Tim Pedersen, PT
Tim Pedersen, PT, is the owner of Synergy Physical Therapy in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. He can be reached at Tpedersen6@comcast.net.
Locations: Fairhaven, Massachusetts. 10 employees. Synergy Physical Therapy has been open for 5 years. Tim Pedersen has been practicing physical therapy for 25 years this year.
What or who is the most influential book/person/event that enhanced your professional career? There have been so many wonderful people throughout the years who have influenced, taught, encouraged, and guided me. I do not know if I have said this publicly before but Diane Cordeiro was one of my first supervisors and has been a friend and wonderful mentor for most of my professional career. She provides a benchmark that I aspire to emulate. Clifton Greenwood showed me what it means to truly care for the people that work for you.
What is the flow of your average day? I get in at 7 a.m. and open the office and take care of reviewing the clinic schedule, complete any paperwork, and usually begin treating at 8 a.m. I take some time each afternoon just before lunch to follow up on emails and other business matters. I enjoy treating patients so I do a lot of treatment hours each week. After five years I am starting to carve some time to work out more regularly in the evenings and prioritize my time a bit more.
How would you describe your essential business philosophy? My philosophy is to provide the best personal service to our clients. They should never feel like they could be doing their clinical program without us. A patient needs to feel that their time is well spent, that they are not just one body among many, and that we care about them. Even an unsuccessful course of therapy is a win for us if they feel that we listened to them, educated them, and did as much for them as we could.
What have been your best/worst/toughest decisions? The tough decisions are when to hire additional staff and when to fire staff. Show compassion in every daily interaction and things generally run smoothly, but you have to know when to cut the cord or be disciplinary and that is not always easy. I think the toughest thing to do is to manage the balance between my clinical time, administrative time, and personal time.
How do you motivate your employees? I motivate my employees by seeking their advice and opinions on what directions we should take, what equipment they want, and what training and education is important to them. I also motivate them by showing them that I value their time and their opinion in what we do. Our staff is very important to me and I want them to feel like a family team so that they are each vested in each other’s success as well as the clinic’s success.
How did you get your start in private practice? I had always wanted my own practice. I had been a manager for many years, then started and grew an outpatient practice for another organization. While I loved them, it was not mine and was never going to be. A clinic closed in my town and I saw it as an opportunity. After a lot of planning, projecting, and discussion with my wife, I decided to move ahead. She was teaching Zumba so we saw it as an opportunity to provide additional exposure for the new clinic. We wrote a lot of clinic names on scraps of paper and napkins but ultimately fell in love with Synergy, which is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the cooperative effort of two entities to achieve a more successful or productive result”—the patient and the therapist, the therapy and the fitness work together to achieve better health. It seemed to fit.
How do you stay ahead of the competition? We are constantly learning and striving to provide the most individual therapy programs. We do a lot of learning. We place the emphasis on our patients and we make sure that our communication to the physicians is short, clear, and concise to show that we value their time.
What have been your best learning experiences (mistakes) since the inception of your practice? Every day is a learning experience. I have been involved in running a clinic for many years but still learn new things about contracting, billing, and running the practice all of the time. I think that Rick Gawenda’s seminar on outpatient therapy Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Coding, Billing, and Documentation was a great resource for keeping us set up for compliance.
What are the benefits of Private Practice Section (PPS) membership to your practice? I love getting each issue of Impact, which keeps me up to date on changes within the profession, insurance issues, and management. It gives me some focus on running my practice. PPS membership provides me with networking opportunities that help me run and grow my practice.
What is your life motto? Love, learn, enjoy your family, and never ever be afraid of hard work.
What worries you about the future of private practice physical therapy/what are you optimistic about? I am very optimistic about the future of Direct Access and the autonomy of the physical therapy practice.
What are some new opportunities you plan to pursue in the next year? We are evaluating electronic health records/electronic medical records (EHR/EMRs) and are hoping to increase our involvement in the community.