E722 | Important Trends In The PT World

In this episode, Doc Danny discusses key trends in lifestyle and regenerative medicine, highlighting the increasing popularity of treatments like hormone optimization, testosterone replacement therapy, Ozempic, and peptide therapy. He emphasizes the potential for physical therapists to partner with clinics offering these services to provide complementary support in areas like lifestyle changes, mobility, strength, and functional ability.

The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on physical therapy is also explored, with Doc Danny foreseeing AI augmenting efficiency in the profession through automated documentation, home exercise program generation, and patient updates. While AI is expected to streamline administrative tasks, Doc Danny emphasizes the importance of maintaining human-to-human interaction and trust in physical therapy practice.

The podcast delves into the trend towards niche specialization in healthcare, with patients seeking out experts who can help them achieve specific health and wellness goals. By narrowing down their niche, physical therapists can become go-to experts in specialized areas, charge higher prices, and attract clients who are committed to the services offered.

Overall, Doc Danny presents a positive outlook for the future of physical therapy, encouraging therapists to explore opportunities for partnerships in lifestyle and regenerative medicine, embrace the benefits of AI in improving efficiency, and consider niche specialization to increase demand and improve client outcomes. The evolving healthcare landscape offers numerous opportunities for physical therapists to adapt and thrive in the coming years.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick, if you're serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matei. And over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you

what's going on? Dr. Danny here with the pt entrepreneur podcast and today i'm doing something a little bit different. I'm going to call this one Current trends and my thoughts on how PT does with these or relates to these, this is not a good title. It won't be titled that, but it's something to that effect.

And one of the reasons that I wanted to bring this up was a conversation that I actually had with another business owner that was talking about. All the changes that are occurring in really the technology space and how that is something that how that's affecting his business. And I'll talk about that in a second as a relevant example of what he's seeing, but this is something that for me, I try to pay a lot of attention to the things that I feel like are going to affect the business owners that we work with and look at maybe a bit more like 30, 000 foot view Of what's going on because I'm not as much in the day to day in the weeds of running a practice as I used to be.

But what I get a chance to do now is take a step back and see what that, that business sort of trend will look like and what things will affect physical therapy and cash based physical therapy and perform in particular, a performance based sort of niche for that people that are helping people get out of pain and back to activities that they really enjoy.

And all the niches of that. Would encompass really just movement based, performance based physical therapy or clinical work. And how are some of these, what we consider I hate to even say it this way, but like macro trends of like big trends of technology economy interests that people have, how's that sort of trending?

And where do we fit and how do we do, the saying, I believe is Wayne Gretzky said, skate where the puck is going and how do we stay nimble and move towards trends that are, eh, they're not fats, right? Like they're going to be here to stay and they're going to have an effect on us as clinicians in our businesses.

I have a couple of things I want to address with this, and the first one is a trend that I've seen. Really pick up over the last, I would say 12 to 24 months. And that is lifestyle medicine more like hormone optimization, replacement, peptide therapy, all these things that kind of lumped together and not necessarily like functional medicine.

I don't really view this as. Functional medicine as much. It's really more like regenerative or anti aging optimization, kind of medicine that I see a lot of people moving towards. And this would include things like. TRT replacement, Ozempic peptide therapy. Lots of things that are being used now that are starting to develop.

A decent amount of evidence around as well. But are a little bit fringe at the same time. I talked to a regenerative medicine, a business owner. This was maybe like two or three months ago. And I was just shocked at how fast his business was growing, like way faster than I would have ever thought.

And. A lot of this has to do with a big chunk of what they're doing is things like ozempic and peptide therapy for weight loss but a large chunk of what they were getting was people that were looking for hormone regulation and proactive. A hormone and peptide therapy for just being active, staying active.

And I don't see this trend necessarily going away. I think more and more people are moving towards this. Especially people that are, that have a a bit more disposable income and really view their health as an investment, which go figure is probably the same, niche to some degree as a lot of the clients that work with cash based physical therapy practices.

They not be exactly the same, but there's definitely some overlap. I think there's a similar client base. And for me, what I view with this is, okay, people are trying to invest more in their health. Sure. Maybe this is, they're trying to hit the easy button. You know, you can make a strong statement that if you just take Ozempic and you lose weight because of that, but you don't develop any sort of.

