physical therapist

physical therapist assistant

operations associate

screener

personal trainer

Ati-Physical-Therapy

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat.  YES, I have become a disgruntled employee--but I wasn't always. I've been doing this over twenty years and have always been in love with my job.  That was until ATI bought my old company out.  I have to believe all these glowing comments and reviews are from people who are in or near the Chicago area, where the company started, and have been there since it was small, grounded, and had a handle on what it was doing.

Unfortunately, the company is buying up everything it can get it's hands on, and becoming too big, too fast.  They're trying to manage every region like it's Chicago, and it's NOT.  They don't understand, and refuse to try to understand, that in more rural areas, there are constant, seasonal, and very predictable fluctuations in patient numbers.  Always.  Every single year.  So when summer comes and the patient load takes a dive, they start screaming about numbers and laying off staff.  The earlier comment from "Sinking Ship" wasn't an exaggeration...there truly are daily phone calls and emails demanding to know why numbers drop, and where are our referrals--as if we clinicians (who, by the way, are earning their money for them) have any control over who gets injured and when.

Administratively the company is extremely top-heavy, and there's a huge layer of middle-management who, while being completely unnecessary and who are getting paid a lot of money to essentially do nothing, have to do something to keep their jobs, so they're the ones constantly hounding about the numbers, making all of their clinical directors and staff absolutely miserable in their jobs.  They're paying all these people loads of money, remodeling all the new clinics to meet the ATI 'look'  (which nobody but them cares about), replacing perfectly good equipment with brand-new equipment with the ATI logo on it....and all the while, cutting hours, cutting staff, cutting pay, and making people miserable.

The worst part?  Patient care.  The company will drone on and on and on about it's Mission Statement, but by being so greedy and micro-managing so horribly, they make it very, very difficult for the clinician to provide truly good patient care.  And the patients KNOW it.  I can't tell you how many negative comments we've heard in the last few months, and patients are leaving.  Even with the predictable cycles, my own clinic has not picked up since school started back up again, like is has every year until this one.  Why should it?  There's a wonderful clinic two miles up the road that has all the bells and whistles (like us), a great staff (like us), and is a privately-owned 10-location outfit where the owners are totally in touch with what's going on in their clinics.  Their clinics are adequately staffed by happy people content in their jobs and happy with their company.  Oh, I could go on and on...

This company needs to take a lesson from Novacare.  15 years ago, Novacare was also buying up everything they could across the country, including the company I worked for at that time.  They made all the same mistakes that ATI is making...micro-managing, cutting staff, cutting salaries, creating miserable employees and unhappy patients..  And guess what?  They tanked.  Patient care was a joke.  Company stock took a huuuuuge nosedive.  And they had to start closing clinics because as PTs and PTAs left, so did the patients.  Neither company seems to understand that patients aren't coming to "Novacare" or "ATI"... they're coming to Mike, or Sue, or whoever's treating them.  They don't care what the brand name is.  It all starts with creating and maintaining the relationship between patient and clinician, but they make it sooo hard to that.  

Bottom line is....well, the bottom line.  Basically, they put on a good show of it all being about the patient, when the truth is, it's all about the numbers and the cash flow.  It's sad, because they really do have the makings of a great company, but they've completely lost touch with how to make that happen and instead, things are on a rapid . decline in the other direction.  I know dozens of people in many other newer ATI clinics.  Know how many are actually happy?  ONE.  The rest of us are all looking for other opportunities.  Frankly, I'm ready to get out of physical therapy altogether.

What is the best part of working at the company?
Depending on the location and provider you are working for, the best thing I've encountered is their flexibility with workers' schedules [especially with school for PT, OT and PTA]. Most clinicians In-Office are pretty understanding, as is most of Home-Office.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
As a CPT, the most stressful part of the work is dealing with corporations' capitalistic desire to increase patient count and increase Gross Revenue for their shareholders [not uncommon for many companies in US.]. Seeing daily patient quotes for high costs and horrific waiting periods for appointments. This is coupled with clinicians' and staff's medical knowledge that some patients need more personal care while in the clinic. 
There is also no standardized terminology for various exercise movements, despite management reinforcing the importance of exact application; this can greatly complicate your work performance, though there is little to no training to mitigate this issue. 

