Ben Barron on the 12,000-therapist shortage, what CMS's proposed RTM changes would mean for rural practices, and how to create access starting Monday.
Ben Barron is Senior Vice President of Sales at Net Health, where he leads go-to-market strategy across the company's rehab therapy portfolio, including the Optima and ReDoc EMRs and the Limber Health digital MSK platform. Before moving into health tech leadership, Ben spent years as a practicing physical therapist, eventually building and selling a 20-location PT practice in New England, an experience that still shapes how he thinks about the profession today.
That operator background is why Ben spends as much time on payment models and workforce economics as he does on product. He writes Half Hour Ahead, a Substack on the clinical-to-financial realities of rehab therapy: how PTs and OTs actually get paid, what payer policy does to a clinic's margins, and where the workforce and delivery model is headed next. He's a regular voice on the collision between policy, technology, and the day-to-day math of running a therapy practice.
Ben lives in Maine with his wife Katey and their two kids, and when he's not thinking about reimbursement, he's usually in his gardens or on a tennis court.
Alex Bendersky (00:11) welcome to episode number 34 of future-proof physical therapy. I have here my partner in crime, Dana. And today we are grateful to have Ben Barron as our guest. Ben has been part of physical therapy and rehab industry for a while and has been in health technology for a pretty long time too. So you can say one of the pioneers in integration and in use.
So with that in mind, I will hand off the mic
Ben Barron (00:39) Well sure. Well thanks. First of thanks Alex. Thanks, Dana, for having me. I don't say this lightly, but I do listen to the podcast. I have it
Dana (00:46) Yeah.
Ben Barron (00:46) automatically downloaded when the when they come out. So I appreciate what you guys are doing and and pretty honored to be here. yeah, so my name is Ben Barron. I am a physical therapist. I'm
Proud Boston University alum who lives just north of Boston now in southern Maine. so my career I think it's kind of funny. I went to physical therapy school in order to be a f pediatric physical therapist. and
Some things happen along the way and you end up in different places. And I ended up being one of the owners of a of a 23 clinic private orthopedic practice in Greater Boston that we we sold to a private equity back strategic. and where I stuck around and I worked there for a bit. One of the interesting things that kind of happened along the way is we had actually built a
revenue cycle management company where we helped other private practices around the country doing their billing and probably had 50, 60 clients at and part of that actually had become a strategic partner of one of the larger EMR companies in the space who would send us business that they weren't able to help because it was maybe a little bit more niche. And so when I was looking to make a transition in my career,
I hadn't even considered moving into the world of technology, but actually got a phone call from this partner who bringing in someone who had relationships, understood the industry, and could that was about almost 10 years ago now. And so since that time, I've I've been in a couple different technology spaces, typically on the growth, revenue, sales side of things. but really I I just look at
The way I got here, frankly, was a story of scale, is that I am passionate about the industry of PT and the impact that we have on people's lives and every setting that we work in. And when I was a staff PT, I could have that on the eight, 10, 12 patients that I saw that day. When I ran a clinic, I could do that for three or four therapists. When I owned the business, we had a hundred therapists at one point that I had the impact. and now I feel like I'm in the role where I can really
take a step back and try to figure out how can we help thousands of clinics, tens of thousands of therapists and enable them with potentially tools that help them do a better, easier, more efficient, more So that's kind of my my story in a nutshell.
Alex Bendersky (02:50) you have been impactful. So I think based on your road of of discovery to in physical therapy, I and based on the trajectory and building a system, building revenue cycle management part and this is
off-grid and feel free to deflect it. but do you think we are enabling therapists to do a hard job better but are we doing a good job making the therapist job easier? Or are we just supporting their hard job by enabling them to do it well?