The Million-Dollar Opportunity Hidden in Your Patient Pre-Arrival Process (RTS Newsletter #14)

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Beyond Billing: Why Optimizing the Patient Journey Matters More 💡

In our February newsletter featuring Jerry Durham, we explored how therapy practices can sometimes become "billing companies that happen to provide patient care" rather than care providers who handle billing. Today, I want to build on that conversation by examining why focusing on billing optimization alone creates a dangerous blind spot in practice management.

The SaaS Paradigm: What Healthcare Can Learn

When we look outside healthcare, successful businesses obsessively track their entire customer journey. They understand that revenue is merely the result of a well-optimized conversion process.

Consider a SaaS company like Salesforce or HubSpot:

Imagine if they only tracked "active users" without any visibility into how they acquired those users. Picture their CEO announcing: "Great news! We have 1,000 active users this month. No idea how they found us, how many visited our website, what percentage signed up for trials, or why some converted while others didn't—but hey, 1,000 users!"

They'd be laughed out of the boardroom. Yet this is precisely how many therapy practices operate—focusing exclusively on who showed up and what was billed while remaining blind to the journey that brought patients there (or didn't).

The Hidden Cost of Looking Backward

A striking example: one large therapy chain proudly showcased how they'd recovered $1.2 million through improved billing practices in a calendar year. When analyzed more deeply, their data revealed they were losing approximately $3 million per month due to patients not showing up for appointments.

Building Your Practice Funnel

In our February newsletter, Jerry highlighted crucial metrics like lead-to-arrival rate, cancellation rates, and drop-off rates. Let's take this a step further by mapping these to what other industries call a "conversion funnel":

Remember Jerry's "dirty secret" from our February newsletter? "Only about 30% of people who start a plan of care complete a plan of care." This is the healthcare equivalent of a SaaS company having a 70% customer churn rate—a business-killing metric that would trigger immediate intervention in any other industry.

The Power of Forward-Looking Metrics

SaaS companies can predict their quarter's revenue with remarkable accuracy weeks in advance by analyzing their funnel metrics. They know exactly how many website visitors convert to trials, what percentage of trials convert to paid accounts, and how much each customer typically spends.

Healthcare practices can achieve similar predictability. As Jerry noted, tracking daily progress toward monthly goals allows you to course-correct while there's still time: if you need 400 leads monthly and you're only at 85 by March 7th, you can take immediate action rather than discovering the shortfall at month-end.

The Financial Impact: Small Funnel Improvements, Big Results

Just like SaaS companies see big returns from small conversion improvements, therapy practices can experience similar gains.

The Leaky Bucket Problem

Think of your practice as a bucket. New patient inquiries pour in at the top, but many leak out before becoming revenue. Unlike retail businesses that can compensate with volume, therapy practices face unique challenges:

• Each potential patient costs significant marketing dollars to acquire

• Your clinical hours are finite and can't be easily scaled

• Patient relationships require ongoing nurturing, not one-time transactions

As Jerry noted in February, what happens before a patient arrives is just as critical as the treatment itself.

Getting Started: Building Your Practice Funnel

Building on Jerry's recommendation to track what actually matters, here's how to implement a conversion funnel in your practice:

See you in two weeks,

Eddie

P.S. Want to streamline your business, improve margins, boost patient outcomes, and energize your staff? Reply to this email or click the link below to schedule a time to chat.

World of Rehab 🌐

• [Physical] A KFF Health News investigation reveals how insurance caps on physical therapy sessions—often as few as 20 per year—prevent full recovery for seriously injured patients who exhaust their benefits before regaining mobility.

• [Occupational] Nevada Medicaid pauses a proposal that would have allowed behavior analysts to address ADLs/IADLs following successful advocacy efforts from state and national occupational therapy associations concerned about scope of practice overlap and potential service disruption.

• [Speech] ASHA details how President Trump's executive order to "facilitate the closure" of the Department of Education could impact school-based speech and hearing professionals, with potential shifts of IDEA to Health and Human Services raising concerns about medical versus educational approaches to student services.

Last Laugh 🤣

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