Habitual changes in what you're doing in your lifestyle that as soon as you stop using it, then you're basically just going to get back to whatever unhealthy lifestyle and weight corresponding with that, that you had before. But if you could work, do that and work with somebody that could help, Behaviorally improve that and teach them how to eat healthier.

And what a great win that would be. So thinking of this as if you're in the nutrition side, like partnering with somebody like that, or affiliating with somebody like that's going to have a similar client base, I think is a smart move. If you see clinics that are doing a bit more of like peptide therapy, hormone optimization for people that are looking to stay active and healthy for long periods of time, that are maybe like an active aging population, more middle aged what a great, group to work with as well, like cool internally do some things that are going to help improve cell turnover, recovery, or whatever like functional ability for the body to perform internally.

And then, move great. Do it right. Exercises, get mobility where you need to get strength where you need it and follow a a really solid program based on what you're trying to do with your physical goals. This is a great place where these performance based clinicians can fit in as well.

Like they can augment that or. In a lot of ways, maybe the peptide hormone therapy is augmenting working with a provider. So even like looking at partnerships with these types of clinics or I don't even, I don't know what the unit economics of these things are. I don't know much about the business model, aside from the fact that I know it's like picking up really quickly with the business owner that I talked to. Like that's going, it's going to be something that you see more and more. I was surprised at how many I've seen pop up around Atlanta. And I don't think this is one of those things is going to be a fad. I think if you start looking at some of the research around just basic like TRT replacement or even some peptides like these are probably not going anywhere and they, some of them do have some substantial evidence to show efficacy not as much in humans, but definitely animal studies from what I've read certain ones, much more so than others.

Some are just frankly, Probably, not worth even looking at, but this is where talking to somebody that's reputable makes a lot of sense. And I think it's a fit that people are looking for to be very proactive with their health and just honestly to stay as active as they can especially if it doesn't create any negative health effects, which the jury's still out on that, but this is something that I see popping up more and more, something to keep your eye on and see if there's anybody in the area that would be a good referral relationship to start to develop that relationship with.

The second thing, and this is a big one, that I see creating change in the profession and really a lot of industries over the next, I don't even know how long, even in the next year can improve dramatically is artificial intelligence and AI is an interesting thing, right?

Like it's, it sounds like some, Shit out of a sci fi novel, but, uh, we really look at what AI is being used for from a, in a functional standpoint, like actual real use cases, not, Oh, we could do this one day or whatever. It's, there's a few places where it's happening a lot, and it's progressing quickly.

So if you look at AI in terms of big language models, like a chat GPT, as an example, these are growing in usage, popularity, and also effectiveness, like the, each iteration, it gets better. And if you want to see some, something crazy look up. Chat GPT like conversation with camera use, basically this is something they rolled out recently where the camera on your phone, like the AI can actually like use that as like it's eyes and see, you see the world around you kind of creep you out a little bit.

Cause they're like, Hey, great hoodie. You got on today, it must be cold or whatever. And it's weird. It'll interact with you. More so than just verbally. So that's a crazy thing to see, make progress on with something that hasn't even been around that long. And maybe that doesn't have a ton to do with what you're doing right now as a clinician.

But what I see with this is I think this could actually be a really good thing for clinicians. And the reason I say that is I think AI is going to be something that's going to help augment the, the work that we're doing and make you more efficient. So I'll give you a good example for what I mean by that.

I have a friend that is a personal injury attorney. He owns a, his own practice and he had a two paralegals that were they're working at his company. He basically one left to take another job. And as he was going to look to hire another one, the paralegal that was working with him, he started to help train her up on like utilization of AI platform specific to the legal industry.

And she became so efficient with some of the documentation work, the contractual work that just the paperwork side research side of things that he didn't even need to hire another paralegal. Paralegal and was actually able to give this person a raise, but still net positive for him because he only really needed to hire one because that one person can be as efficient as two with the aid of an AI platform that they were using.

What does that mean for you? Does that mean that one PT is going to become as efficient as two? I don't think so, but I do think you're going to be able to become more efficient as things like EMR platforms and home exercise platforms Start to better integrate or maybe develop AI platforms that can help you augment what you're doing for instance, let's say, and I don't know if this exists yet, it probably is in the works, but let's just say you can have, some sort of AI platform built into an EMR that is just listening to your.

