Eric Sacia. Chief Operational Officer, PT, OCS, Rock Valley Physical Therapy

Transcript:

‍
My name is Eric Sacia. I currently serve in the role of Chief Operations Officer for Rock Valley Physical Therapy. I'm a PT. I graduated from Washington University in 1993. So, I've been in the profession for quite some time. Purely as a PT, it was about helping others. I had an injury back when I was in youth adolescent baseball and had therapy, and I thought it was a really cool thing that you could help, you know, kids get back to sports. Little did I know the breadth of what we do as a profession and all the things we serve. I was passionate about patient care, and then when I came to Rock Valley, eventually, I started to get more interested in the administrative side. So, I just kind of did some things about measuring quality. We tried to figure out our own outcomes back in the late '90s. We did, you know, measure some metrics that indicated you're doing a good job. And then from there, I just continued to add on and have more responsibility, to the point where it became overseeing operations of our practice.

We always talk about how our metrics should tell the story of great patient care. So, if patients find value in what they do, they're going to show up for their appointments, as measured by an arrival rate, for example. If they have a great experience with the therapist, they're going to finish their course of care, which is measured by the number of visits they come in for. If they have a great experience and a great outcome, they're going to come back, which will mean more new patients. So, we don't look at a metric in isolation, but we use those metrics to tell the story of how our therapists are taking care of their patients in their communities. What I find very rewarding about that is not just that we're relying on a specific number, but it's a set of metrics that tell us that we're doing a good job, we're growing, and we're taking care of our patients and we're taking care of our communities.

The pain point that we have today, and there have been some people who have solved this, but we haven't gotten to that point yet in any of our previous vendor experiences is getting data at the right time, to the right people, in the right fashion. We have the data there, but the challenge is getting it out and putting it into a format so you can get it to people frequently. We take a lot of data and put it into Excel. We embarked on a couple of experiments to try to get to a BI tool, but it didn't work out with some of the data we were getting from one vendor, and the dashboards were never created. But for a long time, I've been asking for the ability to take data to expectation and to be able to give that to my leadership team to help them make good decisions.

We also had the state of Iowa cut payments for their speech services. So, we have two pediatric practices. That's been a challenge to look ahead to see how payment is going to come in and whether we are going to have a viable practice there, right? We just met about that last week, and then all of a sudden, the state showed up today for their state audit. So, all of a sudden, the therapists are in a panic. They have somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about in terms of looking at chart reviews and doing all this, but they're conducting a state audit on the rehab agency.

So, taking a step back, what we've seen over time is that payment for services is flatlining. Insurance companies are not looking to pay us. Medicare has cut us year-over-year for several years, right? So, payment has been a challenge. Where that has to come in is, to maintain a margin, you have to look at your expense side. So, what we are really eager to work on is how we can use technology to reduce our labor, reduce our costs, and reduce the administrative burden. Documentation is a burden for all the therapists. And they may not be as willing to say yes to that next new patient because it might take them 15 minutes to do their documentation. So, can we use the Scribe and the Ambient to bring that time down so that they'll say yes, and maybe they see another visit or two a week? If they do that, it lowers our expense per visit and maintains our margin, which is something that I'm really looking forward to. Our therapists went to school to take care of people, and compliance, the administrative burden, and the authorization requirements are taking too much time away from the patients. So, if our system is efficient and automated, if it allows therapists to get back to doing what they do best and taking care of patients, that would be a great outcome in my opinion.

‍