Home-Office and HR are also not the most available, and multiple associates have made complaints about company promises [insentive pay etc.] that the company has failed to uphold.

I've also encountered associates who have been working with the company for multiple years AND have anything from an Associate Degree to a Bachelor Degree who are, not only working without compensation for these degrees but have been told by management outright, "Well, it's a matter of when you were hired". 
I've also observed multiple issues with following safety guidelines, sanitization, Fire and AED safety etc. For a time I thought about going above and beyond for the company to help fix these issues, but after being spoken about, "Not doing my job, and instead goofing around" because instead of sitting around doing nothing like many of the other Opp. Support Specialists and PTs, I enjoy being active and productive. However, washing the walls of their disgusting foot and hand marks is apparently 'not' part of our job title. *sarcasm*

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Again, depending on the location you work at and the clinician you are working for, the environment can be positive. That being said, don't be fooled by the 'Hyper Positivity' marketing, there are some harsh realities to face.

The website and Home Office make regular announcements and advertisements for "Inclusivity" and "Diversity", but this is just as much Spoon-fed fluff as any other company in my 20-year experience. We recently had Gay Pride Month and Juneteenth. The only thing I saw was an email asking people, "Share their story" and that was it....We really shouldn't be surprised that corps only show support and care to the extent that they don't have to commit to a divisive statement on HOW MUCH they recognize and support these communities. 

In conclusion, it's like many clinics and companies, they talk a nice game, but they seldom deliver.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Honestly, this is the better part of the review. An average day is pretty simple for OSS. Clock in, check in patients, take co-pays or co-insurance, work with AMT and CIV team on new patients and other tasks. Cleaning and laundry are pretty simple as are the ice and heat treatments. The job is easy enough, but because MA laws allow for you to be more involved with helping patients workout, it can be a little whelming. Make occasional modifications to workouts, run insurance, take demographics etc. All in all, days are pretty low stress.

I started working for ATI thinking it was a good place to develop good skills for my career along with moving up within the company. This stayed true until I stopped playing "the game" with management which pretty much means sucking up to upper management even though I knew they just gossiped about other people in other clinics and take credit for the hard work that their employees did. However, people that were buddy buddy with managers could pretty much do whatever they wanted and leave the other people at the clinic picking up the slack for them so patient care wasn't compromised.

When working for ATI, don't expect to have much of a life outside of work no matter what your position is. Expect to work until 7:00-7:30 every night and be at work early the next day, get no overtime, and have to jump through hoops to get PTO approved that you have earned and accumulated. The ridiculous policies that this company lives by will also be their downfall. The policies make it hard on clinicians and other clinic members to maintain quality patient care as well as enjoying the job and having personal time for yourself outside of work. 

All upper management cares about is their stats so they can show them off at regional meetings in order to get a chance to move up the company ladder. There were numerous times when I was asked to do something outside of my job description in order to "help" other staff members when they fell behind because they were on their personal phones all day the previous day. After completion of said tasks, you are expected to continue to do these tasks without any additional compensation for the added responsibilities, but when you stop doing the tasks or ask for a raise for doing additional tasks you are silently taken further out of the loop. Upper management tries to avoid confrontation in order to prevent  documented complaints so it doesn't look bad on them. They throw the hand book at every complaint you have in their defense but if you find something that is not a policy, they do not have a leg to stand on for their reasoning. 

When someone resigns from their job, the company does not actively search for a replacement in a timely matter. This creates more work for the employees still at the clinic, once again without compensation for the additional workload. 