I don't even know if this is HIPAA compliant or not, but anyway, let's just say this can happen, listen to your visit with somebody. And at the end of your visit, it has a typed up thorough note of exactly what you went over exactly what you know, you're going to do next time. If that person's better, same, worse.

And then it automatically sends the updated home exercise program to that person that is specific to the progressions you say that you want to make and the corresponding videos of the new things that they need to do. Like automatically as it's actively listening and documenting and creating the home exercise plan updates for whatever it is that you want to do.

Like how much time would that save you in a day? Significant amount, right? Even if you didn't want to see more volume, how much more time does that allow you to spend with your patient? Like actually with the patient doing the things that can't be done by software or AI platforms, like building that rapport making sure that they understand how to do things, doing hands on work, coaching them through the actual.

Progressions and regressions of things that they need to do. Just talking to them about frustrations of things that, they're worried about as far as physically being able to do or not do, it allows you to spend more meaningful time face to face with those people, hands on with those people with something that is going to be very hard to replace.

With any sort of AI platform, but the efficiency of what you do with tasks that we all have to do that take time could be offset and a really good way to make us more efficient at what we do and also have to do less of the mundane stuff we don't really like. What if you never had to write a note ever again, but you had the documentation you needed automatically.

And the next time somebody came in. You could review that and make sure that you're up to date on everything. And, but you don't actually have to be the one typing out what's going on. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a longtime listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast.

And please leave a rating and review. This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast for more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. In in these documentation platforms. And I remember like back when I was in the army, we would do these big sports med days and it's when the surgeons would have would all show up.

Because where I was at was a was called a troop medical clinic. So it's not the hospital it's pseudo attached to it, but it's not a part of it. It's like at another base and it's where like all the infantry soldiers were. So it was much more convenient for them to come in. But if you had surgery, you'd go to the hospital and all the surgeons were at the hospital and the surgeons would come in once a month, all the orthosurgeons, all the physical therapists would be there.

And all the people that were post operative would show up and they would just be like in a line, go down the line, seeing, updates on how people are doing. We'd give them updates on the rehab side. We would get on the same page with next steps, and then they would go walk off to the side and they would dictate into a some sort of handheld device that then they would Drop off at the hospital and then somebody would manually type those things up.

They would type up the notes so that, cause they would see, maybe 30, 40 people each in a day going through all those folks into a half. And I guess it would be like half a day in an afternoon. So if you can imagine that doc, like typing up all his notes would be, Insane.

It would be very hard for them to do that. So from an efficiency standpoint, they had documentation or a dictation service that they used. What if that just was like a button you wore around and that automatically happened? And it just went into a platform that was integrated with that.

Like we're not that far from that. Now, not after you're. Like if you see what some of the progressions look like in this, in the software, it's pretty impressive. As well as I think like diagnostically, as far as movement patterns go and understanding biomechanics and being able to break those things down in a more effective manner.

I think stuff like that is going to improve quickly. It's already starting to happen. We're already seeing that with lots of different technologies that are just beginning and just beginning to get better and better. I think it's going to be a augment to. What we do in a positive way, and maybe it does replace some of our peers that, that don't want to adopt it or like in my friend scenario, somebody leaves and maybe somebody is efficient enough to replace what they're doing.

I think it'd be hard to do that on the patient care side. But definitely the documentation side, I just feel like I could save a ton of time and make the job of being a clinician more enjoyable if that was a case, because then you can just focus on the stuff that you really like to do. Like we have to do documentation and update HTPs and stuff because it just is part of the job.

It helps us do our job. But if you could have somebody do that automatically, man, you can focus on the stuff you really like, which is. Educating and helping people get over injuries and doing hands on work and coaching them and all that. And that allows more time for us to be in our zone of genius that we like to do anyway.

So I think it's generally a positive thing. The other thing too, is I saw a study where they were looking at what. What professions over the next 10 years are going to be more in demand. And a lot of them were healthcare. It was like nurse practitioners, physical therapists, PTAs. Just people that are like helping other human beings face to face. I think if you are, I think if you're like a computer designer, like if you're designing, I don't know if we call it like, like logos or brand design stuff for companies coding, basic things I think those are the things that are going to get really, they're going to get offset like really quickly with AI.

