Not Your Run-of-the-Mill Physical Therapy Clinic

Reflecting on the past 13 months here with Streamline, I am forever grateful for Kari and the team supporting me, Amanda, on my jump into the cash-pay clinical practice world. When I was brought on to the Streamline team last June, I had exactly 1 year of experience as a physical therapist. Although it was only 1 year, it felt like 5 years due to the sheer amount of patients I had seen that past year. 

I started my career as a physical therapist in the travel community. A travel physical therapist is a practitioner that accepts an “assignment” through a recruiting agency and works at a clinic for a short period of time, typically for 13 or more weeks. I worked at four different clinics and three different states in one year. Clinics need travelers for a variety of reasons. I was needed at these clinics to help out when another clinician was on maternity leave, when one clinic was going through some manger changes, and another clinic was trying to hire a long-term pelvic floor physical therapist for a new pelvic floor program that they were starting. 

Three of the four clinics I worked at had potential to fall victim to the term “PT mill”. A clinic gets this nickname when they prioritize numbers of patients seen vs quality of care. These clinics try to survive off of insurance reimbursements via the wild amount of patients that they see in a week. This can lead to the clinic having shorter visit times (like 30-40 minutes in duration) and the therapist being required to see more than one patient at once. These patients were also taking time out of their work weeks to come to the clinic 2-3 times a week. With these parameters, it is easy to see how patients would experience inadequate care. My record high of patients seen in one day was 27 in a 10 hour shift. For my fellow math lovers, that’s 2.7 patients an hour. This clinic also required that each patient be seen for 45 minutes at a minimum. In this setting, I spoke with each patient individually for about 15 min before I handed them off to my PT aid, an undergraduate student applying to PT schools, to run them through exercises I had picked out for them for that day. 

I tried my hardest to provide each patient with individualized, quality care, but with these parameters set, it was very difficult to give undivided attention that each patient deserved. One could argue that seeing more patients helps more people, but when there is limited individual time spent with a patient, it is hard to prescribe the most appropriate plan of care. 

When I started working with Streamline last year, I was worried that 60 minute sessions once a week would be hard to get used to. I was worried about filling a full 60 minute session and worried that once a week wouldn’t be enough. It didn’t take long for me to see patients flourishing in this setting. 60 minutes was, in fact, easy to fill when considering the goal is not only to stop pain but also target the root cause of the issue and set the patient up for success in the future. I have never had more fun working with patients and getting them back to achieving their goals. 

The Madison area is an extremely active population and we love treating these athletes. Athletes are people who continue to have fitness goals throughout their life. Swimmers, bikers, runners, pregnant and postpartum moms, and many others who have goals that they are working towards, come through our doors. We at Streamline strive for research-based, quality care that is not driven by the amount of people we see in a week but rather driven by helping an individual feel equipped to tackle anything that comes their way. 

Long story short, this is my way of looking back on this past year and seeing how many people Streamline has helped. Every patient that comes through our door is just motivation to keep growing our successful, goal-crushing community and continue on our mission to keep Madison athletes in their game!