Patients are welcome to come and go whenever they please and are not held to their appointment time. In my opinion, that encourages patients to come an hour early or late and expect to be seen even when the clinician is already triple booked to meet the quota of patients for the day. This leads to poor patient care because the clinician is to busy for personalized care. Patients understandably get frustrated from the care but ATI does everything they can to convince the patient to stay.

Overall, ATI is not the best company to work for, and not the best for patients because the patient is not the main focus (the numbers are their main priority even if it puts clinicians in a tight bind). The leadership is not there to hold every employee by the same code of conduct and communication even within the clinic is extremely subpar. They have gotten too big too fast, and patient care is going to be the thing that suffers. Once patient care goes down because of under appreciated employees, the company will go down with it.

This company has great vision and passion.  It is clear that management believes they are the best physical therapy company in the country.  The company is growing and there are many opportunities for therapists, new grads, and athletic trainers.  This company has  excellent CEU reimbursement, the best I have seen.  As an experienced clinician, my pay is very good but only because my company was acquired by ATI in 2011 and my salary carried over.  The bonus structure for clinical directors is good but they purposely raise it to make it more difficult to meet budget.  

As a clinical director working long hours is a must in the physical therapy profession in general.  However, at this company it has gotten ridiculous.  They expect way too much.  You have to see a full patient load, manage the day to day, attend meetings and market to MDs.  They have secret shoppers which can be a good idea.  However, I got docked points for turning down a secret shopper for 6:30 AM appointments when I offered a 7:00!!

Management is a little top heavy.  There are too many regional managers and senior regional managers. My regional manager is constantly on my case about things that do not matter.  I treat my clinic like it is my own but do not get recognized for it.

This company preaches manual therapy/1;1 care.  This has become impossible especially as a clinic director in this company.  Productivity keeps increasing and the clinic budget keeps increasing making more difficult to obtain a bonus.  Profit and loss sheets are kept from the clinic director and from what I have been told, the regional director as well. 

The quality of care provided by the therapists is the worst I have seen in my career.  There is absolutely no mentoring for new grads.  They are thrown into clinics without the skills to treat patients.  Most therapists do not perform manual therapy and treatment can be very generic.  I do not even feel comfortable letting my patients attend other ATIs that are close to my clinic. 

Therapists that are not ready to be managers are being put into clinic director roles and they are not doing a great job.  They also do not get a salary increase, just the very difficult opportunity to bonus.

The cut front office coordinators and don't train them well.  They no nothing about insurance and cannot answer patient's questions.  When they leave at 3:30 or 4:00, the therapists are expected to deal with the phone and new patient intakes. 

This company just became the official provider for the Chicago Cubs.  How much did this cost? 

There is passion at the upper management level but not so much at the regional level.  The regional managers I am associated with do not care about patient care (some of the regional managers are great) It is becoming increasingly more difficult to provide patients with the best care.  

Increasing productivity, increasing clinic director budget, cutting front desk coordinators, pulling therapists in and out of clinics continues to happen and has got worse in 2014 and 2015.

Do not let the job descriptions fool you. This was once an awesome company to work for. Work had a community culture where I didn’t mind staying late, working off the clock, and essentially going above and beyond because this company & this team was so amazing!
After the pandemic with a new CEO things have turned downhill fast. I stuck it out for another year hoping for the best, but things have only gotten worse. Here’s what it looks like now:
As a PTA you expected to see an average of 13 patients/day. However, this is usually on the lower side of things. An average would look like 17/day, a super slow day would be 9. You are expected to be well versed in all front office tasks as those are handled at the clinic level, while you are treating patients. This includes answering the phones, scheduling and rescheduling appointments, verifying insurance benefits, submitting insurance forms for authorization, all types of workers compensation paperwork, laundry, cleaning (which now includes wiping absolutely every contacted surface), taking co-pays, handling billing disputes, and all this while treating multiple patients at the same time. Usually there is at least one support staff (tech) in each clinic, some of the busier clinics have 2, but that 1 person is supposed to help out at least 2 clinicians (up to 4) at a time. It’s simply not enough hands or focus on patient care.
I will say that the pay is not terrible and the benefits are good. If you listen to the rules and play the numbers game there’s the ability to bonus financially to a pretty decent amount - hundreds of dollars per month. But you have to sacrifice patient care and your work community to get there. It becomes very cookie cutter, with multiple patients having the exact same treatment plans with notes that could almost be copy-pasted. You also have to demand for those around you to help you because you are over-booked. Management is constantly pushing to get evaluations scheduled sooner and patients that cancelled rescheduled. They have strict rules on PTO, 45-day submissions must be made, you cannot take a full week off in the second part of the year, no two week vacations period, you cannot take an entire week off during a paid holiday week, and it’s a first come first serve basis, no more than 1 clinical staff can have off on the same day.

