Guest Blog: Why Practice Owners Need to Step Into Advocacy

By Dr. Josh Funk, PT, DPT

For a long time, I cared deeply about the future of physical therapy without doing enough to influence it.

Like many practice owners, I was focused on building a business, developing leaders, serving patients, and navigating the growing complexity of healthcare. Advocacy mattered to me in theory. In practice, it often felt like something happening somewhere else, handled by someone else.

Over time, that mindset became harder to justify.

Rehab 2 Perform has grown into a major player in our region just outside Washington, DC, where so much healthcare policy is shaped. As our influence has grown, so has my conviction that successful practices cannot afford to stay on the sidelines. If we are willing to build organizations, lead teams, and shape patient experiences at scale, we should also be willing to help move the profession forward.

Why this has become harder to ignore

What has sharpened this for me is not one dramatic moment. It has been a compounding realization over the years. As our practice has grown, I have watched our influence increase while the profession still struggles to fully express its potential in the broader healthcare landscape.

We see the limits in patient access. We see them in reimbursement pressure. We see them in the burden created by insurance payers that insert too many middlemen and too much administrative friction into care. We see them in complexity that should not exist, and that becomes a barrier for patients and providers alike.

From my vantage point as an operator, one of the clearest signs that the system is off track is how much back-office infrastructure it takes to run a healthcare business. We need too many people doing work that should not be necessary in the first place. Healthcare should be simpler. And if it were simpler, it would not cost so much.

Why advocacy matters for practice owners

That is why I have become more convinced that advocacy is not a side interest for owners. It is part of leadership.

It is easy to talk privately about the frustrations in our system. It is harder, and more important, to join efforts that can actually influence policy. For practices like ours, advocacy creates a way to turn individual frustration into organized influence. It gives operators a seat at the table where the future of access, reimbursement, and care delivery is being shaped.

That is what makes organizations like APTQI so important. They create a channel for community-based therapy practices to speak with a stronger collective voice around the issues that affect our patients, our teams, and the sustainability of high-quality care.

A message to owners who have not stepped up yet

I still consider myself to be growing in this area. I am not writing from the perspective of someone who has mastered advocacy. I am writing as a practice leader who has become increasingly convinced that if our profession is going to move forward, more owners need to engage.

If you care about patient access, advocacy matters. If you care about reimbursement and the viability of your practice, advocacy matters. If you care about reducing unnecessary burden so clinicians can spend more time delivering care and less time navigating bureaucracy, advocacy matters.

Too many of us have built meaningful businesses while leaving the work of shaping the profession to someone else. That is no longer a position I am comfortable with, and I do not think other owners should be either. Success and scale come with responsibility.

The call to action

My encouragement to other practice owners is simple: get involved.

If APTQI is active in your orbit, support its efforts. If not, get involved through your state APTA chapter or another credible advocacy channel. Do not assume someone else will carry the profession forward for you.

Practice owners have influence. We should use it not only to build successful companies, but also to help create a healthcare environment that is simpler, stronger, and better for the patients we serve.