My PT Hub App

Fitness services made easy through an online personal training app.

Reviewed by Matt Slimming, PT, DPT

For physical therapists to continue to provide the best value in health care, we need to learn to communicate with the people we serve in different ways.

For some of us, that means finding ways to help the public before they need our physical therapy services, as well as after they have completed their plan of care. One of the ways to develop or maintain a relationship with a client is through wellness services. Perhaps the most common wellness service that PTs offer is fitness services post-discharge.

Many providers have tackled this opportunity in different ways, with varying levels of success. It can be an expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating pursuit: Payments are often lower for fitness services; the labor and time required to execute it well are significant; and it is very hard to attract and keep fitness staff who reflect the high standards of expertise and professionalism that our PT practices have achieved.

So is it really worth making the extra effort to provide post-discharge fitness services?

Consider these benefits:

• Increased rates of reactivation among discharged patients
• Staying connected with our past patients in a meaningful way
• Referrals from fitness clients who refer their friends and neighbors
• Additional revenue per plan of care
• Continued value to patients whose insurance dictates earlier than desired discharge
• Injury prevention

Providing personal training services can be an excellent component of a comprehensive post-discharge fitness service. With personal training software, we now have increased ability to offer effective personal training services without the hassle of additional staff and lease space.

My PT Hub is a fairly comprehensive platform that allows both client and trainer/PT to access important information via a smartphone app. Complete with the ability to brand your clinic logo, the software offers a wide variety of services from exercise to nutrition. Within the software, as the physical therapist, you have the option to use their personal training programs or you can create your own. There are over 7,500 exercises to create workouts of whatever length you wish. Each of these exercises has two videos: one featuring a woman and one a man. The appropriate gender video is automatically assigned to the client based on their sex. Once you have created your workouts, you can develop schedules so that the client has at least a week’s worth of workouts available to them. Alternatively, you can simply use the pre-set Exercise Plans in the software and assign those to your clients.

One of the features that I most enjoy is the ability to communicate directly with my clients. If I want to send a message, I can do so through the app. It also allows my clients to message and notify me when they complete a workout. For clients who require a little extra motivation, I am able to positively reinforce their behavior. To make it easier to assign schedules and communicate with the clients, your clients can be arranged in groups. Hence, I can just create one message and send it out to a specific group of clients. This function can be used for announcements, wishing a happy holiday, or just as a reminder to take measurements to track progress.

The processing fees are relatively low, currently 3.8 percent of your Package Fee plus $0.36 for each client payment. In addition, there is a flat cost for subscribing to the My PT Hub software which ranges between $7.50 and $15 a month (not including the previously mentioned fees). Rates are proposed to decrease in 2019.

While it is unlikely that personal training revenue in our clinics will come close to matching the revenue we gain from direct patient care, by using an online training platform, we are able to enjoy a low additional cost to provide the service and greater ease with which we can help our past patients. In my opinion this makes online personal training a valuable service to add to our offerings.

The My PT Hub app is just one of a number of online personal training programs. If you are considering launching your own personal training program, treat it like any other new service line: Create at least a mini-business plan and a financial pro forma for the new service. Also research the other online personal training platforms available.

Matt Slimming, PT, DPT, is a PPS member and owner of STAR Physical Therapy and STAR Fitness, an 8-clinic PT practice in the Greater New Orleans area. He can be reached at matt@starptclinics.com.