 The work day was not structured at one of their locations in Kirkland (Totem Lake). With their work place culture, work time was more focused  on winning a gold belt than educating me on the therapeutic modalities or what services they provided at their clinic. This made it difficult to adapt well with patients and the secret shoppers that called the clinic. The staff that I was supposed to be learning from were more obsessed  with watching Disney channel movies on the flat screen T.V in the clinic. My training session the first month consisted on pressuring me to convince patients when they first walked in to donate to their companies charity by paying the staff to do exercises for them. While doing so, they would talk about graphic shows in front of patients. The rest of the time the current senior staff would be playing jokes on one another. There were times I questioned whether I was working with licensed accredited clinicians.

With a typical day at work, the worst of it was being put with patients who have no respect for you because many patients want to see a licensed physical therapist. You are either disrespected for not being a medical professional, and contradicted in your instruction by patients who believe they don't have to listen to you because you hold a title of a aide. This is especially worse if you have to monitor three patients at a time who want individual time with a licensed physical therapist. This was definitely difficult with scheduling patients who were equally rude to you over the phone as well. The scheduling system was restricting you from scheduling patients at hours that they requested because the physical therapist did not want consecutive patients because of paper work. And you are told to get new patients in within 24 hours even though you could be booked out a solid week and when you don't you have to write out why or else you will be seen as a uncaring individual and written up because of it. 

There was no enjoyable moments of the job. I left the position shortly after. 

I have enjoyed my time working as a rehab technician because I have created great relationships with patients and I have gained a lot of experience for physical therapy school, and eventually working as a physical therapist. My experience as a tech has solidified that this is the field I want to have a career in.

At my location (which is not the location listed above for privacy matters), I feel very micro-managed. I will look over and see one of the therapists staring me down rather than focusing on the patient they are working with, and while I am biased towards my own performance, I can assure that I have great experiences with the patients that I work with. I understand that if an incident were to occur that they would be held responsible, but I have been properly trained and it doesn't make sense that I am under constant scrutiny when I have never had a major issue in my year working here. Experiences will vary from location to location, but as a whole, rehab techs are on the bottom of the totem pole and the only benefit for them as seen by the company is the experience given for grad school.

As far as ATI as a whole, I see how much they are just wanting to make money and not caring for the patient population (probably because the upper management aren't even or ever were physical therapists). They only care about seeing the numbers rather than taking in circumstances of why the numbers aren't where they want them to be. The pay is also terrible (typically minimum wage), considering techs will often work more with the patient than the therapist does. The benefits are not great either. I have my own health insurance and used to be compensated for that in my paycheck (medical opt-out), but this year that was taken away and I'm pretty positive that most companies are required to compensate their employees if they decide to opt-out of their benefits. What would be the point of working full-time if that weren't the case? Perhaps instead of focusing on opening so many clinics throughout the country, they can pay their employees better?

I'm thankful for this opportunity to work with patients, but I do not intend on working for a corporate company in the future.

The interview was extremely misleading. I was told I'd be doing certain day to day tasks, but when I arrived, I learned those tasks would double. I received little to no training. They would not discuss pay until the day I received my contract to work. It's much lower than it should be. They want someone with lots of experience and with a degree but want to pay you only slightly over minimum wage.

