CSM 2023 Recap: Addressing Challenges Facing Today’s Rehab Therapists

As attendance totals pushed 15,000 each day of this year’s APTA Combined Sections Meeting (CSM), held last week in San Diego, our Net Health team welcomed hundreds of rehab therapy practitioners, owners, educators, leaders and students into our vendor booth to discuss the myriad ways technology can benefit them as well as their professions.

Each of these discussions served as a valuable reminder to Net Health – an Advocate Sponsor at CSM 2024 – that as proud as we are of our rehab therapy EHR software and solutions, the true power of this profession comes from the passion of its people.

It’s a passion, we were often reminded, that derives not just from the need to succeed financially, though that plays an important role. It comes from an innate desire to best serve the needs of their patients, helping them achieve greater function and optimal outcomes.

As such, many discussions revolved around issues that all too often have made it difficult for rehab therapists to reach these goals. These issues included:

• Staffing. How can rehab therapy clinics and teams hire and retain qualified staff members that will enable them to accomplish such things as serving more patients, growing their clinics, achieving higher outcomes, optimizing revenue potential, etc., while avoiding staff burnout?
• Documentation. Speaking of maintaining a patient-centered focus while optimizing revenue and avoiding burnout, how can rehab therapy clinics and teams reduce the burden of documentation without it affecting compliance and reimbursement?
• Reimbursement. In an age of shrinking reimbursements and the transition to value-based care models, what should rehab therapy teams be doing, and what tools could they be using, to optimize revenue while complying with new regulations?
• Technology. What role will technology play in helping overcome challenges in documentation, scheduling, communication, workflows, etc., making it easier for clinics and rehab departments to do more with less?
• Education. With technology taking on a greater role throughout seemingly every aspect of rehab therapy, from operations, scheduling and revenue to marketing and patient engagement, how will the next generation of PTs and OTs be trained to optimally utilize these tools?

Such challenges often transcend care settings, affecting hospital outpatient and acute care as well as private practice, skilled nursing facilities, senior care facilities, and so on.

So if you stopped by our booth and wish to continue our conversation, or you wish to learn more about the solutions Net Health has created to address these and other issues, contact us today to schedule a demo with our team!

Net Health Gives Back at CSM Fundraising Events

Even outside the walls of the San Diego Convention Center, we at Net Health found additional ways to give back and support the rehab therapy profession during CSM 2023. This included our participation in the following events:

PT Fund Celebration for Diversity

On Thursday evening, Feb. 23, our Net Health team sponsored the PT Fund Celebration for Diversity, which took place on the decks of the historic USS Midway.

A fundraiser for the Minority Scholarship Fund, the event featured hundreds of attendees who partook in a number of aircraft-themed activities, including the popular virtual reality Screaming Eagle flight experiences. Dozens of historic aircraft were also on display both inside the ship and on its flight deck.

Through its Minority Scholarship Fund and the Dimensions of Diversity Fund, PT Fund has provided more than $1 million in scholarships for diversity, equity and inclusion within the physical therapy profession.

Party with a Purpose / TechnoPalooza 2023

Then as an Ally Sponsor at this year’s Party with a Purpose, a Friday-night fundraising event held during CSM, our Net Health team demonstrated one of our newest artificial intelligence (AI) tools at TechnoPalooza 2023.

A “hands-on playground for learning,” TechnoPalooza proved to be such a hot event that it was briefly interrupted by an erroneous fire alarm before it evolved into the night’s main feature, Party with a Purpose.

The evening enabled our team to showcase Net Health’s new Missed Visit Prediction Indicator, a predictive analytics tool that uses real-time data available within a facility’s EHR to predict the likelihood a patient may miss a future appointment.

If you operate an outpatient and/or private practice rehab therapy clinic, schedule a demo to see how our Missed Visit Prediction Indicator works!