Physical Therapy Equipment Breakeven: Motion Capture

Welcome private practice section physical therapy clinic owner!

You are setting up your clinic with physical therapy (PT) equipment. You are looking to calculate ROI for new equipment for your clinic. Of course, some equipment is nearly standard for most PT clinics. Treatment tables, resistance bands, stability pads, and fitness equipment will usually be found in most clinics.

However, you are investigating a new PT product that you don't have experience with. You're looking for a way to think about new product return on investment (ROI). You've come to the right place!

Should you invest in physical therapy equipment, such as motion capture? How do you measure PT equipment return on investment? [1]

We'll examine a methodology to investigate the ROI on PT equipment that is not part of the standard setup.

We'll use a case study of evaluating EuMotus markerless motion capture, to provide a method of how the PT clinic owner, or business manager can evaluate the return on investment on a new/non-standard piece of equipment.

On motion capture systems, we've previously examined the various types of systems and trade offs, and their true cost & hidden risks (and related business models).

We'll center our discussion around the EuMotus markerless motion capture system. An important reason on why EuMotus is practicality - the clinical team can perform a screen in as little as 1-2 minutes. No complex setup. No markers. No resource or time intensive post-processing. No biomechanics PhD required. This design for ease and speed of use (i.e. design for clinical application) allows the clinician the option to use the markerless mocap system with orders of magnitude more patients than a traditional mocap rig (i.e. traditional mocap rigs can require hours of setup and run time).

Warning! There exists risk of non-utilization of traditional motion capture systems for physical therapy. Traditional mocap rigs ROI analysis very quickly can turn into depreciation analysis.

Now that we've set the context, how can we go about evaluating the EuMotus markerless motion capture system ROI?

There are a couple of ways that come to mind. The first involves patient lifetime value (LTV) calculation. The LTV approach simply means you are calculating your ROI based on the expected number of patient clinic visits over the course of the lifetime of the patient & clinic. Here is a physical therapy marketing calculator that calculates the ROI of attracting new patients with mocap. Similarly, here is a patient retention calculator.

A more conservative method to investigate ROI on new PT equipment is to ask, what would it take my clinic to break even on this? What do I have to believe to achieve breakeven?

We will take a private practice physical therapy clinic with 2, 4, or 6 treating clinicians. We take $100 of revenue booked for each patient visit. Each PT sees 50 unique patients per month.

1. How much do I have to increase my PT clinic's patient retention rate to achieve breakeven?

The methodology to calculate breakeven in the context of patient retention is as follows. Taking into account EuMotus cost, for the number of unique patients that I see (e.g. 100 patients for a two (2) PT clinic on a monthly basis), how many incremental visits do I need to break even on implementing EuMotus in my clinical process?

Created by EuMotus (2019)

For a two (2) PT clinic, retention rate breakeven is achieved at an additional six (6) visits per 100 patients.

For a four (4) PT clinic, retention rate breakeven is achieved at an additional three (3) visits per 100 patients.

For a six (6) PT clinic, retention rate breakeven is achieved at an additional two (2) visits per 100 patients.

For less conservative LTV ROI calculations, you can simply increase the additional visits across all patients - for example, what does an incremental one (1) or two (2) additional visits do for my business?

2. How much do I have to increase my patient referral rate (i.e. patients referring friends, family, colleagues, neighbors etc) to achieve breakeven?

Highly satisfied patients mean more referrals for your business. Many friends, family, and coworkers can benefit from PT, and at the same time many do not seek PT as a primary treatment option of e.g. back pain, ankle injury etc. A recommendation from friends & family can significantly impact your clinic's top and bottom lines!

Ok, so how do you calculate breakeven? In the below chat, we investigated 2, 4, and 6 PT clinics, plotting referral revenue ($) and additional referrals generated by new PT equipment on the vertical and horizontal axes, respectively.

Created by EuMotus (2019)

We conservatively take two (2) visits per referral for this calculation (a less conservative LTV approach would assume a ten (10) visit value).

For a two (2) PT clinic, referral rate breakeven is achieved at three (3) additional referrals per 100 patients.

For a four (4) PT clinic, referral rate breakeven is achieved at one and one half (1.5) additional referrals per 100 patients.

For a six (6) PT clinic, referral rate breakeven is achieved at one (1) additional referral per 100 patients.

But how does EuMotus BodyWatch help increase referrals, and patient retention?

EuMotus helps the clinician increase patient satisfaction, education, and engagement! The vast majority of patients are excited about seeing the red lines show up - "Oh cool, that's me! Those red lines are my skeleton!!".

A happy physical therapy patient

Patients also take interest in results "That was fun.. but wait! Why is my left leg red? What's going on??" Now that the patient is a little more energized, and motivated, they are more motivated to come back and complete their therapy. Patients also want to share their experience with friends, family & colleagues.

"But wait! Why is my left leg red?"

Apart from putting a huge smile on your patient, regardless if they are a teenager, office worker, weekend warrior, or geriatric patient, you can create educational video content for prospective patients in your area. Use EuMotus to showcase your physical therapy knowledge, and create case study videos of how PT can help your patients with knee pain, back pain etc.

See and hear below example EuMotus video showcasing exercise, and post-exercise analysis.

As a EuMotus customer, we'll show you how to record and create instructional videos that allow you to showcase your company's value proposition and brand! Great places to share your exciting and educational content are your PT clinic web page, and your social media accounts!

So that's it! Breakeven analysis on physical therapy equipment is one way to evaluate the ROI! You can easily swap out physical therapy motion capture example above for any other physical therapy equipment you are evaluating. A prerequisite to achieving return on investment, is of course utilization. If your clinic does not use the equipment, you won't achieve ROI! So when answering the question "What do I have to believe in order to achieve ROI", a critical component is "Will my clinicians (be excited to and) utilize this new piece of equipment?". If yes, crunch those ROI numbers to check if you can make your private practice PT clinic even stronger!

If you have a question, shoot us a note at hello / at / eumotus / dot / com.

References

[1] Tuan86 via pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/green-grow-grow-up-plant-rain-2551467/. Accessed August, 2019.