Pilates) that is grossly atypical and misrepresentative of the overall PT sector. The bottom line on these idealists is that at the end of the day they never are faced with the real world difference between the service of PT and its financial viability.
The Debate:
According to the Insulated’s, 100% of all PT has to be done one on one by a PT or PTA without exception and to do anything to the contrary is fraud and should be punished by jail, fine, license revocation or preferably all three (truth be told a few canings ought to be in there as well). They believe that Medicare superimposed rules are the best thing since the Wii and that the CPT codes by definition further support their position and every attempt should be made to gather national payors to get their acts together and adopt medicare as the de facto standard and in addition open up every practice act in the US and amend those to be of the same standard and consistency in every state where their position is duly reflected.
Iinsulateds believe that nothing should every be left to the judgment of a PT but rather every possible clinical scenario and intervention should be explicitly listed and reflect that it has to be done one on one PT or a PTA. They frequently site the excessive use of techs and aids in PT departments. For the PTA, they typically suggest that the PTA is duly licensed and essentially the equivalent in every way except for evaluation, manipulation, and debridement (some Insulateds would point out that an advanced PTA can perform the last two). Even a hot pack that nobody pays for has to be applied by a PT or PTA. In there world, nothing is left to chance and the list of rules for PT and practice acts would be about the same size as Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Economics is never considered because their fundamental belief is that PT ought to be free anyway and that any PT who makes more then them is a greedy crook who only looks at money.
On the other side is the Practicals. They believe that medicare superimposed rules are stupid and that although you have to follow them that every attempt should be made to get rid of them and more importantly stop the madness from methastasizing to other payors. The Practicals believe that a PT’s education and practice act allow both delegation of care and supervision in accordance to their judgment as a PT. They believe appropriate checks and balances are in place to prevent the excesses and avoid the impulse to manage to the small percent of PT practices that abuse the rules. Practicals look at the CPT codes in the same manner that physician’s-unless explicitly stated, supervision of support personnel thru delegation and direction aptly meets the description of the code even in cases where the word “one on one” is used as long as the one on one by a support person is done under supervision as outlined in their state’s practice act.
Relative to Vision 2020 Practicals actually buy into it and see the attempt by Insulateds as de-evolutionary to the profession. Practical believe that the Idealist’s view of Vision 2020 is illusionary. They believe Insulateds don’t see how their position runs contrary to a direct access practitioner who is autonomous Practicals take the position that a doctorate degree with advanced clinical training is best positioned to make judgments within the scope of practice of what their support personnel can do in much the same way that you see physicians manage their nurses and techs.
Practicals both laugh and are incensed by the Insulated’s activism toward amending practice act and attempts to make all care explicit. A practical would ask “do you see physicians trying to eliminate their nurses and support personnel from their supervision?”.
Practicals are faced with the financials repercussions of not taking certain contracts or the difficulty of trying to align quality care in a declining reimbursement arena by applying appropriate resources in conjunction with the insurance that patients have. Practicals site the great success of the military and VA system who have empirically shown their cost effectiveness in an environment where reimbursement is not an issue and where the PT is given significant autonomy and unfettered supervision over their techs and support (and at least the case in the military prescriptive authority and ability to refer for imaging).
Practicals would like to debate eliminating PTA’s from the profession and site the drastic educational differences and the inconsistent Medicare policy towards them. Any attempt to align a PTA as equivalent to a PT is appalling to a Practical. Practicals also site that evidence does not exist to support any of the condescending positions taken by the Idealists and that the free market thru both quality indicators and consumerism will determine the most efficacious delivery of PT. Practicals believe that PT can be economically viable if the shackles of the regulatory environment were lifted and the idealists would halt their ways in attempting to further restrict the profession from becoming autonomous providers. Practicals believe that without margin their is no mission and that without economic viability that our best and brightest will not seek out a PT career and that we will quickly head towards a 7 year degree getting $27 per visit for one on one care with more loan debts than a third world country.
I don’t think you have to guess which side that I am on.
The Question:
Which side are you on? Who is winning? What are the implications of Insulated’s position for the future of PT?
larry@physicaltherapist.com
Rush Presbyterian in Chicago has been refining a Virtual Integrated Practice (VIP) for the past four years. The project has had multiple goals with the major goals noted as:
- Refining
the VIP intervention and implementing it over an 18 month period in
four practice sites focusing on patients with diabetes type II, chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease and urinary incontinence.
