Interview with Alan Henley and Merlin Johnson, PT

Alan Henley: We’ve been in private practice going on 8 years. We’re in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which has a population of around 35,000. The surrounding area has about 50,000 people – somewhere in that range. We are about 40 miles away from Tulsa, which has a 1 million population.
I’m not a physical therapist and Merlin is of course so we kind of had a good partnership from the start. He was able to handle all the clinical aspects and I was able to handle all the administrative aspects and we’ve been very successful, really, all along. The practice grew right away.
Before we did The New Patient Course, we were too caught up in the day-to-day activities of the practice. We were not able to do necessary administrative tasks such as marketing.

Merlin Johnson, PT: After we took the New Patient Course, things really just started to take off. We started implementing the things they taught us and the ways to actually do the marketing. And our new patients actually went up substantially. We went from about 12–15 new patients per week to 25-28 per week. Last week, we did our highest ever new patients: 39. It was fun!

A: It was kind of interesting, because we were already a
successful practice and thought we had pretty much plateaued. What kind of intrigued us about coming to The New Patient Course was a technique that could be implemented, that would not require us to be out of the office.

M: Because we would spend time out of the office, it was something that was easily implemented. Alan and I experienced a tremendous amount of growth and found out that we had not actually plateaued.

A: The biggest problem that we were running into prior to coming to Measurable Solutions was time.

M: Time and management of our clinic. Our staff got too big for the way we were handling it. Alan and I were handling everything.

A: We were really overworked and didn’t know how to get out of it, or even that we should get out of it.

M: We didn’t have a clue how to get out of it.

A: We didn’t seek anyone else to get training or assistance of how to get things resolved, really. We didn’t even know we were overworked. We just thought that’s the way it was and supposed to be.

M: We had to answer every question from staff and everyone. We became very good at coping. I was working 50-55 hours a week – I do around 40 now, which is really nice.
A: Yes, it’s really nice. It’s definitely given me more time to spend with family and to be able to re-prioritize, if you will, what’s really important. I mean, you’ve got to be successful because you’ve got to create income to support your family and your practice. But the bigger emphasis is now on family time, and now, that time is available.

What made us come to Measurable Solutions was just to see if their program was something that we could easily implement and made sense to us. Shortly after we got here, we saw some problems that we were having as regards our practice. We didn’t really admit that we had problems at the time, but suggestions and recommendations were made to us at that point, on some ways that we could change things to make them more efficient, better. We have found that everything we have been told and taught has been easily implemented.

M: We were able to take steps immediately to get things going. Probably two weeks after The New Patient Course, we were brought together as a team, dealing with the company.

A: One of the first things that the New Patient Course did was to enable us to improve our relationship with the patients. I thought that we had this all along, but there’s a definite, key technique to have in place to make this really occur.
We put to use further training from Measurable Solutions that allowed everybody to understand how to control their own environment, using fundamental administrative tools. Our front office staff saw relief, almost, saying “gosh, we should have done this a long, long time ago.” From our front office aspect that was immediately helpful in terms of efficiency.

M: Another thing that the course did for me was handle something that was keeping me up at night – the feeling that we were not really cause over our business and the flows of new patients, but just an effect of what the physicians thought of us or thought of our business. That went away. I don’t even worry about anything like that anymore. I care of course what the doctor thinks or what one doctor may think, but I just don’t worry about it any more. I fix the problem, or whatever, but I know that the doctor is not going to be cause over my company and my business.

A: Regarding referrals, we had a pretty good relationship with a majority of the physicians in our area, however there were some that were very loyal to the hospital (our main competitor in town) and some that would just come right out and tell you “my loyalties lie with the hospital.” Since Measurable Solutions, we’ve actually got some referrals from a few of those physicians that we thought we would never get referrals from. And some referral sources that were sporadic have become more consistent. There are some people in our area that go to Tulsa for their specialty care and those are generally really big orthopedic groups or very closed or very difficult groups to market to. We’ve actually had some doors open to us since the New Patient Course and I think it’s a direct result of what we learned on the course.

M: For me, my responsibility has risen tremendously. I thought
I was a responsible person, but I found that I had projects that weren’t getting done and things that I wasn’t doing or confronting. And that has changed tremendously.
I would say the stress level has pretty much gone to zero. And the things that do stress us, we’re able to confront and fix.

A: We can manage it better.

M: That would be a good way to put it. The stresses don’t prolong and irritate for weeks. Before we came for The New Patient Course, just dealing with our personnel, we had some difficulties. We had a staff member who was keeping everyone else down, who was causing major conflicts. It really split the plans — really. We were able to target where the trouble was coming from and fix it.

A: It was a situation where deep down we knew it, but weren’t really ready to admit it or confront it and Measurable Solutions offered a way for us to handle it. Solving that situation was a tremendous relief, not just for us, but the improvement in the morale of the clinic was night and day.

M: I would suggest to private practice physical therapists that they’d be foolish not to take advantage of The New Patient Course. Measurable Solutions has shown us things that we’d never have dreamed were problems or obstacles. And you know, we thought we were doing great. But we found out things that we weren’t aware of — that we weren’t doing, that would help our production tremendously. Even though people may think they’re doing really well, you typically are really blind in what you are not doing or what you are missing. We didn’t know what our top was and we found out that we have a lot of room for growth.