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Community Story: Jeff Moore of the Institute of Clinical Excellence

December 22, 2022

How a Jane customer is building a community of physical therapists across the United States.

Story by Jack Murphy

Dr. Jeff Moore started the Institute of Clinical Excellence (ICE) in 2012, which helps healthcare providers improve their clinical practice to better serve patients.

Jeff is also a partner in Onward Physical Therapy offering traditional in-clinic services in multiple states and nationally via telehealth, which now has 18 locations across the US.

Why did you decide to become a physical therapist?

Originally, I was going to go into medicine. I was fortunate to spend some time shadowing and having long conversations with some physicians before starting down that road. Ultimately, those conversations made me understand that if I really wanted to be encouraging health and wellness and working with people and helping them change their behaviours and lifestyles, then mainstream medicine wasn’t the best place for me to do that.

My brother was working in the physical therapy space and I had a heart-to-heart with him about what I wanted to do with my life. He told me that he loved his job. Every day he was motivating people and helping them recover from injuries and getting them back to doing what they love. That sounded fantastic to me. From that point on, my journey to become a physical therapist began.

Now you are training other physical therapists. Tell us a little about how you do that.

I am the CEO of the Institute of Clinical Excellence (ICE) where we empower physical therapists to pursue their passions by offering an outstanding patient experience. Our vision is to help healthcare providers improve their clinical practice with a fitness-forward, manual therapy skilled, and psychologically informed style of treatment.

Our faculty is dedicated to not only being on the cutting edge of current research in our field, but also helping you apply it clinically with real-life patients in the clinic.

Our programs and certifications at ICE aim to give practitioners a jump into offering the best patient experience. Whether they take a course on cervical spine management or on working with fitness athletes, our goal is to help them build the foundations for a successful and fulfilling career.

What would you tell a new physical therapist starting their practice?

It comes down to this philosophy of getting good, not busy. Everybody wants to hack the marketing game and hack the digital space. There’s a place for working on your SEO and generating awareness, but it’s all for naught if your product isn’t exceptional.

I encourage new physical therapists to get good. Take the right courses, learn the skills that generate awareness and make people say, “I am thrilled I came here, I would have paid double. I wish I would have booked here a long time ago.” Word of mouth is going to do the rest of it for you. But you have to have the skills that stop you from having to always find new patients. Eventually, you want to get to a point where people are marketing for you, so you can just enjoy treating the people.

I’m biased, thinking ICE is probably a great way to do that, but there are a lot of great ways to do that. Whatever your specialty, go figure out where those condensed pieces of material live that elevate your skill set. Do the work, get really good and then think about ways to bring awareness to your service. Doing it the other way is a recipe for disaster.

There is a lot of talk of burnout at work. This can be even more prevalent for physical therapists. How do you recommend avoiding physical burnout?

You can either worry about being thrifty with the amount of fuel in your tank, or you can build a bigger tank. I’m a big advocate of the latter. It revolves around a lot of our philosophy at ICE. Live your life the way that you want your patients to live their lives.

Recover even harder than you train. Live your life in a way that makes it very difficult to exhaust yourself. To me, that’s the solution everyone is always trying to work around.

I would argue physical therapists are working to do as much good as they can in the world. I don’t think doing less is the answer. I think finding a way to have a capacity that’s really hard to exhaust is the answer. I would really encourage people to get as fit as they encourage their patients to be. How much reserve can you build up so that it’s just very, very hard for your daily life to tap that reserve?

You offer a lot of free resources for physical therapists. Tell us about them and where people can find them.

Hump day hustle is my e-mail newsletter. I’ve been writing it for so many years now that I’ve lost track of how old it is. It goes out every Wednesday morning to between twenty and thirty thousand physiotherapists and physical therapists across the world.

The main objective of the hump day hustle is to help keep everyone in the community really current with news in the physical therapy space. I compile all the resources and news that has come out over the past week. I write it in a way that people can scan it quickly and grab the links they are interested in and continue on with their day. It’s really become this incredible way to drive conversation and just bring awareness to really well-done research in things that are moving our physio space forward.

We also release a daily podcast, PTonICE Daily Show. Every morning at 9:00 AM EST, someone on our faculty shares something that they’re working on and what they’ve learned with the greater physio community to help elevate it.

Why do you use Jane in the Onward Physical Therapy clinics?

We were blown away by Jane. That’s why we use it exclusively at all our Onward Physical therapy clinics.

Jane has cut through so much of the noise of EMR documentation. Charting is not exactly a highlight of anybody’s physio career or any healthcare professional. But Jane has done as good of a job as could be imagined, making it fun to be in that space. What a feat, creating a service that takes something that can be so miserable and creates moments of joy.

It is our opinion that Jane is head and shoulders above the competition for all of those reasons.

Jane also has a really fresh user interface. Everything is so streamlined and fun to use and intuitive. It has made things so much easier for our staff, which is why we’ll never go in a different direction.

What are some of your favourite features of Jane as a physical therapist?

There are so many that it makes this a tough question to answer. Jane has done such a good job with charting. There are no unnecessary boxes or things like that we have to contend with when we go through our notes. It makes it so that I’m able to get to work and be efficient with the few minutes I have available to keep up with high-quality documentation.

The entire patient experience, too. The user interface and the scheduling. It is easy to look at and navigate. “When we look at Jane, we see people converting, getting all the way through to booking. Jane is a fresh-looking, really fun EMR that people can schedule on their own.”

Jane also lets us save all our patient’s credit card info for both the clinic and the patient’s ease of payment. Everything is so clearly designed that they know what they’re buying and why they’re buying that product. It’s those things that Jane offers that mean our business is thriving.

What is some advice you would like to share with the Jane community?

There is an economist quote that I read 20 years ago that I love to share with people.

In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.” ― Rudiger Dornbusch

I think that quote has played out to be as true as any other piece of advice I’ve ever come across. At the beginning of your career, it can feel like it’s never going to happen. Especially when you read about overnight success stories. But, you’re not reading about the years of grind that had led those people up to that “overnight success”. I want people to know that their hard work will pay off. They just need to keep their heads down, keep at the grindstone and be ready for that really intense and fun upturn in their business pursuits.

Is there anything you would like to share with the Jane community before we say goodbye?

I hope you’re doing something great that you believe in because that is something truly exceptional in this world. If you don’t feel like you are, change it, go do something you believe in that you’ll look back on and be proud of, whether it works out or not. Be the type of person that can say I was a part of doing great work, no matter the costs.

Resources

Institute of Clinical Excellence
PTonICE Daily Show Podcast
Hump Day Hustle Email sign-up


If you’re not already part of the Jane community, welcome! We’re so glad you found us. If you’re in search of Practice Management software to help run your clinic, we’d love for you to meet Jane. Book a demo with one of our lovely support staff, or sign up here!

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