AdamBanks

Adam Banks is the CEO of NY Sports Medicine & Physical Therapy.  He is the driving force behind the development and growth of New York’s premier provider of physical therapy services.  Adam bases his business practices on treating all patients with kindness and respect and catering specifically to their needs. This patient-focused philosophy has resulted in the success of NY Sports Medicine and Physical Therapy.

Adam began his career as an airline pilot and was credited with being the youngest pilot for a major airline due to his focus, leadership, and work ethic.  During his early career, he was promoted often and achieved success in a fast paced and high pressure environment.  His passion eventually shifted and he embarked on a path leading him to success in a new field – that of sports medicine and physical therapy.

Together with long-time friends, Dr. Michael Neely and Luke Bongiorno, Adam conceptualized a holistic approach for orthopedic medicine. Together, they envisioned a place where patients could receive treatment and evaluation for all orthopedic conditions.  The motivated and dynamic group created and developed a place of healing and fitness that caters to patients with varying orthopedic needs. Adam tapped into his business acumen and dedication to excellence to create a thriving patient-focused environment.

As NY Sports Medicine & Physical Therapy has grown, Adam has maintained his commitment to the practice’s continued success as the Chief of Operations.  He works with all staff members to ensure that all day-to-day operations excel beyond expectations and that patient care excellence is maintained.  His focus on the business aspects of the practice allow the medical and orthopedic staff to focus on getting patients back to the life that they love.

Adam is running the NYC marathon this fall to support the American Cancer Society.  Please support Adam by clicking here.

Yesterday I was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my fourth metatarsal head just two months away from the NYC Marathon!!!!

I wanted to get some ideas for training with this injury.  Ideally once the boot is off in a month, I can pick-up training close to where I left off and still run the NYC Marathon in November.

I read an article about Deep Water Running; this makes me wonder ‘would I be able to maintain my current level of fitness by running in the water?’. Does anyone have a deep-water-marathon training program?

AdamBanks

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AdamBanks

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We here at the PT Project are taking a little time to enjoy the last few days of Summer.  While our contributors are relaxing, our web designers are working hard to build a brand-spankin-new PT Project website.  We expect to launch it in a few weeks! 

We wish you a happy end-o-the-summer.

AdamBanks

A few days ago, I was watching an interview on ‘Mad Money’ with the CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff.  Mr. Benioff was introducing Salesforce’s new social medium platform for businesses, Chatter – just like Facebook for business. 

This idea of using a “Facebook” type of application for a small company is brilliant, it’s a great way to communicate with all employees, or specific employee groups, and even more brilliant as a way for management to get information that they might not necessarily see.  Using a social networking site will all for instant collaboration, give a real time “snap shot” of the company, and allow management to gain valuable insight.

Today, NY SportsMed is launching Yammer, similar software to Salesforce’s Chatter, but free.  Yammer sells upgraded Silver and Gold packages for a few dollars per user. Yammer is set up just like Facebook, but it is a closed group to just people with company email addresses.  (I am reluctant to endorse products here, but this one is very cool and free).

Some of the features that I look forward to using:

Profiles – employees can share important information on their profiles

Status Updates – Share insight or a tip of the day, front-of-the-house staff and back-of-the-house staff can collaborate.

Groups – work groups can share information and work together across different locations

Document Handling – we can post important documents, such as the employee manual so people know where to go to find it.

App updates– employees (and managers) can get updates via sms or an iPhone app.

NY SportsMed will be testing Yammer our today, I will keep you posted.

AdamBanks

I am taking my co-op billing idea to the next step; I am going to propose some real world numbers!

The below budget is based on NYC prices; rent, salary’s and electricity are significantly more expensive in this town than the rest of the US – I am sure some of you will laugh at these numbers.  If we use these higher numbers for assumptions, certainly there will be room to reduce expenses in the future.

For simple assumptions, I have added an additional biller for each 3 practices and divided the expenses equally by practice.  In reality a practice would have to “pay for what they use”.  A small practice may actually use only a portion of 1 biller – a small practice could get all of the benefits of a large billing company for a portion of 1 salary and overhead.  A large practice would pay a larger portion of several billers and a larger portion of the overhead.

It would be easy to see that a smaller practice could get the full services of the cooperative for less than $2,000 per month.

AdamBanks

I am so sick of wasting so much money on collecting from insurance companies.  Each and every practice is wasting its profits on “back-of-the house” operations.  NY SportsMed runs a large “in-house” billing department – this is a very expensive operation – but I have found it better (most likely not cheaper though) than out-sourcing. 

To do billing in-house NY SportsMed spends 10’s of thousands of dollars to keep up on the ever changing environment of billing.  We bring in billing consultants quarterly.  Our company is lucky in that we can afford this investment; most small practices (and small billing companies) could never make this investment. We are very good at billing, but we spend so much money to be good at it (right now our billing department is 6 full time employees – all located in Manhattan on the most expensive square footage in the country).

Our company is not only waste money on billing, we all waste money on other information that we could share, like calls to our attorneys.  It drives me crazy to think that we are paying our attorney $300 per hour to answer a question and the practice down the street is paying their attorney $300 an hour to get the same answer to the same question.

I propose the creation of a billing “cooperative”.  I don’t feel that there is “competition” among our practices, why don’t we agree to share back-of-the-house resources? 

The basic idea of the billing co-operative is that we will create a billing company that we all can own (member-owned and operated, an alternative to commercial profit-orientated medical billing company).  As members, we will work together to build the most efficient and knowledgeable and ethical billing company.  Only members may use the resources, we will share in the expenses based on actual use / actual expenses.

By combining resources we will eliminate duplicity of billing departments, and eliminate the third-party-for-profit billing companies.  Members will share information on a real-time basis to help all member companies become more profitable.

