A Different Kind of Physical Therapist Job: Why MovementX Is Growing

It’s no secret that MovementX is growing.

We’re adding extraordinary physical therapists in communities across the country, and we have ambitions to serve far more providers and patients in the years ahead.

But if I had to describe my relationship with growth, I’d say it’s akin to the old Facebook status: “it’s complicated.”

Growth isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, and I once heard a phrase on a podcast that stuck with me:

“The only thing that grows for the sake of growth is a cancer cell.”

I think, on a deeper level, most of us are mistrustful of growth. We’ve seen the story play out all too often…

We’ve watched organizations grow and seen the values that once mattered become words on a wall. We’ve watched cultures get diluted. And in physical therapy specifically, we’ve seen what can happen when growth depends on seeing more patients, billing more units, and asking clinicians to produce more every year.

A physical therapist can enter this profession wanting to change lives and eventually find themselves spending much of the day doing everything but that.

That is exactly the kind of growth we want to avoid.

So why is MovementX growing?

There are three reasons, and they’re deeply connected to the kind of physical therapy career we want to help create.

To Help the Profession Heal

Too many great physical therapists are leaving the profession.

For the first nine years of MovementX’s existence, until my twin boys arrived and life changed, I personally conducted the first interview with every provider who applied.

I talked with compassionate physical therapists from all over the country.

Again and again, I heard similar stories.

They loved being PTs. They loved helping people. They loved the relationships they had built with patients.

What was wearing them down was the environment surrounding the work.

Some were exhausted by aggressive productivity requirements. Some wanted more flexibility over their schedules. Some wanted greater autonomy over how they were treated. Some were tired of double and triple booking. Some simply wanted enough time with a patient to provide the kind of care they had originally set out to give.

Many were desperately searching for a better way to practice physical therapy.

Transparently, we turned most of them down.

They were good people and, in many cases, wonderful clinicians. We simply didn’t yet have the systems, infrastructure, and local support necessary to feel confident they could thrive at MovementX.

I still think about those conversations.

Some of those physical therapists have since left clinical practice altogether, and it breaks my heart.

When thoughtful, compassionate clinicians decide a career in physical therapy is no longer sustainable for them, we lose a small piece of our identity as a profession. And patients lose something, too.

One of the reasons we are growing MovementX is so that we can say “yes” to more of those clinicians.

We want more physical therapists to have access to a career where they can build meaningful relationships with patients, have flexibility in their lives, exercise real clinical autonomy, and still be surrounded by a community of people who care deeply about the work.

We have plenty of our own challenges, problems, and failures at MovementX. I am acutely aware of them.

And we’re building something special: a way to practice with real autonomy and flexibility, in an abundantly supportive community.

I want more great physical therapists to have the opportunity to be part of it. That means we need to get bigger, with more resources, teammates, and support, in more places.

To Empower Patients and Providers

Empowered physical therapists will empower their patients.

Ultimately, every conversation about the MovementX model comes back to patients.

Taking extraordinary care of people is the pursuit that unites our community.

When I first started building my own caseload through the MovementX model, I fell in love with the type of care I could provide. I had the time and freedom to understand the person in front of me, see the environment they actually lived in, and build treatment around the things that mattered most in their life.

Our providers experience versions of that every day.

One story from MovementX physical therapist Laura Garrison has stayed with me.

Laura began working with a patient who had experienced a brain injury 11 years earlier. The patient had been in and out of traditional physical therapy ever since.

She still struggled to walk inside her home. She could not navigate her stairs. Her husband had to carry her to the car.

Working one-on-one with the patient in her home, Laura helped her begin walking through the house. Then she helped her navigate the stairs. Eventually, the patient took her first steps outside her own front door.

Later, Laura shared another update with our team.

“This week, her goal was to get down the stairs to her basement so she can leave the house in an Uber and we were able to make it all the way down to the basement to her garage. Her first words were, ‘I just opened up so many opportunities to take my kiddo out.’”

Think about the weight of that sentence.

This woman gained access to her life again; to experience the world with her child.

Certainly, Laura’s skill and commitment made that possible. Laura also pointed to the environment in which she was able to practice:

“I think being with MX and having the 1-on-1 time, and allowing me to be in the home with her, without having so many restrictions, has really helped her.”

Stories like hers are everywhere in our community.

I treated a 95-year-old skier.

Another MovementX provider helped a 30-year-old who had a stroke get back to hiking.

Every provider has their own stories about someone who needed more individualized care, more creativity, more time, or simply a physical therapist who could meet them where they were.

This is why the conversation about physical therapist jobs matters far beyond employment.

The environment in which clinicians practice shapes the care patients receive.

When a PT has time to think, permission to use their judgment, and the flexibility to build care around a patient’s actual goals, some remarkable things can happen.

We want more patients to have access to that kind of care.

To Raise the Quality of Care

Our business model depends on growing the number of providers, rather than the number of patients each PT sees.

There’s one more reason MovementX is growing, and I don’t talk about it nearly as often. It’s a business-model imperative.

In the traditional physical therapy landscape, organizations often create scale through patient volume.

Financial pressure pushes managers to encourage more visits.

That helps explain why double and triple booking exists. It explains the intense focus on productivity metrics and units billed. It explains why clinicians can feel pressure to squeeze one more patient into the day.

MovementX made a very different choice.

Our full-time providers agree to treat only four patients per day.

Four.

Even within many out-of-network physical therapy practices, that is unheard of.

Of course, MovementX still needs volume to build a sustainable business.

We simply focus on a different kind of volume.

Provider volume.

Our goal is to grow by bringing more extraordinary physical therapists into the community, rather than asking each clinician to continually see more patients.

That distinction affects nearly everything about the business.

As the number of MovementX providers in a market grows, local referral networks become stronger. Providers have more colleagues nearby and more opportunities to collaborate.

Scale also gives us more resources to invest in technology, tools, people, benefits, infrastructure, and the overall provider experience.

As our organization grows, we gain more ability to improve programs like health insurance and to create additional opportunities for providers to participate in our shared success.

And importantly, our providers retain the autonomy to decide what kind of practice they want to build.

Our job as a company is to create an environment where great clinicians can succeed without recreating the productivity-driven system many of us were trying to leave in the first place.

What Kind of Physical Therapy Career are We Building?

Whenever I think about MovementX’s growth, I come back to a simple picture.

I want physical therapists across the country to wake up excited about the care they are going to provide that day.

I want them to feel trusted.

I want them to have autonomy.

I want them to have enough flexibility to build a career around their life, rather than continually rearranging their life around their job. It makes for better patient care.

I want them to know their patients as people.

I want them to belong to a community of clinicians who will teach them, challenge them, celebrate them, and help them when things get hard.

And I want the business supporting them to become stronger because those things are happening, rather than in spite of them.

That is the kind of growth we are pursuing.

Our mission at MovementX is to help people move their best, so they can live their best.

For years, we have thought about that mission primarily through the lens of our patients.

As we grow, I believe we have an opportunity to pursue it for physical therapists, too.

There are extraordinary clinicians all over this country who still love this profession and the people they serve. They are simply looking for a place where they can practice differently.

We want to build more of those places.

And we want more great physical therapists building them with us.