If you’re an occupational therapist and you have an outpatient therapy clinic and want to have more of the kind of patients you want to see, then you need to ask yourself a question: What does my target audience really need?
I know that most of the time, we’re trained in the university to think that patients will only be willing to use their insurance or only consider opening our business if we can get into this or that network when it comes to it. But believe it or not, if you take a moment to think about what your patients need and figure it out, you can have a really great business.
My Journey
My name is Hoang. I’m an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist, and I had all those same thoughts and ideas when I first went out and started my clinic over 10 years ago.
My questions were:
- What insurance do I need to get into?
- How do I do the paperwork to get a network?
- How much would they pay me?
But I failed to realize that if I could figure out what my patients really wanted from me, then my clinic could be even more successful than I ever dreamed possible. And I could start to hire more people, and I could train more therapists.
Focusing on Patient Needs
I wanted to share a little bit of that with you because it’s something that’s really important that I go through with my staff over and over. We do tend to forget about what patients actually need because we’re so focused on insurance this and insurance that. And that’s a very important question, and it’s a very important answer that you can have with your patients.
But I think before we can even get there, we have to think and figure out what our patients need. It’s not a range of motion; I promise you.
If you’re thinking as an occupational therapist, I think that I am at my “most OT” in my business because I can really think about what patients really need. I can think about not just their ADLs, not just their activities of daily living, but I can think about their hobbies, their work.
I can think about when someone comes to me and says, “Hey Hoang, I’m a drummer and my elbow hurts me. I need to work. I need to be able to hit this gig and do that gig.” I can figure out what they really need. It’s not the elbow pain.
If I’m just only talking about it, I can lose them because they can go on YouTube and watch a ton of videos. They can go get an injection. They can wear straps on their arms. But if we can sit there and figure out what patients actually really need, we have the potential to have a really successful business.
Key Questions to Ask Patients
Here are the three questions that I generally ask my patients. When I train my therapists, I train my front desk, we need to have these answers.
- What have you tried in the past?
- From what you’ve tried, what works and what doesn’t work?
- What’s most important to you or what do you want?
I know it seems so simple and there are some nuances around, but figure out what they really want.
A Case Study
Let me share this story. A guy came in, he’s tried physical therapy, chiropractic, massage. He’s also done injections and PRP, and he came in for one of our free discovery visits. We have this new service called shockwave therapy, and he wanted to try it because he wanted it done quick and fast.
In the session, I said, your problem isn’t a quick and fast problem. I asked, what do you really need? What have you tried? That’s how I knew he tried all these things. What has worked and what hasn’t worked? None of those things have worked. Why hasn’t any of them worked? The reason why is because you haven’t gotten to the root cause of the problem.
It sounds to me like you want quick and fast, and your problem isn’t that. If you just want to come in and out and you want injections, I can’t give that to you. The shockwave session is a quick session, but it needs multiple sessions. It needs more than one.
And if you really need therapy, which it sounds to me like you do, we see you have all the motion, but you still have the pain. You can do just about everything, but there’s a reason why you still cannot sleep at night. Something is going on. I think I know how to figure that out. And if sleeping is really important to you, I can help you.
But what he wanted was quick and fast, and I’m not a magic bullet where it’s just one and done kind of thing. Every time he was looking for that, everyone has failed him because he wanted just a one-stop shop. He didn’t want to put any effort into it, and that’s not going to work for my model.
Matching Services with Patient Needs
I was able to figure out what he wanted or what he really needed. Did it match with my services that I have to offer? I think that we have an opportunity to figure out what patients need and then be able to deliver to them, and it had absolutely nothing to do with insurance.
I want to encourage you to think that way because now, in this day and age, insurance reimbursements are lower and lower. Most insurance networks aren’t even open to taking on new providers. I want to encourage you that there are other ways to go about it, and it doesn’t have to involve always working with insurance.
When you’re working with insurance, you’re working with high volumes of patients with very low reimbursement rates. But I think that when you can figure out what patients need from you, you’ll be able to charge higher prices and see fewer people but actually deliver on the thing that you say you can deliver on.
A New Perspective
I want to encourage you that that is totally possible, and there are a lot of cash-based businesses. You can be a premium service where people are willing to pay, people are willing to come and go out of their way to see you.
I own a therapy clinic in a very big city. I’m not what people would consider a local business, meaning I don’t have a lot of local people coming to me. I actually have a lot of people who are willing to drive in. We always make fun of people on Miami Beach because people who live there hate coming off the island to the mainland, but yet I have people who come. It’s because I have figured out what that person specifically needed, and because of my specialty, I’m able to deliver.
Conclusion
A part of your job, if you want to open a successful, lucrative business that actually makes money, profit, and allows you to do it your way, you just have to figure out what your patients really need and then ask those questions over and over again. And then don’t be afraid of someone saying no to you because they’re probably not a good fit for your business anyway.
Now, I’m not going to not follow up with this guy because I do think I can help him, but he’s looking for a quick fix, and I don’t have that. So if I can share some value over time like, “Hey, watch this video,” or “Let me at least educate you a little bit on what might be wrong”.
I create a lot of videos on my clinic’s site on why shoulder pain isn’t always at the shoulder or if you have elbow pain, why elbow pain isn’t always at the elbow. We have to look and see, like in your activity, what’s happening in your positioning? How much more OT can you be? Activity analysis, one-on-one.
I had a patient whose son came in for wrist pain, he’s a sailor. I’m trying to get him back to sailing professionally before the summer because he’s got a big competition and camp that he’s going to. He’s coming in once a week to work on his wrist pain, on his shoulder, and we’re breaking down what that activity needs to look like so that he can get better.
Part of it is just educating and asking the questions based on what they want. I think that if you can break that down, you’ll be able to get more and more patients that are willing to come pay for your services. It won’t matter whether you’re an OT or whatever specialty you have because your specialty is in figuring out what patients want.
I hope this blog helps and encourages you that you have all the skills that you need to ask the questions and to be able to charge a premium and to be able to grow your business.
And if you want to find out more, watch the full YouTube video:
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