I propose the following principles:

1st Principle: Voluntary and Open Membership

The Billing cooperative would be a voluntary organizations, open to all physical therapists willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, to use the services of stated co-op.

2nd Principle: Democratic Member Control

The billing cooperative will be a democratic organization controlled by their members, who actively participate in setting their policies and making decisions. Elected representatives are accountable to the membership.

 3rd Principle: Member Economic Participation

Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their cooperative. At least part of that capital is usually the common property of the cooperative. Members usually receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership. Members allocate surpluses for any or all of the following purposes: developing their cooperative, possibly by setting up reserves, part of which at least would be indivisible; benefiting members in proportion to their transactions with the cooperative; and supporting other activities approved by the membership.

 4th Principle: Autonomy and Independence

The billing cooperative would be an autonomous, self-help organization, controlled by the members. If the co-op were to enter to agreements with other organizations, including governments, or raise capital from external sources, it would do so on terms that ensure democratic control by their members and maintain the co-operative autonomy.

5th Principle: Education, Training and Information

The billing co-op will provide education and training for their members, elected representatives, managers, and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of the billing co-operative.  Members will share billing related information to other member’s of the co-op, individuals working in the co-op will be educated to provide the highest level of service to the members.

6^th Principle: Level of Service

The billing cooperative will provide a higher level of service to members by sharing information among practices.  Billing standards will be increased; practices revenues will increase as all practices will share in real-time information.  

Let’s start the conversation, email me if you are interested: abanks@nysportsmed.com

AdamBanks

The Philippine’s ambassador to the US has requested that the US defer the ban on Filipino PT graduates taking the US National Physical Therapy Exam (NPTE).

Last month, the Federation of State Boards of Physical Therapy (FSBPT) suspended licensure test for graduates of Philippines, Egypt, India and Pakistan, stating “systematic and methodical sharing of recalled questions by significant numbers of graduates of programs in the affected countries”.

The Philippine Ambassador to the us, Willy Gaa, noted that only 1 review center is accused of wrong doing, out of many review centers and colleges, was cited of wrong doing (the St. Louis Review Center in Manila.  Gaa has requested a meeting with FSBPT officials.

There are currently over 1,300 Filipino PTs working in the us.

AdamBanks

Are your notes compliant?  PT’s are running into trouble with Medicare because their notes are not properly signed.  CMS requires all notes contain (1) date, (2) time, (3) authentication and (4) legibility.

Below are key excerpts from the CMS manual. Read the entire text of the here.

All entries in the medical record must be dated, timed, and authenticated, in written or electronic form, by the person responsible for providing or evaluating the service provided.

• The time and date of each entry (orders, reports, notes, etc.) must be accurately documented. Timing establishes when an order was given, when an activity happened or when an activity is to take place. Timing and dating entries is necessary for patient safety and quality of care. Timing and dating of entries establishes a baseline for future actions or assessments and establishes a timeline of events. Many patient interventions or assessments are based on time intervals or timelines of various signs, symptoms, or events. (71 FR 68687)
• The hospital must have a method to establish the identity of the author of each entry. This would include verification of the author of faxed orders/entries or computer entries.
• The hospital must have a method to require that each author takes a specific action to verify that the entry being authenticated is his/her entry or that he/she is responsible for the entry, and that the entry is accurate.

AdamBanks

Do you wonder who our contributors are and where they come from?
Do you have articles written and no platform to publish them?
Are you interested in becoming a contributor?

If so, the PT Project is looking for high quality content and high-quality contributors.  The pay is so close to zero, so we might as well just round it to that.  But what is lacking in pay, is made up in limitless glory. 

Our contributors have found The PT Project as a great place to build on their reputation, create link-backs, and increase their populatirty in online searches. 

We at the PT Project don’t think that the best PTs are in competition, we see that the best PTs compliment each other. 

Please email jon@theptproject.com if you want your voice heard.

AdamBanks

We are launching IPads for medical notes in our practices.  From the second that I first held an IPad, I knew it was a game changer for medical notes.

As a practice administrator I am always fighting to get “good” notes done on time.  I fully understand that from a PTs perspective doing notes is tedious work however, it is my job as the administrator to make this as easy as possible for the PT, while producing a compliant note.  Note “burn-out” is very expensive to the practice, bad notes don’t get paid, and they clog the billing process with denials and appeals (possibly adding an additional staff member to handle).

I see that the IPad as a “Game Changer” in the way providers interact with the EMR system.   I envision all providers being able to get notes done, real time, in front of the patient in a non – intrusive way.  Notes can be done on the IPad very quickly, almost at a conversational rate.  Patients are quick to adapt to the interaction of a PT talking and clicking away on the Ipad.  PTs can be “heads-up” and still complete a note.

Our practices has tested everything to make note taking easier; dictations (didn’t work as there was so much back and forth with India, Tablet PCs (too heavy and too slow), Assistants (too expensive and burn-out was high), and different software’s (long on promises and short on delivery).

At $500, I am finding that the IPads are actually cheaper than PCs, too.  A fully loaded PC always seems to end up around $1,200 – no matter the teaser price.  The maintenance on PCs is a very real expense, our practice has hired a 3^rd party computer “geek” company, is always upgrading our anti-virus software, and I frequently walk by an employee that isn’t doing anything because their computer “doesn’t work”.

I have asked a few of our PTs to post their experience with the transition to IPads.   FYI, we are buying the “cheapest” Ipads, we have Wi-Fi set up in the office and I don’t see that we need 3G.  We have been testing an external keyboard, and so far everyone likes the option of using it.

I am not in the pracitce of endorsing a product, however I am very impressed with these two EMRs, www.forcetherapeutics.com and www.WebPt.com for the high quality note that they produce in “real time” and both are IPad capable.

AdamBanks

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