Grow your rehab through health club partnerships
Joint ventures help you gain recognition
Fitness centers with their personal trainers offer performance enhancement services to healthy people, much as rehabilitation facilities offer the same to people who have physical illnesses or injuries. And people pay cash for the fitness centers’ services.
So why can’t a rehabilitation facility move into that market niche? After all, rehab providers have a greater need than ever before to find revenue sources that are not subject to Medicare and managed care cutbacks. This type of creative thinking led a major national rehabilitation company to begin partnerships and a joint venture with fitness centers.
Placing rehab services in a fitness center gives rehab facilities a new avenue of distribution, and it’s a relatively inexpensive way to expand services, says Greg Marotta, director of operations and ambulatory care for Kessler Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation in West Orange, NJ. Kessler Rehab Corp., which owns Kessler Physical Ther apy and Rehabilitation, has acute care rehabilitation hospitals, outpatient centers, assisted-living facilities, and skilled nursing facilities primarily in the eastern and southern United States. Marotta spoke in November about integrated outpatient rehabilitation at the 5th Annual Joint Conference for Rehabilitation in New Orleans.
Kessler started partnerships with fitness centers in 1995 and formed its first joint venture with a fitness company in 1998. The benefits of such a relationship include opening additional locations for rehab services at a lower cost than if the locations were opened in empty buildings, and the partnership gives patients the opportunity to use a wide variety of exercise equipment that a satellite rehab facility normally wouldn’t have.
"We were looking to capture the ambulatory care population with musculoskeletal and orthopedic problems, the type of diagnoses that don’t require intensive rehab services," Marotta explains.
First, look at centers in right location
Initially, Kessler targeted regional fitness centers that were in the same areas as four of the company’s New Jersey hospitals. "We needed a network to capture those patients after their discharge and at a lesser acuity level."
The marketing strategy worked, and now the company has staff in 18 fitness centers, eight of which are part of a joint venture with Bally Total Fitness, a nationwide chain of more than 300 fitness centers in North America. Kessler’s contract with the non-joint-venture fitness centers includes a licensing agreement that permits rehab patients to use the gym facilities, and Kessler rents the rehab space within the center. Kessler’s operations are covered by standard rehabilitation insurance.
Next year, Kessler will target women’s fitness clubs for rehab partnerships.
"The women’s health initiative within the rehab industry has grown dramatically within the last 24 months, and we’re looking for opportunities to place those services in women-only clubs," Marotta says. "Women’s health programs address sensitive needs, and a special approach is warranted to deliver these services in an appropriate environment."
Marotta offers these strategies for developing a partnership with a fitness center:
• Target the right type of facility and sell it on the idea. Not all fitness centers are a good fit with rehabilitation services. For example, a rehab facility probably shouldn’t target a club that focuses entirely on weight-training. "While we may treat some of the people who go to this sort of club, it’s not consistent with our approach to the community," Marotta says.
The best strategy is to look for a fitness center that has the same kind of market, location, and demographics the rehab facility seeks. For example, a good match might include a center that attracts families and older people as well as the traditional 20-something market. If you do this, you’ll save time and money by not having to duplicate demographic and market research.
For example, perhaps your rehab facility would like to receive referrals from physicians in the opposite end of town, but the doctors say their patients don’t want to travel 30 minutes to receive rehabilitation. Then you could select a fitness center in that end of town and quite easily have an attractive and convenient location that will attract new clients and referral sources.
"We wanted to make sure the clubs we identified were the ones who fit our strategic plan," Marotta says.
Your rehab facility should meet the fitness center’s strategic plan, as well. The fitness center should see the benefit of having access to professional therapists in its facility, so if members have a particular muscle or joint problem, the club can suggest they see the physical therapist. Also, any patients the rehab facility brings to the club could become new members for the fitness center.
"We’re actually generating memberships for the fitness centers," Marotta says. "One thing we have done to increase fitness center memberships is to offer free musculoskeletal screenings by a physical therapist."
The screening is designed to pick up imbalances, weaknesses, and deficiencies in flexibility that could lead to lower back pain or neck problems. The screenings have been very popular, Marotta adds.
• Make cost-effective physical and staff changes. Once you find a fitness center that is a good match, you need to carve out some space for the rehabilitation work. Kessler has renovated old racquetball courts and other unused space from 600 to 1,000 square feet. The renovations have to meet local building codes, but that typically isn’t a problem, Marotta says.
The entire start-up costs are about $65,000, which is considerably less than if the rehab facility had expanded into new space and started from scratch, he adds.
Another way to cut start-up costs is to assign a minimal staff to the fitness center until business builds up. In the Washington, DC, market, where Kessler opened rehab services in three area fitness centers, the company assigned one therapist and one support staff person to cover all three sites, which are within a 30-mile radius, until the volume increased. "What we did was cluster sites we were opening in a way that would allow us to leverage those human resources," Marotta explains. That type of strategy saves more money than if the company only opened and staffed one site at a time and then added more sites as the volume increased.
• Identify referral sources and begin marketing campaign. Kessler began marketing its rehab/ fitness center partnership and services even before opening up the new sites.
"Early on, in new markets, we identified the clubs that could house the clinical services, and if we weren’t going to immediately build these, we got our name out there through offering ancillary services, like massage therapy," Marotta says.
The company also marketed its services for athletes, such as helping individuals improve their golf game and providing high-performance training for student athletes. The marketing efforts targeted primary referral sources as well as the public and the fitness center membership, but physicians are the first priority.
"A lot of people go to their physician, saying, Johnny wants to improve his basketball game, but I’m worried about his lower back, who do you recommend we see?’’’ Marotta explains. "It’s an out-of-pocket expense that’s not billed to a third-party payer."
Sales coordinators visit doctors and educate them about those kinds of therapy services for athletes and healthy people. They ask physicians questions such as these:
— We have treated some of your patients at these locations. Do you have any other patients who might benefit from our services?
— Do these services match up with the patients you are seeing?
— Could you please identify any specific protocols you like to see us use for knee or shoulder injuries?
• Work with fitness center to enhance community awareness. Fitness centers that work with a rehabilitation facility want to enhance their own market niche by showing they are concerned about their members’ overall health. They want people to associate their names with a higher quality of service, Marotta says. "Bally Total Fitness was looking for quality providers to bring that level of expertise to the organization."
Kessler has worked closely with its partner fitness centers to create a seamless integration of the rehab and fitness services.
"While we do act independently, we are not looking to be identified as two separate identities within the same space," Marotta says.
The integration includes having rehab therapists provide educational classes at the fitness center for staff and personal trainers, and it includes joint marketing and public relations activities. The rehab facility also may provide special services just for the fitness center’s membership in conjunction with the club’s membership drive.
"Fitness centers have multiple programs available that they can offer to their membership, but having a health care provider’s name within that arena gives them a seal of approval," Marotta says.
Need More Information?
Greg Marotta, Director, Operations and Ambu latory Care, Kessler Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation, 1199 Pleasant Valley Way, West Orange, NJ 07052. Telephone: (973) 243-6913. Fax: (973) 243-6960.
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