To diagnose and take care of the problem. So 50% of the time, the patient had to come back to see a different specialist to get a diagnosis or plan going forward. If you saw the sports med doc, 90% of the time, you did not need to see an orthopedic surgeon or neurologist or whatever.

We had a very long backlog of patients and we were trying to find out which method was most efficient.

PT visits resulted in many more visits and many more referrals, so the conclusion was that they were less efficient at getting to the bottom of the problem and coming up with a definitive plan.

The pilot program for open access to PT had to be stopped for a while. I left last year so I’m not sure what they ended up doing.

But if you had the choice of seeing someone and getting a definitive diagnosis and plan 90% of the time vs 50% (plus more appointments), you might choose the former. That was our data and may not apply to every situation.