‘Tis the New Year Planning Season in Rehab Therapy

New year planning isn’t just for individuals who want to go to the gym more or pay off debt. In businesses, it’s often the time individual and team performance over the past year is evaluated and priorities are established for the next year. It could involve offering promotions to outstanding staff members, realigning the budget with company goals, shuffling teams and schedules, or determining the goals and benchmarks for the upcoming year.

In rehab therapy, it’s a great time to think back on the past year of patient care and look forward to the upcoming year. While there is no slow time of year in medical professions, taking the time to recalibrate, determine top goals and objectives, figure out what your budget looks like, and create plans for achieving those goals will keep teams focused and motivated.

How Rehab Therapists Prep for the New Year

Your employer, clinic, or facility may already have a structured approach to reviewing the past year and setting new goals and plans for the coming year. This is likely when organizational-wide priorities and individual performance are reviewed. But new year planning should consist of more than a number ranking for determining promotions and bonuses.

The start of a new year is a great time for teams to make changes that can have a lasting impact on patient care, employee satisfaction, and facility performance and reputation. While you don’t want to overwhelm your teams with new priorities, consider some of these focuses to bring into the new year:

• Being more patient-focused and led
• Establishing better operational routines
• Cross-team or cross-functional collaboration
• Tracking and evaluating progress and measuring success via structured data systems
• Developing support systems for patients
• Work-life balance for employees
• Reducing errors
• Training and supervision for junior employees and improving professional development opportunities for all employees
• Streamlining workflows for efficiency and profitability
• Adopting new technology

Thinking about your goals in large areas of practice will help you choose a few to focus on that are most important to your current patient set, community, and practitioners. Maybe you can divide your focus areas into buckets such as employee satisfaction, patient care, administrative work, or institutional operations. Thinking about it in overall themes like this will help you organize your priorities and communicate them clearly to the appropriate teams.

Evaluate Your Performance Over the Past Year

Every company, employee, and patient deserves to have a review of their successes and areas of improvement for each year. For these purposes, we’ll take this year: 2025. Level setting where the baseline is will help everyone come to the table with an understanding of what has happened in the last year, what expectations are, where expectations were met, and where they were not. This will be much easier if you have specific goals for a given year—personal or professional.

To give you and your team a fair evaluation, follow these steps.

• Review the goals for 2025: What outcomes were your working toward by the end of the year? How were you measuring these goals? Who is involved?
• Collect data: Consider all the places you can find data on success toward these goals. If you had a goal to have fewer billing errors, compare the number of claims sent back to you in 2025 with the number from 2024. If you had goals around providing better work-life balance for employees, look at how much overtime employees worked and how much of their PTO they used over the course of the year. Having data to refer to gives you an objective metric to measure what success looks like for you now and in the future. You can also use these to start conversations about practical ways to achieve future goals and how your current tactics succeeded and failed.
• Talk to the stakeholders: Administrators don’t get to determine patient satisfaction independently. Look at survey results, consider public rankings, and talk to patients and their families to get another perspective on how you improved over the past year and what remains an area to improve.

Create Your Goals for the New Year

Now that you have all the data and input you need to evaluate the previous year’s goals, consider what you have accomplished that was a one-time goal and what was just an incremental step toward a bigger goal. In a year where your facility moved to a new electronic health record system, your goals might include completing training for all employees, having all records transferred by the end of the year, and/or building the connections to share patient information with the right contacts outside of your facility. If all of these are accomplished, this goal is complete. Congratulations!

If you aren’t quite satisfied with one aspect, maybe that’s a great goal to continue into the new year. You’ve already started toward it, but maybe you just need a little more time to fully check the box.

On the other hand, you’ll often have incremental goals like reducing waiting times in the lobby or reducing billing errors as you move towards these bigger goals. If you make progress toward these, that’s reason for celebration as well—after all, incremental goals encourage higher rates of completion in bigger goals. But there may be more work to be done. If you’ve reduced the number of patients taking pain medication by 5%, maybe you can aim for an additional 5% improvement in 2026. It’s great to have audacious long-term goals, but your short-term goals should give you a path to make those possible. Now you can consider what new goals you want to set for the next year; in this case, 2026. Keep in mind those that will carry over from 2025 and build in a few additional goals as encouragement for this new year. Goals may also be handed down by state or federal regulators, CMS, insurance companies, or ownership of the facility.