And I, if your spouse is in one of these professions, don't freak out. I don't know the timeline on these things, but I do see that they are making a lot of headway. In replacing a lot of stuff, like you can even, if you want to code like small things, you can do that just by telling these, some of these AI systems, what you want and it'll build it for you.

And then you can connect it into the software that you have with minimal to no technical skills, no coding skills, not knowing how to do that at all. Like it's getting there. It's, and it's crazy, but what you can't replace very easily is one human being. Talking to another human being, putting their hands on that other person, helping them, get over injuries that are stopping them from doing things that they like to do.

And there's a huge trust factor there between one person and another person that I think is going to become even more important as we have interactions with different AI platforms that probably get to a point where it's hard for you to tell if it's an AI platform or not, like phone answering services and stuff like that, or it's very much trending that direction.

So the good news is I think you're in a great spot, right? Like you working with other people like that, it's going to be very hard to replace and long term, I think it's going to become even more in demand and fewer people are really moving towards those professions because they, that they want more of a technological sort of job.

They want more location independence. And clinician, but at the same time, it's a great way to bulletproof your. Career by doing so because you're going to be, you're going to continue to be higher and higher in demand as fewer people move into those types of roles. And more demand is there by one person wanting to work with another person.

So I think it's a net positive for our profession. If it can help with. The things you don't like to do that are more administrative and he can have those done for you. That sounds awesome. And more people are going to want to work with you. That sounds awesome too. I think you're in a great spot. Very bullish on, PT over the next decade at a minimum.

Who knows after that. No one really does. No one really knows what's gonna happen next year either. But this is my sort of guess as to what I see based on current trends in technology and in our population as well as professions. So I think it's a great spot. The last thing that I see, which is really interesting is.

Health and wellness. I see an increased demand in this for niche experts, helping people achieve goals that they want. And this is not anything new. I just see this more and more as I pay attention to different niches and and just trends that I'm seeing with even our own clients with the number of businesses that we work with now, we get a lot of combined data and it's really interesting to to see and what people are maybe seeing more success with.

And what I see with this though, is people are searching out specific people for specific problems. So for instance, let's say, you are a cyclist that has back pain. You're going to want to find a clinician that works with cyclists specifically. And understands how to do a back pain in cyclists more so than generally going to a a general sports ortho clinic that kind of sees whatever, and I see this sort of niching down of what people are looking for as a trend is going to continue.

So the more that you can try to dominate a niche and especially a niche you really enjoy working with, I think you're going to see more and more traction with that and more and more. More and more deep dives into different niches where people are going to find success and really separate themselves from everybody else.

I think if you want to be general, you're gonna have to go big. And if you want to be smaller, but more specialized, then you can drill a drill down even more and really focus on those people. And I'll give you a good example. I talked to a a guy that is a mountain bike coach and he basically sells like a three month.

Basically digital sort of coaching offer. And yeah, I don't know all the details of what he does with it, but it's three months and it's 5, 000 bucks. So he's talking to him about riding mechanics and training and the mindset of a mountain biker and all this stuff. And he's coaching them up on not just like how to ride better, but also, building out the program that they follow.

So that they can work towards the mountain bike goals they have. But this guy's, I don't know what his background is besides enjoying to ride mountain bikes and then being pretty good at sales. But if you break that up, that's like over 1, 500 a month that he's charging for people to become better mountain bikers.

For three, over a three month period, like that's a lot of money. That's a lot more money than most people that we work with as, cash based clinicians are charging and this guy's doing great and he's, has a great business and he's probably the most highly paid mountain bike, Coach in the country that I've ever heard of.

That's a pretty niche thing. That's a niche thing that he's seen a lot of success with. And I see a lot of people that are trending that direction. That's what they want. They want a specialization in something that they like to do with somebody that's really good at that, that can help them achieve that goal.

That is very narrowly niche down. So if you're worried that maybe you're going to. Too narrow with your niche. Let's say you work with the golfers. I wouldn't be worried about that. That's still pretty broad, right? You could make it even more specific that let's say you only work with female golfers, right?

