As a physical therapist, you know and understand the importance of measuring outcomes among patients. If you want to provide the highest-quality total care to your patients, measuring and tracking outcomes is a critical component of your success.

High-Quality Total Care is Dependent Upon Measuring Outcomes Among Patients

By accurately measuring outcomes, you will be able to directly manage the individual care of each of your patients. Each patient that you serve will not become the subject of volume-based healthcare. Instead, they will each receive only the care that they actually need to improve their strength, optimize their range of motion, and experience the highest level of health for their individual needs. In addition to this, measuring outcomes among your patients will help provide the entire physical therapy profession with useful information that outlines how care procedures are doing in terms of effectiveness.

If you want to provide the highest-quality total care to your patients, measuring outcomes should be of highest importance to you and your practice.

When you take on a new patient in your physical therapy practice, it is imperative that you take full advantage of the standardized tests that are part of the industry. This will allow you to determine the unique needs of each patient and their baseline, as it pertains to individual functionality.

Once you use these tests to learn where your patient is, physically, you can then use the results of the test in order to quantify any changes that occur with the patient’s health and their level of functionality. Your job does not stop there, though. In order to provide the absolute best care to your patients, you will be required to continue measuring outcomes. In order to do this, you simply have to set up your patients for periodic reexaminations.

It is then that you can see where the patient is and if the outcome that your practice predicting is occurring. If the outcome is not as suspected, you may then change your treatment regimen so that you are able to reach that specific outcome.

The most standardized of outcome measures may result in the best of individualized total care. In fact, this is the common language that physical therapists use to evaluate the success of all interventions provided to a patient. If interventions are not found to be successful, they may be adjusted – based on a patient’s needs.

Outcomes should be measured to determine the unique components associated with function, the proper functionality of the body systems, and the response rates to unique interventions. In order to improve the process of determining which interventions result in the best outcomes, the EDGE Taskforce was created in the year of 2006. “EDGE” stands for “Evaluation Database to Guide Effectiveness”.

In order to take part in their work, you should make certain that your practice is engaging in the task of measuring outcomes.

If you would like to learn more about improving the total care of your patients, get started on our home page

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