Hospitals and physical therapists are just two of the providers adjusting to the concept of bundled payments for a patient. When insurers set a certain price for procedures and care of a specific situation, it created a new landscape for the healthcare environment. The result makes it necessary to develop a plan for care and the distribution of payment between everyone involved in the process.
PTs already know how to work with one another and other providers. Changing billing strategies is but one example of additional skills and knowledge that must be learned.
Which parts of the overall requirements for completing the mission of effective quality care for all patients should be reviewed first? One of two important matters is listing priorities demonstrating how forms of treatment are determined. The second is showing how skills have improved and continue to improve so patients experience life-changing results. The result demonstrates the importance of patient care, although it isn’t the usual method of defining physical therapy tactics.
Bundled payments cut the amount of funds distributed to each party in the treatment plan. During the short time of its existence, stakeholders have evaluated a variety of topics to decide how to assure improved results through efficient customer care without removing the caring human touch that’s part of the solution. At the same time, methods can be designed that prove the reason some types of care, particularly in job rehabilitation, should provide an equitable amount of payment for the job done by physical therapists. PTs spend more time deciding how to successfully care for and heal patients than they do creating multitudes of pages showing how to achieve it. This appears to be the time to continue extraordinary healing while documenting what it takes so funding is approved to improve methods of therapy.
It’s time to address the importance of serving the many rather than the few.
Design physical therapy models to address population health models. Knowledge, interventions and techniques applied daily can improve the problems of many when treatment goals are developed to transform society and how it determines worth and success.
Changing the focus to resource management as a solution to a societal problem instead of a service in the form of individual treatment for the patient currently being seen is a challenge. A healing benefit will result from tactics like better nutrition and targeted exercise are met. Providers, payers, and patients will see a better, healthier lifestyle that validates the proposed changes in healing and health.
