In this episode of the Better Outcomes Show, we take a look at a recent conversation on LinkedIn about the steep decline in occupational therapy (and physical therapy) school applications.

A post by Sarah Lyon raised an important question: Why are fewer students choosing OT, and what does that mean for the future of the profession?

In response, Rafi shared several factors that may be contributing to the decline — and in this episode, he unpacks those ideas in more detail.

What we cover in this episode:
- Why confusion about OT entry-level requirements (Master’s vs. OTD) is discouraging prospective applicants.
- How rising tuition and questionable ROI impact PT/OT’s attractiveness compared to other health professions.
- The role of corporate healthcare and private equity in fueling burnout — and how that shapes the profession’s reputation.
- Why other clinical degrees often carry higher compensation ceilings and broader leadership opportunities.
- What these trends mean for the future — and why this might actually be a unique opportunity for new students entering PT/OT now.

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

Finding the Thread – Humanizing Healthcare Across a Career

Have you ever looked back on your career and tried to connect the dots?
For a long time, I thought my resume looked like a series of “rabbit holes” in healthcare—clinical care, academia, management consulting, strategy work, practice ownership. At the time, each move felt like simply saying “yes” to an opportunity.

But a recent conversation with a prospective client made me pause. They said, “I can see a common thread running through everything you’ve done.”

That led me to reflect on the last 13 years of my career… and I realized they were right.

The thread? Humanizing the healthcare experience.
In this episode, I share the story of discovering that throughline, what it means for me today, and why humanizing healthcare isn’t just a personal mission—it’s a necessity for our industry.

What We Cover in This Episode:
- The winding path of my career: from clinician to consultant to practice owner.
- How a client conversation sparked the realization of a unifying theme.
- Why “healthcare is a human experience” became more than a phrase—it became my mission.
- The risks of reducing patients to checklists, protocols, and data points.
- How technology and operations should be used: to create space for real human connection.
- A framework you can use to find your own “common thread.”

Why It Matters
Healthcare often gets lost in efficiency metrics, compliance checkboxes, and bottom lines. But patients—and clinicians—need meaning, connection, and human presence. By stepping back and asking what ties our careers and choices together, we can refocus on what really drives us and the work we do.

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-160

Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

Healthcare Disrupted: Why the Next Big Innovation Won’t Come From Healthcare

In this episode of the Better Outcomes Show, we dive into a bold prediction about the future of healthcare: The next wave of real innovation — the kind that transforms how we deliver care, engage patients, and improve outcomes — won’t come from within the healthcare industry.

Instead, it will come from outside.

Tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Walmart, and others are entering the healthcare space not to play by the traditional rules, but to rewrite them. They’re not dependent on fee-for-service reimbursement or burdened by legacy EMR infrastructure. They’re consumer-first, data-driven, and laser-focused on convenience and outcomes — not billing codes.

So, what does this mean for providers, practice owners, and healthcare leaders?

It means the time to adapt is now.

What we cover in this episode:
-Why the healthcare industry is structurally incapable of disrupting itself
-How tech giants are positioned to lead the next wave of care innovation
-The business models these companies are using — and how they differ from traditional healthcare
-What small-to-mid-sized providers can do to stay relevant and competitive
-How to rethink your value proposition outside of third-party payer systems
-Where the opportunities lie for independent clinics to innovate at the edges

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-160

Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

Can you use Free Healthcare to build a profitable business?

What if you gave away your clinical services… for free? Not as charity. Not as a one-time promo. But as an actual business model. I recently revisited Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I read it in 2013 and recently picked it back up — and it got me thinking: How could we apply this to healthcare? The cost of delivering digital care (videos, plans, consults) is rapidly approaching (nearly) zero.

That opens the door to radically different care delivery models — ones that lower access barriers and still generate real revenue. So, in this episode, I dive into ways that clinicians could build a profitable business offering free healthcare services.

In a world where trust, access, and attention are more valuable than ever. Offering “free” services could be a strategic move — not a loss. For clinicians willing to rethink their model, there’s real opportunity here. Curious — if you had to give away your clinical services for free,
what would you monetize instead? Shoot me an email if you've got some ideas!

What we cover in this Episode:

-How a Freemium model could work in delivering healthcare services
-The idea of a Cross-Subsidy model for private practice healthcare services
-Membership models, like Direct Primary Care
-Sponsorships or Ad-based Healthcare services
-Data Exchange & Research Recruitment Models

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-159

Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

Real Healthcare Innovators Read Outside of Healthcare

I covered this topic in a LinkedIn article recently, but thought the idea of reading outside of healthcare warranted its own podcast episode. Here's the main idea: if you want to be truly innovative in healthcare, you need to read outside of healthcare. Being well-informed in your field is just the baseline. Everyone should be doing that. What often sets leaders and innovators apart stems from their ability to take insights and ideas from outside their field and apply it to their industry.

