Dear Practice Owner,
I treated a woman for back pain years ago. I'll call her Karen. She did really well in treatment. The last time I saw her she told me she was back to walking, back to doing everything she wanted to do. She felt great. I discharged her and felt good about it.
About a year later I went to visit my best friend's grandfather in an assisted living facility. I was walking through the common area and I saw Karen. I said, "Hey, how are you doing?", and then I got close enough to see she was in a wheelchair.
She told me her pain came back a couple months after she finished with me. She'd slipped. She went to a specialist, got an MRI, and it showed stenosis and disc degeneration. They told her she needed a fusion. During the fusion, the way she described it to me, they "nicked her spinal cord." She hadn't walked since, months later.
Karen had taken care of my grandparents before they passed. I'd known her for years. And I could not stop thinking one thing: she never heard from us again. Not a call. Not a text. Not an email. She got worse, she got scared, she took the next available exit in the healthcare system, and we were nowhere in the conversation. That was my failure, and ultimately my responsibility.
200/month
reactivations across our six clinics today
$80K
recovered in 90 days once we stopped dropping people
I can't control what other providers do. But I can control whether a past patient hears from my practice at the moment their pain comes back. That's what this playbook is about. If you search your own memory for a few seconds, you have a Karen too.
Everything in this playbook makes you money. That's nice. But that's not why I run it.
— Chad MaddenChad Madden, MSPT · Co-Founder, Breakthrough · Owner, Madden & Gilbert Physical Therapy
P.S. Still writing in green ink out of habit. Some things from the old system stick around.
