The Impact of Setting Performance Goals for Your Rehab Therapy Clinic

When patients come into your rehab clinic for assessments and treatments, they may only see a single physical, occupational or speech therapist along with an aide, in some cases.

Yet, in nearly every rehab facility, there’s an entire team of people working behind the scenes to help ensure each patient achieves optimal outcomes through his or her rehab therapy experience.

From front desk workers and billing associates to your entire rehab therapy team, each person on staff has a role in helping ensure patients comply with their plans of care (POC), which leads to better outcomes.

But, does your team see it this way? Do all your employees, no matter how they contribute within your rehab therapy practice or department, truly understand their individual roles in selling plans of care, increasing cash flow, and maximizing their values as professionals?

If not, this could become a problem. Why?

Without the establishment of transparent and measurable performance goals, it’s difficult for staff members within various departments to truly understand how their jobs – their careers – could impact the practice in an increasingly positive way.

Why Set Performance Goals in Rehab Therapy?

Performance goals are measurable ways everyone who works at your physical, occupational and/or rehab therapy practice can contribute to patients’ compliance with their plans of care (POCs).

Achieving such compliance is critical for a lot of reasons. It can reduce cancellations, reschedules and no-shows; increase total visits and visit frequencies; motivate patients to follow through with at-home exercises; and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

It’s not enough to encourage staff to simply focus on patient compliance, however. Performance goals provide rehab therapists and employees with tangible targets (KPIs) which, when specific and transparent, make it possible to:

Achieve Buy-In

It would be unreasonable to expect rehab therapy staff members and practice employees to rally around abstract objectives or points of emphasis. Giving your team specific targets while educating them about how they contribute to patient compliance will help them focus collectively.

Create a Team Culture

Performance goals make it clear that everyone has a role to play in patient outcomes and business success, not just the rehab therapy team. This can contribute toward developing a culture built around the sentiment, “We’re all in this together!”

Evaluate Progress and Success

Based on your targets, are you heading in the right direction? Are you and your team making strides toward improvement? What have been your greatest successes thus far? What needs more attention? Developing specific and trackable performance goals allow you to continually assess your program and make corrections when needed.

Gamify the Process

Many people are naturally competitive, and they certainly appreciate being recognized for their accomplishments. Setting trackable goals for your various teams and team members provide the opportunity to create friendly competitions within departments, reward milestones, develop incentive structures, and so on.

Simply put, setting specific, trackable and transparent performance goals doesn’t just help you get to where you want to go as a clinic. It also lets you know that you’re continually heading in the right direction based on incremental improvements by highly motivated employees.

Register for Net Health’s Performance Goals Webinar

We’ve established that setting performance goals is an important business practice. But, if you’ve never done this before, where do you start? What do you measure, and how will your employees respond?

For answers and insights to these questions and others, register today for your spot at our upcoming webinar, “Setting Performance Goals for Your Therapy Practice.”

Scheduled for Thursday, March 17 at 1 p.m. EST, Net Health Therapy experts KellyAnn Cascio, and Abby Jackson, PT, will offer information and tips about how to set performance goals for your clinic – goals that can help your team increase efficiency, compliance, outcomes and revenue. Register for the webinar today!