Keep moving with The Physio Joint
17th June, 2015
Life in the medical industry isn’t easy. There are hard days, long hours and tragic stories.
But for Damien Cummins, practice partner at his Newcastle business The Physio Joint, the days are mostly filled with good news. In fact, he says his team performs “a miracle a month”.
“There’s dramatic times when people come in with significant pain that they’ve had for long periods of time and functional losses associated with it, and we’ll apply forces and movements and teach them how to improve their movement and find that they can leave with significantly less pain in one or two treatments.”
“It’s quite dramatic actually what we see. That’s empowering.”
Cummins started the company with a business partner and a specialised focus – backs, necks and headache pain. With a decade of experience and five practicing physios, they’re a busy lot. As Cummins says, they should be – the physio industry has experienced a “revolution” in the past 20 years.
“Movement can change pain and function, and physio is the epitome of movement. We know how to make tissue move, and we can empower people to move better.”
Cummins says the company’s work is broad, helping people such as “seniors in nursing homes” to “kids in schools”.
But changing lives requires some support, too. For that, Cummins has the company’s practice manager, Nicole Smith. Just as Cummins says the physio industry has evolved in terms of treatment, so too has the technology required to keep that business going.
“Technology is important to us as a business, innovation is important to us. We’re always looking for different programs and opportunities that can help us streamline our clinical and our administration functions.”
Having access to the latest technology to run the business is imperative. Part of that meant upgrading the company’s accounts to the cloud.
“Using MYOB AccountRight online has given Nicole freedom to be able to work from home, and it’s also giving her freedom to work with someone else who’s in another location from home or wherever they are,” says Cummins.
“It’s an efficient use of time. We’ve all got kids, we’ve all got challenges outside of work, and MYOB allows us to be able to freely move where we need to be.”
Additionally, the flexibility in being able to use her accounts both online and offline has opened Smith to working in new ways. I’m not always in an area that has fantastically fast internet reception,” she says. “It’s extremely easy to pull it out.”
“We have an accountant who we work with quite closely on the management of the business. They really appreciate the cloud based function. If there’s an issue that we need them to clarify, they can just log on.”
Smith says she actually feels even more secure knowing her accounts are in the cloud.
Using technology to solve problems has changed Smith’s workflow, allowing her to reprioritise her time. Instead of spending multiple hours a month organizing different super payments into multiple accounts, she uses MYOB’s Pay Super to do all the work for her.
“I love Pay Super more than life itself,” she says.
“It took me a good half a day to do super once a month. Pay Super, I literally open it, tick the ones I want and press ‘process’. It goes into my bank account, it pulls the money out, it sends the remittance off to all of the super funds. It can’t get any better.”
Paying for 12 months’ support means Smith has access to everything she needs. “I’m getting the cloud based program, I’m getting the Pay Super function, I’m getting the bank feeds function. So I’m not giving out bank account details – it’s all in MYOB and it’s all still secure.”
The last 20 years have been good to the physio industry, and the last 10 to The Physio Joint. With some help from new tech and better ways of doing business, the next 10 can be even better.
“MYOB has been really great for us – an actual product that’s improving the functionality of the business,” says Cummins.