- Evaluate
the efficacy of the intervention with regard to consistency, costs,
patient and provider perception, selected patient indicators of health
status and changes in disease specific health parameters.
- Promote
practitioner usage of VIP locally and nationally and distribute
findings of VIP intervention through a variety of collaborative
activities.
Interestingly, the VIP team consisted of a nurse, a social worker/case manager, a
physician, a pharmacist and a physical therapist.
Note that in a very recent meeting with the reimbursement experts with APTA, there was quite a bit of buzz about new CPT codes for telemedicine and internet consultation.....
Before you start ranting about the importance of seeing the patient in person and not trying to deliver care over the internet (please don't make me PT Whore of the Month!), I am curious if the group sees any use for this type of collaboration in the treatment of conditions like low back pain?
I see great potential for this type of system in enhancing the communication and thus the access to the services of qualified PT's in a timely fashion. If we can get the low back pain patient in front of us quicker we should be able to have better results in many cases?
This type of communication system also might allow for "pinging" the patient at defined intervals (3 months, 6 months....) to provide additional value (and gather additional data) to the patient over a longer period of time.
What do you think?
As we catch up with our PT "Whore of the Month" Club award winners, we have named the April 2008 winner below. Before we do that, I will call attention to the ongoing debate about the name of the award itself, which continues to receive much scrutiny (which we welcome) as you can see from the comments posted to the March 2008 winner. We are still not convinced that the name should be changed but appreciate that the name is not endorsed by 100% of our readers. Btw, in response to some of the comments, we have issue whatsoever in naming a female for this award since definition #4 below applies. The fact that only males have previously won is pure coincidence and no indication of reverse discrimination whatsoever. Please send along some deserving female candidates and we'd be glad to include them to the list. Without further adue, the April 2008 winner of the PT "Whore of the Month" Club is...drumroll please... All chiropractors who think they can do "physical therapy" As you can see from websites like this, many chiropractors have been deluded into thinking they can provide "physical therapy", as if physical therapy was constituted in its essence by a "grab bag" of treatments, as opposed to itself a profession with professional boundaries such as licensure. Of course, states like Maryland (and the physical therapist whores who perpetuate this idea) whose chiropractic practice acts permit such a masquerade are acting whorish themselves. The good news for physical therapists is that there are all sorts of reasons not to become a chiropractor, not the least of which is that chiropractic was recently named to US News and World Report's "Most Overrated Profession" list. All in all there are far more reasons to feel sorry for the chiropractic profession than feel threatened. Check out this video from Dr. Bill Kinsinger if you'd like a succinct overview of some of the major problems in chiropractic. It's well worth your watch. Keep sending in your ideas via email at info@evidenceinmotion.com or feel free to post as comments! The EIM Team Previous PT Whore of the Month Winners: Jan 2008 - WebPT - PT Whore of the Month Club #1 Feb 2008 - Paul Duxbury - PT Whore of the Month Club #2 Mar 2008 - Alan Tyson - PT Whore of the Month Club #3 Disclaimer: In the event that anyone is concerned with our use of the word "Whore", we are referring to definition #4 below. whore- 1. a woman who engages in promiscuous sexual intercourse, usually for money; prostitute; harlot; strumpet. 2. to act as a whore. 3. to consort with whores. –verb (used with object) 4. Obsolete. to make a whore of; corrupt; debauch.
At first, I thought it was the greatest May fool’s joke that I have ever seen, even though May 1st isn’t till tomorrow (In feat of symbolism this is how we celebrate it in KY-one month behind everybody else).
Of course I am talking about the front cover of the PT Magazine of Phys (can’t tell what else it says as some kid who is playing the wii’s head is covering the rest of the magazine title). This is the glossy mag that accompanies our official Journal-Physical Therapy.
It has been posted many times here, here, here, and here about what I will now refer as “the Paris Hilton of Physical Therapy” (you know something that continues to obnoxiously show up all the time and just when you thought it was gone shows up again)-otherwise known as the Wii as in Wiihabiliation (or Wii’s gone Wild).
