Guides
Physical Therapy Services Packages: A Self-Pay Build Order
A build order for physical therapy services packages: define the buyer, sessions, schedule, stopping rules, price, agreement, and advertising and payer checks.
What to take away
- Physical therapy services packages are self-pay products with a defined start, end and content, sold before they are delivered. That makes them a promise, a prepayment and a liability at the same time.
- Build it in a fixed orderthe buyer, the content, the schedule it occupies, the policy for stopping early, then the words on the page. Most packages are built backwards, from the price.
- Whether a package may include anything a payer covers is a contract question. Ask the payer before selling one to an insured patient.
- The page that sells a package is advertising, and the FTC and the state board both have rules for it.
Where packages belong
Insurance-billed care is not packaged. The clinician sets the plan within payer rules, visits bill one at a time, and the patient's share follows the contract. Packages fit self-pay: a performance program, maintenance series after discharge, group class, home-visit block, or an assessment the payer does not cover.
The services and packages guide explains that line; this page builds the self-pay side.
The build order
- Name the buyer and the problem. Not a diagnosis, which is the clinician's business, but the situation: a patient finishing a plan of care who wants to keep going, an adult training for an event, an employer wanting an on-site block. One buyer per package.
- Write the content as sessions. How many, how long, delivered by whom, with what equipment, in which room. Where an assistant or an unlicensed instructor will deliver part of it, the state physical therapy board's answer on scope and supervision comes first; the licensing and compliance guide covers how to get it.
- Place it on the calendar. Which slots, on which days, and whether those slots are empty now or would displace plan-of-care visits. A package that needs the slots referred patients already use is a decision to prefer it over them.
- Set the stopping rules. What happens if the buyer stops after two sessions: refund of the unused part, credit, or forfeit, and within what period. What happens if the practice cannot deliver: a therapist leaves, the room is unavailable. Write both.
- Set the price last, from what the sessions cost to deliver and what the same slots would otherwise collect; the most profitable physical therapy services arithmetic gives the comparison. The price is a consequence of steps one to four, not the reason for them.
- Write the agreement. Content, schedule, stopping rules, what the package does not include, and who to contact. The buyer signs it before paying.
- Write the page. Only after the agreement exists, and only saying what the agreement says.
What the page may and may not say
The FTC advertising guidance for small business asks that claims be truthful, not misleading, and substantiated before they are made. For a package that means:
Package Page Compliance Check
- No outcome promised
- Comparison real and checkable
- Testimonials genuine and consented
- Credentials currently held
- Stopping rules on page
- No replacement of evaluation
- No outcome is promised. "Twelve sessions with a licensed therapist" is a fact. "Twelve sessions to get you back to running" is a promise you cannot substantiate for a person you have not evaluated.
- Any comparison is to something real and checkable.
- Testimonials, if used, are genuine, typical or labeled as not typical, and used with the person's consent. The board's advertising rules may add to this.
- Credentials named are held, currently, by the person who will deliver the sessions.
- The stopping rules are on the page, not only in the agreement.
- Nothing on the page suggests that the package replaces evaluation or treatment a patient may need.
Packages and insured patients
If a patient is in a covered episode, selling them a package alongside raises a contract question. Some payer agreements limit what a provider may charge a member for covered services or services delivered during that episode.
Medicare has its own rules on what may be charged to beneficiaries, and coding and billing material is on the CMS therapy services page. Beneficiary rules are in the payer's own documents.
Read the contract, ask the payer in writing, and ask a compliance adviser to review the answer before the first sale. Where the answer is yes with conditions, the conditions become part of the agreement.
The front desk and the package
A package is sold by whoever answers the phone. The hiring and training guide puts a package script in onboarding.
It covers what the package contains, what it costs, the stopping rules, and the one sentence never said: any version of "this will fix it". If the front desk cannot explain the package in a minute, the package is too complicated.
Records
A prepaid package is money received for sessions not yet delivered. The accountant books it as a liability that falls as sessions are delivered. The IRS guidance on which records to keep expects the business to show income and what produced it.
Keep, per package sold: the signed agreement, the payment, the session log with dates and who delivered each, and any refund. When the buyer asks where they stand, the session log is the answer.
How the package reaches buyers
Most package buyers are people the practice already knows: patients at discharge, past patients, referrers' patients who were not covered for what they wanted. The marketing and growth guide covers the listing and the page. The conversation at discharge is the channel that costs nothing, and it works only if the therapist knows the package exists and believes in it.
Common questions
How many sessions should a package contain?
As many as the content needs and the buyer will plausibly attend. Long packages sell less often and are stopped early more often, which makes the stopping rules the most-used part of the agreement.
Can a package include an evaluation?
The state board decides whether an evaluation is an act of practice that must be done by a licensed therapist, and the payer decides whether it is a covered service that cannot be sold separately to their member. Ask both.
What if a patient wants to convert their package into insured care?
Stop the package, refund or credit the unused part under the stopping rules, and start the covered episode under the payer's rules. Do not blend them.
Should packages be discounted?
A discount is a price decision and belongs at step five. What it must not do is make the per-session collection lower than the slot would collect from a referred patient, unless the slot would otherwise be empty.