You’d be surprised at how often ideas from seemingly unrelated fields can unlock new ways of thinking about your own work. A story about survival in the Alaskan wilderness might teach you more about resilience and process management than the latest leadership manual. A deep dive into the history of jazz might shift your perspective on improvisation and problem-solving in ways that no business podcast could.

The more I read outside the typical business playbooks, the more I’m convinced: if you want to stand out in your field, you sometimes have to look beyond it.

What we cover in this Episode:

-Why reading outside of your industry provides unique insights that can be applied to healthcare
-How reading broadly can help you communicate, lead and innovate in healthcare
-The reason that innovation to the industry will come from outside of healthcare
-A few of the recent books I've read and the insights I pulled from them that applied to healthcare

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-158

Learn More: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com
Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

Healthcare Data Silos Cause Problems Throughout the Healthcare System

If you talk to any healthcare provider, and most patients, about healthcare data sharing, you quickly discover that one of the biggest problems patients and providers face is healthcare data silos. What do I mean by that? Imagine you see your primary care physician. Your PCP determines that you need an evaluation by a specialist. They put in a referral. You go see the specialist like an orthopedic surgeon, and that provider determines you should try a conservative treatment by another sub-specialist, like a physical therapist. Fast forward 2 months, and you follow up with your PCP. The PCP asks you how things have been going, and you say you don't feel any improvement. So, your PCP tells you that they believe you would benefit from a physical therapy course of treatment.

Now you're annoyed. "How did you not know that I've just finished up 8 weeks of PT treatment?" you might be thinking. Here's the problem: your PCP put in the referral for the original specialist, but then had no idea about the PT. Maybe they received some kind of follow-up communication of note from the orthopedic surgeon. But your PCP has no insight into the rest of the course of care.

This is the problem caused by healthcare data silos. So, this week, I sit down with Rick Mirell from Arrow Health to talk about the challenge with healthcare data silos and some new technology-driven tools that aim to solve this problem for the industry.

What we cover in this Episode:

-The importance of open flow of data in healthcare
-The breakdown in communication and data between healthcare systems and providers
-How data can improve clinical outcomes
-The patient experience when healthcare data isn't shared well

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-157

Learn More: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com
Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

Rethinking State Licensure in Healthcare for the 21st Century

State-based licensure for healthcare professionals has been the status quo for over a century. But in an era defined by digital health and telemedicine, is this 19th-century solution still fit for purpose? In this episode, I explore the historical context of state licensure, the modern-day challenges it poses to telehealth, and practical solutions for breaking down regulatory barriers. Drawing insights from my experience as a state licensing board member and recent academic research, we dissect the structural flaws that limit patient access, drive up costs, and stifle innovation in healthcare. Here's the original post on state licensure in healthcare that fueled this episode.

What we cover in this Episode:

-The origins of State-Based Licensure
-How Technology has Changed the Healthcare Regulatory Landscape
-The Real-World Impact of State Licensing in healthcare & the Barriers it places to providing/receiving care
-Possible solutions or alternatives for State-based healthcare licensing
-How value-based care and regulatory policy are intertwined

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-156

Learn More: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com
Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!

This episode of The Better Outcomes Show explores how artificial intelligence (AI) transforms healthcare delivery and decision-making. Drawing from a structured review of 288 peer-reviewed articles published between 1992 and 2021, we break down key themes, trends, and implications for clinicians, health systems, and patients. From diagnostics to health services management, we’ll look at where AI is already making an impact—and where the field still needs to grow.

What we cover in this episode:

-The rapid growth of AI in healthcare research and its emerging significance.
-Five core applications of AI in healthcare: health services management, predictive medicine, patient data handling, diagnostics, and clinical decision-making.
-How AI supports clinicians by improving diagnostic accuracy, predicting disease spread, customizing treatments, and streamlining administrative tasks.
-The leading countries in AI healthcare research and the current state of international collaboration.
-Key trends in AI research, including machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, telemedicine, and COVID-19-related applications.
-Identified gaps in research, such as the need for cost-benefit analyses and considerations for low-resource settings.
-The importance of ethical considerations, data quality, and workforce skill development in AI implementation.
-The necessity of balancing AI support with preserving physicians’ critical thinking to avoid over-reliance or “de-skilling.”

Full episode note: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com/better-outcomes-155

Learn More: https://rehabupracticesolutions.com
Podcast: https://www.betteroutcomes.show
Get the Book: https://amzn.to/3M2UZ6x
Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/rehabu/discovery
Connect with Me: https://www.rafisalazar.com

Resources mentioned:

The role of artificial intelligence in healthcare: a structured literature review (https://bmcmedinformdecismak.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12911-021-01488-9)

If you'd like to learn more about Strata EMR & RCM and achieving a 99.99% reimbursement rate for your PT, OT, or SLP Clinic head over to stratapt.com and book a demo with their team!