Will Humphreys offers a formula for clinic director admin time: 1 hour per week for each provider FTE. A 4.0 FTE clinic gets 4 admin hours, leaving the director to treat 36 of 40 hours. Directors need training in stat reviews, meetings, and walkthroughs, not just clinical skills.
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How much admin time do we give directors to not be treating and be focusing on the clinic? Because directors need time for a number of different things. If you think about it, directors need time for stat management. Hold on there. Stat management.
Any time for reviews, preparation goals, that kind of stuff. They need time for crucial conversations.
Correcting people, inspiring people. They need time for meeting prep.
By the way, it's important to train them that this is what they spend their time doing. Because if you give a PT a director position, you're like, you have two hours a week to do your admin time. They'll just do their notes every time. So you do your meeting prep your. You also do any patient care coordination, meaning they are. We created a meeting called the walkthrough that I can go over another time where they would meet with the front desk and basically look for fall offs, check on authorizations, double check new patients that they were being done correctly, getting in within 24 hours, that kind of thing. So how do we figure that out? How do we determine the amount of time we give them? Well, it's completely dependent upon the size of the team and we base it off of the full time equivalence of physical therapists that are working there. So director time.
The time the director gets for admin time is determined by the number of FTEs of providers and I will say PTs and PTAs.
Depending on how you work with those. So the General equation is 1 pt equals 1 hour.
So if they're running a 4 pt FTE clinic, that's gonna be 4 hours a week.
Now it's really important that a couple of factors go into play here. Number one, the director is still like when they're promoted. First of all, they get promoted by being a director in training. There's never a like PT and then wake up, boom, director. I don't even care if we hire an experienced director. I've had many a client that I've coached through this where someone else was a director at another company, but they don't know how you do things. And more importantly for the culture, it's vital to the team to have the PT director in training be in training because it gives them this permission to go, oh, they're gonna be my leader, so I can still go to Will or whoever for now. But they know it's not permanent. And that director and training time is dependent upon their experience, their ability to run it for you. But as quickly as possible, we get them running the meetings, we get them doing one on one check ins, all of These different things. And then we train them on what they're doing in their four hours, including meet with us in our weekly director meeting, and we break it down for them and then we tell them, look, so if in this example where there's four full time equivalents and they have their 40, they're four hours of admin time, meaning they're treating for 36 hours, they're still responsible. Like, they have to be an example to their team. So whatever visits per hour, equivalent that is, they have to hit in terms of treating, their first priority is to be the example of all things PT. So they need to hit 36 hours of treating in per hour of an equivalent form of someone who is full time. So there's different ways we can calculate that. But if that makes sense, most of my directors, all of them actually, they were the type that, like, say 60 visits a week was our minimum expectation at Rise rehab. All of them were hitting 60 visits a week in 36 hours. And they did that on purpose because it was only, you know, four more visits or something like that. But it was like.
So huge for them when they had a team member. When they had to hold someone else accountable who wasn't hitting their 60, it'd be like, well, you know, I'm only treating 36 hours and I'm still hitting it. So it's doable, you know. And then what I love is, have you ever had a PT go, well, that's unethical to see this much business? You know, like, that's not their fault, by the way. In most cases, it's how they were trained by their schools. In that case, it's like if they're challenging the owner, it's because they feel like there's this, there's unknown money that you're, you know, you're getting on your yacht every weekend and you're sailing off to the Caribbean. But when they're talking to their director, they don't think that. And so they're never going to challenge them on that ever. So there's just so much power in having that out. So I hope that formula helps. And again, our directors in those four hours, going back to the key comment here, that's when they'd use their time just to pull people in between patients and just pull them aside and go, yeah, what are you working on? How can I help you? You know, hey, I noticed last week that, you know, your, your statistics were actually on a downward trend. I want to make sure that you're projecting next week. That's always the big thing in our company was, like, learning how to project things, that people could see things coming.
So, yeah, that's. That's what I recommend. What questions do you guys have at this point after all that? I know I kind of brain dumped on you.