But, to see Paris Hilton of PT show up on a magazine produced by our professional association shows just how lost we are in any type of unified branding message. I am sure that the conversation went something like this:
PT Magazine Idea Generator: “Why don’t we run our cover story on minority diversification, women’s health, or PT cash practices?”
Colleague of Idea Generator: “Uhh, because we run that cyle every quarter?”
Idea Generator: “No, I mean something really different this time! Let’s run them all three together! It will be the biggest issue of all time and amass record sales.”.
Colleague of Idea Generator: “Uhh, well, the magazine is free so sales won’t matter but I am sure your idea will make or advertisers and their mother’s proud-let’s go with it”.
Idea Generator: “Great! Wait! I really got it-let’s throw in a Wii into the picture!”
I am quite confident that is how we got this month’s cover. We hit the trifecta again (pardon the horse pun).
Just a few questions: is this ther ex or group? Does it matter if the kid is on medicare? Do you have to have a DPT or a tDPT to play (I mean facilitate one one one)?
Most interesting thing to the whole debacle? Right below is “Also inside:“ with the first bullet point being about 21st Century Marketing for PTs. Hope the Idea Generator reads it for next month.
But, it ain’t gonna ruin my Derby Week!
larry@physicaltherapist.com
At Least We are #5 on Somebody's list.
From the Tehran Times, Iran’s leading International Daily in an article entitled: Need a less stressful career? Here are eight secrets to work
5. Physical therapy assistant Whether giving and receiving backrubs at a massage therapy school, or practicing flexibility techniques in a physical therapy assisting program, you can learn how to help people maximize relaxation. And if you incorporate some of these exercises into your own daily routine, you could have a recipe for a tension-free workday.
My favorite- help “people maximize relaxation”.
I wish I could make this stuff up.
larry@physicaltherapist.com
Check out the new PSAs
from the US Dept. of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare and
Research and Quality (AHRQ),
and the Ad Council. The tag line: "Real Men Wear Gowns" is
catchy. The website link from the ads states:
"Whether it’s time for you to get a blood test or that test,you’re not
just doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for your family and loved ones,
because Real Men Know the Facts:
- One in 5 American men has heart disease.
- One in 3 American adults has high blood pressure.
- Three in 4 American men are overweight.
- Nine in 10 lung cancer deaths are caused by cigarette smoking.
The single most important way you can take care of yourself
and those you love is to actively take part in your healthcare. Educate
yourself on health care and participate in decisions with your doctor—even if
it means wearing an examination gown. This site will help you get started"
This ad campaign was explained at PRWeek:
Objective:
The effort aims to make men more savvy healthcare consumers and get them into
the doctor's office more often. The most recently released AHRQ Medical
Expenditure Panel Survey (2005) found that men are 25% less likely than women
to have yearly checkups. According to Ellyn Fisher, Ad Council director of
corporate communications, "It's all about starting a dialogue."
The key demographic targeted is US men over 40. "We went out and talked to
men," she added, "and found in our conversations and focus groups
that the reason [they] weren't going is they think they can handle things on
their own."
Idea: The campaign centers on PSAs and strategic media relations, which
use a humorous tone while encouraging men to seek out doctors. Examples include
a man in a doctor's gown walking his daughter down the aisle. Al Lazar,
director of AHRQ's Office of Communication and Knowledge Transfer, emphasized
that the communications team sought to maintain a positive focus by attaching
the campaign to upbeat promotions, such as Father's Day and National Men's
Health Week.
Tools: In addition to the PSAs, the AHRQ launched a new Web site,
www.ahrq.gov/realmen/quiz.htm, which provides preventative testing tips,
referrals, a quiz, and videos. Former NBA star Sam Perkins will headline an SMT
with the groups' leaders. The effort is also reaching out to bloggers and social
media. Internally, PR materials were provided to AHRQ staff, partners, and
constituents.
Measurement: The team is monitoring the number and quality of titles
that cover it, as well as Web site hits. Organizers believe the effort had
already reached more than 5.3 million people in the first few days through its
SMT, b-roll distribution, and other coverage.
Company: US Dept. of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare
and Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Ad Council
Campaign: Real Men Wear Gowns
PR Team: Internal teams
Launch: April 21
Budget: About $100,000 (PR)
From the April 28, 2008 Issue of PRWeek
APTA - Are you paying attention??
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