Leadership: It’s a concept I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the course of my professional career. For those who may be unfamiliar with my story, I’ve worn a lot of leadership hats. I was:

• The captain of my high school and college basketball teams;
• The clinic director of a multi-location PT practice; and now, I’m
• The co-founder of rehab therapy’s first cloud-based documentation solution.

While all of these roles have challenged me to adapt as a leader, my idea of what makes a great leader is much the same. You don’t have to be a manager of people or a company founder to become a leader. You simply must put forth the effort.

At this year’s PPS Graham Sessions, we discussed the topic of industry leadership in great detail. Panelists and attendees exchanged ideas on what it means to be an influencer in the private practice sector. As the conversation progressed, a common theme emerged: Practice size, location, or setting, doesn’t dictate whether a PT is capable of leadership. Rather, leadership is defined by what PTs are doing in their own professional circles and the individual impact each of us can make to collectively strengthen our industry’s voice and efforts overall.

If we really want to create a better future for our profession and prove our value to the masses it bears repeating what good industry leadership looks like today, and how therapists can influence industry progress at an individual level. Here’s what I’m proposing to therapists industry-wide.

Put your money where your mouth is.

It’s no surprise that physical therapy has a brand problem, and it’s something that gets discussed year after year at Graham Sessions. Despite these conversations, however, we’re not much closer to solving it. This begs the question: How can we expect to promote our value to prospective patients (specifically, the 90% of folks who could use physical therapy but never receive it) if we’re not even clear on what our value is?

While there’s no universal solution to this problem, there are a plethora of ways you can lead the charge in promoting PT’s value in your own practice.

Practice to the full extent of your license.

One way to do this is to practice to the full extent of your education and training (a.k.a. your license). Whether you’re a DPT or not, you are a medical professional with the skills necessary to diagnose, treat, and coordinate care for patients and no other clinician can do what you do best. So how do we prove it?

My esteemed colleague, Larry Benz, DPT, OCS, MBA, MAPP, president and CEO of Confluent Health, stated in this article that with the right messaging and outreach, we can “migrate from PT being seen as an intervention and referral profession to a direct pathway of care,” and I couldn’t agree more. At a clinical level, this starts by improving our relationships with other health care professionals (e.g., physicians, surgeons, chiropractors). By providing them with objective results that clearly show our value to patient care, we can empower them to be our allies and to promote our value to other providers in their network.

Don’t accept contracts which undermine your value.

This same thought process can be applied to improving our relationships with payers, too. The more data we can take to payers to show why a PT-first approach to patient care matters and the impact it can have on mitigating downstream costs for all health care stakeholders (payers included) the greater our chances will be in securing fair contracts, mitigating annual reimbursement cuts, and proving our worth to the medical community at large.

In the meantime, don’t accept any old contract just because you feel you need to or because that’s how it’s always been done. Use this data to prove your worth—and push this forward when negotiating contracts. We are beyond the days of accepting crappy offers that don’t come close to justifying our services. We are better and stronger than that, and we need the data now more than ever to support that.

Demand PT as a covered benefit.

There aren’t too many people who can comfortably afford hundreds of dollars a month on physical therapy—regardless of how good the care is. As such, accessibility to PT services isn’t just a matter of law; it’s a matter of payer coverage. So, if you’re not offering PT as a covered benefit to your staff, what is this saying about your commitment to promoting the value of our services? Nothing great.

By opting to not offer PT coverage to your own staff, your ability to convince other medical professionals—including our own team—of the potential which lies in a PT-first approach to care greatly diminishes. Therefore, every PT organization should make sure that PT is a covered benefit to their staff, plain and simple.

Prioritize workplace wellness and employee satisfaction.

A mark of a good leader is someone who can generate buy-in from their peers. To this end, focusing on employee engagement and satisfaction is key to helping both new and seasoned therapists connect to the mission of your organization—and to the mission of PT overall.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways you can prioritize workplace wellness and culture to create a space in which therapists feel supported and are mission-driven. Here are a few to get you started:

• Seek to understand employee motivations: Everyone is motivated by something different, whether it be salary, benefits, time away from work, flexibility, career growth, professional control, you name it. Plus, these key drivers often differ generation by generation. If you can hone in on what your therapists really want from their employer and make concerted efforts to prioritize these in the workplace, you’re well on your way to creating a healthier company culture.
• Ask your staff about their goals: Similarly, it’s important to regularly sit down with your employees and ask them about their career goals. I say regularly because their goals are apt to change over time and not every one of your employees is going to feel comfortable approaching you with their changing priorities and aspirations. After all, cultivating a culture of trust and support comes from the top.
• Encourage employees to be experts: Gaining a better understanding of your employees’ motivators and goals can help inform you of where their clinical expertise lies. Providing your staff with a way to share their expertise with their colleagues can be incredibly motivating—and can help elevate the quality of care your clinic is able to provide across the board.
• Provide mentorship opportunities for your staff: Mentorship is not only an effective tool to attract new PTs to your clinic; it’s also an important incentive to help retain them. Per this JOSPT study, “Standardized, structured mentoring helps newly graduated physical therapists accelerate their professional growth and their ability to provide optimal patient care.” Plus, it’s a great way to enhance employee loyalty in the long term.

At the end of the day, our industry is all about connection. The better we can connect with our colleagues and show them the true potential of PT, the better we can connect them to our industry’s mission at large—fueling the next generation of leaders.

Don’t get stagnant.

One of the Graham Sessions attendees who also happens to be a great leader in the rehab space said, “Those that can imagine their job as being very different are going to be the ones who are going to survive and thrive.” She hit that nail on the head!

As this attendee so poignantly put it, being an industry leader means you’re willing to try new things. I think back to where I was when I started WebPT 14 years ago. At the time, 80% of PTs were documenting with pen and paper. Not satisfied with the status quo, nor overly impressed with the solutions that were available to PTs at the time, I changed my course. And the result was greater than I ever imagined.

The main takeaway here is this: We work in an industry that is constantly (and rapidly) evolving. So, instead of letting change happen to you, get ahead of it or better yet, make some waves yourself.

Learn from digital health upstarts.

The digital health market closed the first quarter of 2021 with $6.7B in US funding, becoming the most-funded quarter in history. This tells us that digital health is here to stay, so we must learn from this trend and more specifically, why it appeals to patients. Otherwise, we risk being displaced or even replaced.

One of the main areas PT falls short of is convenience—and this is exactly where digital health companies thrive. To live up to this level of convenience, our profession must embrace technology and offer:

• Telehealth and virtual care;
• HEP apps;
• Online scheduling and payment portals;
• Digital patient intake options, and
• Digital review options.

Adopting these digital tools can help us better connect with our patients, improve their experience, and expand our clinical reach—helping us work toward PT’s persistent 90% problem I mentioned earlier.

Diversify your revenue streams.

Revenue diversification was a big trend last year, largely due to the financial toll COVID-19 had on clinics. However, diversifying your revenue streams is simply a smart business move regardless of the current climate. Fortunately, there is a bevy of ways rehab therapists can do this in 2022 and beyond, such as:

• Increasing cash-based service offerings, which was actually the most popular revenue diversification strategy in 2021 (per WebPT’s annual State of Rehab Therapy Report);
• Moving out of only clinic-based care and exploring employers and home health;
• Ramping up marketing efforts to attract more direct access patients (and position yourself as a front-line musculoskeletal expert); and
• Offering retail items for purchase (e.g., fitness bands, kinesiology tape, CBD oil, protein powder).

In addition to added revenue, diversifying your services portfolio helps further support your position as an essential medical professional. In fact, the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) released a statement affirming that “physical therapists play a unique role in society in prevention, wellness, fitness, health promotion, and management of disease and disability. This means that although physical therapists are experts in rehabilitation and habilitation, they also have the expertise and the opportunity to help individuals and populations improve overall health and avoid preventable health conditions.”

Explore non-traditional compensation models.

We’ve been hearing about alternative compensation models more and more over the past couple of years for a reason they’re the way of the future. In this article, Jason Wambold, MSPT, co-founder and managing partner at OnusOne, stated, “Fixed salaries plus bonuses is a payment model that is no longer sustainable, and we are estimating that these traditional models will be obsolete in 12–15 years.”

In addition to being fair and equitable, alternative compensation models can provide PTs with greater autonomy and flexibility which are key motivators for this next generation of PTs. In short, this could be a great option for clinic leaders looking to empower their therapists, set them up for long-term financial gains, and engage them in their daily practice.

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As evidenced above, there is room for practices of all sizes and specialties to act as thought leaders and change makers within the industry. And by holding yourself and your services to a higher standard (and encouraging your colleagues to do the same), the ripples you generate could have a tremendous impact on the profession as a whole.