Be careful not to set too many goals in a single area or for a single team. These should feel achievable over the next 12 months. Encourage teams and individuals to develop their own specific goals so they are invested and motivated. A rubric of setting two to three goals in each area of focus will provide an easy-to-follow structure. Try setting goals in these areas:

• Professional development
• Patient care
• Team or individual performance metrics
• Management or administration

Determine What Success Looks Like and Processes for Achievement

Success can be determined in a number of ways, but it’s up to you and your team to figure out what that looks like for you. Maybe it’s achieving the goals you set out. Maybe it’s managing to find some room in the budget for new technology you want to bring in or finding ways to relieve compliance stress for your staff.

After you’ve figured out what it looks like, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to achieve those goals. We’ve already discussed some ways you can get your staff started achieving their goals, but you can also set new operational processes or budget restrictions that can help you achieve those ideas as well. Maybe you want to look at what it would take to hire on a new physical therapy assistant to help relieve some staff stress. Maybe you want to implement a new front desk check in process that keeps appointments running on schedule.

All of these goals will inform your budget and updated processes, but they’re also informed by those. It’s possible you simply don’t have the money to hire or add a new piece of equipment you’ve been eyeing. Either way, you’ll want to put new processes in place that guide you towards achieving these goals.

Get Feedback from Important Parties

Getting input from the people these changes will affect is an important step before finalizing your plans for the new year. If you have a goal for creating a new patient intake process, talk to the people who do that work currently. What are the pain points with the current process? How about your patients? What are their complaints about the current process? This kind of feedback will help you ensure that your plan makes real progress to alleviate a problem in a way that works for everyone involved in the process.

Others may also have opinions about what is possible. Some employees may already feel burnt out, so adding more training to their schedule might be overwhelming rather than a new opportunity. Your practice might simply be unable to afford some of the changes you and your staff want to make, and you’ll have to consider the restrictions from your practice or hospital ownership as you plan. Administrators should also be involved in goal setting to ensure that all regulations are followed and top-line priorities for the facility are never compromised. If a goal is particularly important to you, talk about what can be eliminated in order for the time or money to be spent on achieving this new goal.

Socialize Your Plan

The plan, especially one that requires full team collaboration, should be public knowledge in the workplace. Make sure everyone is up to date on what will be different in the coming months and what the purpose of the change is. When everyone feels part of the process, they are more cooperative and can work toward the same goals.

If any part of the plan will change processes that affect patients, other providers, or care takers, it’s important to keep them in the loop as well. Communication will be key in informing them when new processes or practices will be implemented and what that means for their care or partnership.

Discuss your goals and subsequent plan with your team, supervisors, and mentors as well. These people will likely all be involved in implementing the plan, so they can offer suggestions and even give you time and space for dedicated work toward these goals. Your team at work will be your best cheerleaders and, with their buy-in, will make your plan easier to stick to.

Preparing Patients for Potential Changes

The new year is also a great time to review patient’s goals and treatment plans. During your sessions with patients this time of year, take the time to go through these same steps. How do they feel about their progress so far? Can you measure how they’ve improved? Do you have new goals to work toward?

Some common goals to set with patients in rehab therapy, especially those who are managing chronic conditions, are:

• Improved range of motion.
• Decreased need for pain medication.
• More independent functioning.
• Improved flexibility or balance.
• Increased strength or endurance.
• Improved markers of general health like blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol, blood sugar, and more.
• Develop a support network.

Periodically reviewing and adjusting goals will keep each patient’s progress on track and keep them motivated to work between clinical sessions to achieve their goals.

New Year, New Goals: the Motto of New Year Planning

The start of a new year is a blank slate waiting for new ideas and accomplishments. But as with any new year plans, if we are overly ambitious, we can burn out quickly. These planning steps will help you create a realistic plan that improves your chance of success. You don’t have to overhaul your working life on January 1. A few new goals and a clear vision will improve your performance and create great outcomes for your patients.

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