Nitin Chhoda expounds the main purpose of “time-stamping” by measuring productivity.
He also points out that this system should be done in a non-intrusive manner so that the staff and physical therapy management team will coordinate with each other to address the practice’ needs and optimize productivity.
Time stamping is not a very new idea in the general sense. Emails are time stamped, as well as most photographs taken with digital cameras.
But time stamping in regard to physical therapy software is a very recent development, one that has the potential to improve productivity within your practice.
Gaining Productivity Starts with Measuring Productivity
For those professionals who work in practice management, measuring productivity has been imprecise, at best, and generally impossible.
Without proper physical therapy software, can you measure the success of a single visit with a patient? Does each physical therapist have daily goals for how many patients they will see? Is it worth everyone’s time to keep track of these details?
Some managers in a practice that has no physical therapy software yet focus on what they can quantify; because it is possible to find out how many patients a physical therapist sees in a day, you can measure how productive they have been based on the number of hours they have worked. But to gather the information takes time and energy, and most therapists would prefer to spend that time doing anything else.
Measuring Productivity In a Non-Intrusive Manner
No one wants to be grilled about their daily productivity; or even worse, who would want to write up reports on their own productivity? Requiring this kind of reporting and accountability without the use of physical therapy software can be very bad for morale.
The problem for a physical therapy practice will be measuring productivity. Therefore, the goal for the practice could be to find a way to measure productivity in a non-intrusive manner. The purpose of the goal will be to find ways to improve productivity, using measurable physical therapy software data.
EMR Solutions for Meeting Goals
This is the perfect goal to highlight when searching for an EMR for your practice. Time stamping is now used in some of the top physical therapy software EMR solutions as a way to keep track of the activity of each physical therapist, without forcing them to do the reporting.
Rather than focusing on productivity, time stamping is a way for each staff member to clock in and out each day.
But rather than simply tracking the hours that each staff member works, time stamping as part of an EMR system can use the information alongside other information tracked by the EMR, such as number of patients seen by each physical therapist.
Without needing to add much to the day of the staff member, the manager or owner of the practice with physical therapy software has now access to a measurable data stream for productivity.
Naturally, the question of productivity is more complex than how many patients are seen per day. But the number of visits divided by the number of hours spent at work will give a productivity measure that you can compare from one physical therapy software staff member to the next.
Reporting is Power
Once again, the real power of physical therapy software and EMR solution is to track information with minimal effort by the staff and then convert that information into valuable reports. Practice management can then use those reports to analyze the performance of staff members as well as the practice as a whole.
