Measuring Treatment Success in Physical Therapy - by Brent DOdge

When you come to visit us at Alpine Physical Therapy for an evaluation or reevaluation, you might wonder why you have to fill out a form answering questions about what you can and cannot do when your therapist will be asking you about it anyway. There are several reasons that we ask you to fill out these “outcome measures.” (These forms are available on our website. Simply click here.)

First, they offer a nice sounding board for questioning during our evaluation. Physical therapy is about getting back to the things you love or functioning in your daily life with ease. We are better able to get you back to these things if we know what they are, and we can get to the heart of the problem more efficiently with a heads up of your areas of difficulty.

Second, in our changing healthcare industry, insurance companies and Medicare are becoming more focused on objective measurements to track progress. They want a hard fast number that shows improvement. By filling out an outcome measure initially, then again after a month or so of therapy, they have a more concrete idea of how far along you are in your healing process, which in turn legitimizes further therapy appointments.

Finally, outcome measures help the physical therapy profession as a whole better monitor effectiveness and timeliness of treatment techniques. Each outcome measure that Alpine uses is carefully selected based on evidence of its effectiveness at accurately reporting physical deficits and gains. We want to provide you with the best care possible, and outcome measures are another tool available to us to ensure that we are doing so.
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Fore more information to help you get started at Alpine Physical Therapy, click here for our new patient web page.