Dana Strauss (00:00) Hi everybody, welcome to episode 10 of the Future Proof PT podcast. Today, Alex and I are joined by our second guest. His name is Cody Lee. He is a physical therapist, we would say earlier career, you wouldn't know that he's early career by how much he's accomplished and how much really smart thinking he does.

So we brought Cody on to talk a little bit about some of the influences on his earlier career, on some of his observations about the healthcare industry, on...

how he is incorporating some of the concepts of value-based care into his own specific physical therapy practice. And so we are going to hand the floor a bit over to Cody to tell us a little bit more about sort of what he's doing in his day job and some of the work he is doing to try to advance value-based care locally. And then we'll, talk a bit about his work in the

Alabama Physical Therapy Association, So, Cody, if you want to give us a little background, what are you doing? What's exciting you lately? And we'll take it from there.

Cody Lee (01:05) Yeah, sounds good. So yeah, first, thanks for just having me on. I've really enjoyed listening to the podcast. It's been very impactful early on for me already and really appreciate the work you are doing and everything you are putting out is it's really, really helpful for me as early career clinician for sure. So a little background on me. Graduated from PT school, like you said, I'm early career, August.

2023 from the University of St. Augustine. So I did their flex program. So I was able to be in the clinic while I was in school. I worked full time as a tech and then as a access specialist or in our front office. So I got to see kind of the healthcare system from a different lens than just as a treating clinician, which was super helpful and kind of seeing the impact different roles have within our system and within our clinic specifically.

But currently I'm at a hospital-based outpatient clinic with Southeast Health. So we have PT, OT, speech. We have a neurobalance center as well. But clinically I focus a little more on, we have general orthopedics and then have a big population of chronic pain patients. So that's kind of where my focus is and doing that day to day. And then like you said, I've started working

more with the Alabama APTA and now I'm the co-chair of our membership committee for our association.

Alex (02:28) awesome.

Dana Strauss (02:29) Fantastic. I think maybe first, you have shared a couple of stories about working with patients and taking lessons, if you want to call them, from our episodes or from things that we've written about how you've applied some basic concepts about value-based care to general practice. That is as simple as coordinating with a physician to

to

something that affects their longitudinal care potentially. Do you mind telling us a little bit about one of those anonymous, of course, patient stories?

Cody Lee (03:06) Yeah, definitely. So like I said, y'all have already made an impact on me from that perspective. And I think it was a few episodes ago when you talked about kind of care coordination and that sort of thing in general. And so that was something I've been thinking more about and had a patient recently who came in mid sixties, seeing her for low back pain. As we're doing kind of the evaluation, the subjective, I get to understand a little bit about she kind of always

Caught herself as healthy, you know, like she didn't take medications and that sort of thing. Didn't have a primary care provider, mainly just uses urgent care when she's sick or needs some sort of care. So as a part of my normal intake process when I'm doing my evaluations, I always check vitals. So screen blood pressure and it was, I think systolic was in the 160s that day. And so we had a brief discussion about it.

You know, she'd never mentioned anything about having high blood pressure. She wasn't really aware of it. So, kind of initially broached the subject of, have you thought about maybe having a primary care provider who could, you know, manage this for you? one thing to note, she had a little bit higher anxiety, so I didn't want to take the one, you know, data point and say, okay, you've got high blood pressure. So had her, track it over a few days in between our appointments and then.

When she came back, were able to see it. It is consistently saying hi and had a further discussion about getting connected with a primary care provider. And thankfully we have some relationships with primary care providers in our area. was able to just text one that we have a good relationship with, give her a brief rundown. She was happy to see the patient. Eventually was able to get her in within the next week or two, I think, and get her established with her. So she's under.

her care now and then managing blood pressure with medication and then we continued to see her for her back pain through her plan of care. So it was a good interaction and you y'all are definitely impactful and kind of teaching that lesson, making me think about it more and then trying to apply it in daily practice. And then the patient was grateful for it as well. So it was a good experience.

Alex (05:11) I think it's such a wonderful example of you fitting directly into the healthcare model. You as a professional. And so we tend to judge different clinical and healthcare modalities as a standalone solutions, but they're really interconnected. So you being a musculoskeletal specialist understood that her comorbidity directly fits into her musculoskeletal complaint, but needs to be addressed by the proper fitting specialist, right? So I guess a generalist. So you,

your network to apply the right tool at the right time for the right patient so that she can get better so you can actually manage her back pain more effectively the physician can manage her hypertension more effectively and that's that I think that's an ideal model right where you can apply a fit the right fit for the right customer or the right fit for the right patient so I'll ask you a question I think based on what you described right Adam Grant has a an interesting point that any

professional is simultaneously a coach, a judge, and a referee, right? So, taking care of patients, you are a coach because you are helping them, you are judging them because you have to evaluate their shortcomings, but you're also a referee where you delegate the right structures. based on that event,