Why Home Health patients should Consider PT to You

Many people, when considering the services of PT to You may be thinking about home health physical therapy, a service that is covered by Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, as well as work or exchange-based insurers.  The services however, are much different.  To qualify for home-based physical therapy, a client must be ‘homebound’, meaning that they are physically unable to leave the house.  More frequently than not, this goes hand in hand with severe illness affecting other systems besides the musculoskeletal, neuromuscular and cardiovascular systems which Physical Therapists typically treat.  Because of this, Medicare requires a significant amount of documentation when treating patients, encompassing multiple systems, surveys of vital signs, changes in home environment, a full accounting of all of a patient’s medications and past medical history, etc.  This is to ensure that patients are monitored as carefully as possible and serves the important purpose of preventing a minor negative change in health status from developing into a problem that lands a patient in the hospital.  Aside from being an uncomfortable invasion of privacy for some patients, these paperwork requirements eat up a great deal of time.  When I was working in home health, this meant that follow-up visits, which were typically less than ½ hour due to the productivity demands of for-profit home health corporations, allowed for only 15-25 minutes of treatment time, which is almost always insufficient to provide all of the instruction, education, exercise and manual therapy that a patient would benefit from.  

Another problem is scheduling concerns. When I first began seeing patients at home I was shocked at how difficult it was to meet patients in their homes who by definition could not leave the house!   Dealing with medically fragile patients, medical appointments, surprise hospital trips, dramatic alterations in sleep schedules and other changes in status can greatly interfere with a patient’s availability and throw a wrench into the carefully planned day of their therapist as well as many other patients.  Surprisingly, this is an issue even when--as is typical in home health--the appointments were scheduled the night before or even on the same day the appointment is to take place.  

PT to You eliminates those issues.  You do not need to be homebound and risk losing your healthcare by venturing out to see family.  You’re able to schedule well in advance and be sure that you will see your therapist at the appointed time for a full hour or more.  And during those appointments, the time spent will be focused on the interventions you, your physician, and your therapist deem the most effective for addressing your goals, not watching your therapist click check-boxes on government-mandated paperwork.  There is a flipside of course, and that is that there is generally a lower upfront cost to traditional home health physical therapy.  But for people for whom time is money, who need to get back to living the way they want to as soon as possible, or who are willing to pay more upfront to ensure the highest level of care, PT to You is your answer to the status quo.