Or, you primarily focus on lower back painting golfers or something to that effect, but you can niche down even more than that. And I think you're going to be able to really charge more. And find more consistency with the people that are looking to work with you and what your offer provides, maybe even leveraging that in a digital manner, which I am seeing more and more of that, right?

Even our clinics that we work with, they have a brick and mortar footprint, and this is nothing new. We've been doing this for years. We've been doing this for Five, six years at athletes potential with remote coaching. But I see more and more where it just makes sense for people to add in some variation of remote management of athletes as a ongoing offer for certain people that's what they want.

For some people, they just want to come in person and you're never going to, that's always going to be the case. And so people are going to really value human to human coaching and a connection. But for some people they're busy and maybe you can manage part of it that way. Part of it when they come in occasionally and you're maybe doing goal setting and updating different things, but definitely trending that direction where.

Nitching down even more than you think will be a very viable option where you should be able to charge more for what you do because you have far more of a specialization. So it's I talk about this with my truck. Like my truck has is a Toyota Tacoma, but it has An off road suspension on it.

And I can't take it in to get work done at the Toyota dealership. If something needs to be, some maintenance needs to be done, like I have to take it to an off road specific shop that is literally an hour from my house and I can't get in for a month cause they're so busy. And they charge me like twice as much because they're it's a unique knowledge base that they have that I can't get as general sort of mechanic.

So the same thing can be said for you. If that's what you crush it with a specific niche, you're going to people coming from further away. They're going to charge, you can charge more to they're less price sensitive and they're going to be seeking you out because you're a specialist for what they want.

So in summary, and to wrap this up number one, I see lifestyle medicine. And regenerative medicine, I see that growing a shitload over the next 10 years in particular. There's a lot of eyeballs on this stuff. Just look at how many people are listening to three hour, Huberman or Peter Atiyah podcasts on dopamine.

Like what the hell? I know there's not that many scientists listening to that. You tell me why your CPA is listening to a three hour podcast. Podcasts on dopamine and people are interested in learning about how to take better care of themselves. It's a trend that I think is generally a very positive thing.

But these types of of medicine functional medicine has been growing rapidly. I see that continuing to grow. And if you can augment that and be a part of, that sort of population, I think it's a great Group of people to have some sort of referral partnership with local affiliate partnership with, and you serve a similar client base.

So definitely worth looking for. I think AI is getting better at a scary fast clip. Know the better way to put that. Like it's just it is. It is iterating and getting better so quickly, and it's starting to improve efficiency of so many things that I'm not sure, the speed at which that's going to continue to grow.

I think it'll probably actually continue to speed up and hopefully for us, it's, it creates technology that is going to help improve the amount of time we can actually spend. Forward facing with the people we work with, which really matters the most and remove some of the ancillary tasks that we have to do to be able to enjoy our job more and be more efficient.

I don't see it as a replacement for. The people that we work with anytime soon in the human human to human connection, that's going to be real hard, man really hard to replace. For people that might be worried about what am I going to do? I'm going to get let go, whatever.

And I don't see that happening with our profession anytime soon. In fact, if anything, I think the demand for what we do is going to go up and continue to go up as people need more and more help with people like us. The last thing is I see niching down and specific, niching down even more than you think as increasing in demand, people are really looking for specific, special specialized individuals, and don't be scared to niche down to create content specific to your niche to be the go to person for very niche specific thing in your area.

I think that's going to continue to improve. Prove you're gonna have more and more people seeking you out at a higher price point and net positive for you as a business owner. Because of that, you get to stay in the area that you love so much. We're working with the clients that you can get the best results for and they get a better outcome and they get a more.

Specialized person for the thing that they're looking for. And overall, I think that's a really positive thing. Yeah, don't be scared. You're fine. You're not gonna get replaced by a robot anytime soon, but be on the lookout for some of these things. This is what I think is going to be, be happening.

I'd love to also know, what do you think of this type of topic? I'd love to know you can always shoot me a a DM on Instagrams is Danny Mate PT. If you like this one, let me know. This isn't something I share too much, but I do pay attention to a lot of these things, mainly so that we can share it with the business owners that we're we're working with and make sure that we're, trying to skate where the puck is going and not where it is.

So as always, thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you in the next one.

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