1 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7
H
ere's a way to help weed out
total joint patients who won't
be good fits: Send a physical
therapist to the patient's home as part
of your admission
criteria. Payers won't pay for it, and it
isn't cheap, but in the long run, it will
be money well spent. Remember, once
you sign up a patient, your expenses
start adding up. Your staff will be
spending a lot of time gathering infor-
mation, and if you're in a 23-hour, 59-
minute setting, you may be scheduling
overnight nurses. You don't want to invest that time and money only
to find out later that a particular patient isn't going to cut it.
For example, a while back, one of our PTs visited a potential
patient, and came back with photos. It turned out the patient was a
hoarder and the house was filthy. Magazines and trash were piled up
knee high. Obviously, this was a patient who needed a social worker
and who needed to go to the hospital to have her knee done. So we
didn't waste any more time and ultimately the patient got the help she
needed.
You can even get a lot of information by having your PTs Skype
with patients who live too far away to make visiting practical.
Jessie Scott, MBA
Presidio Surgery Center
San Francisco, Calif.
jessie.scott@scasurgery.com
Make Early PT Visits Mandatory
for Total Joint Patients
• SCOUTING REPORT A home visit by a PT can
help weed out poor candidates for outpatient total
joint surgery before expenses start to pile up.
Ideas Work
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