I had a conversation about a raise with HR, during the conversation I was told I would not receive any kind/amount of raise and if I am not happy with that, I should consider finding a new job. The only reason I asked is because I learned a newly hired employee with less experience and no degree was making quite a bit more than I was, even though ATI stated they could not afford to pay me more. 

Corporate does not care about their employees whatsoever. The PTA's are beyond busy every single day. They will have up to 4 patients at a time. The PT's have to schedule patients every 30 minutes and could also end up having 3-4 patients at the same time. Sometimes this would go on for their entire 12 hour shift. Throughout my experience with ATI, it was clear they truly only cared about one thing, making money. They try much harder to build more clinics than make sure their employees are in a decent environment. They placed the weight of the patient experience on the clinicians, which is uncalled for. 

The only thing that made this job halfway enjoyable to me was the relationship I build with my clinic staff and the patients. They were all amazing people and would help you forget the rest of the things going on, i.e. being overworked and underappreciated. 

With all this being said, I do not think this is the worst physical therapy clinic you could work for but it is certainly not the best. HR and corporate need to be more open and honest about the position and what you will be expected to do. I was basically a receptionist and rehab tech combined but only received compensation for one role. If I would've been told up front what to expect, I probably would not have taken the job. 

This is not for this location. I was a traveler for a location in the surrounding area. 

I'll start with the pros: *staff/colleagues were great
*probably one of the easiest, user friendly EMR's I've used which makes documenting pretty easy and quick (so that day with 7 evals... yea a breeze ;) yes, some sarcasm there but not horrendous)
*there's pretty much a location in every neighborhood it seems so there's always a job if you want it

Cons:
*Because there's a location everywhere, it feels like they get stretched thin. Sucks if someone calls out sick or is out for an extended time like vacation, there may be help 1 or 2 days.
*Factory mill vibes . Evenings can get hectic where sometimes you're juggling upwards of 4-5 per hour as your doubled on the half hours and sometimes gotta squeeze in that 3rd person.  Or you'll have an eval and a f/u at the next 30 minute slot. They usually will have a "tech/aide" that also doubles as the front desk person. If you have a good one, it's clutch, if you don't well then, maybe someone will cancel or NC/NS because otherwise you're "managing" all of that. 
*They'll justify the ridiculous evening/post work schedule of doubles and triples every half hour by showing you the "lighter" middle portion of the day, if you're not Medicare pt heavy at that time (bc that's when they like to come)
*Productivity. Your manager will remind you pretty much daily about it.  Oh and to also schedule pt's 3x/week even if not appropriate, but I held my ground. I'm not going to if they're not appropriate. Perk of being a traveler.  
*There's weekly staff meetings. Again to go over productivity and review almost all of the case load. But luckily this meeting time was set during normal "patient care hours" so there's that.  I hadn't had this in OP, so can either be a pro or con for you. 

I recently heard from a colleague that's still employed with ATI that they switched over to a central phone answering service. So yayyy no control over your schedule! Unsure if it covers all of MD or just particular areas/locations.




Company has only given the employees raises of 1 - 2 % over last 3 years.  Company claims funds not available to be giving raises, yet in each of it's clinics they have TV's advertising that they either bought out other companies or opened up new clinics each and every week.  Their priority seems to be on growth and expansion and not taking a break occasionally to reward it's employees who to me are the hardest working, knowledg  eable, and caring employees I have worked with.  The clinicians and techs make the physical therapy for patients a caring and fun experience when possible.  My job was fabulous, I had worked up great relationships with my co-workers and with the patients that I transported to and from their homes and the clinics.  In three years I may have only had one patient that was not pleasant.  Hardest part of the job was keeping up with the schedules due to time run overs in therapy, traffic situations and patients readiness (sometimes due to their disability) at time of arriving to pick them up.  I enjoyed my patient riders conversations and just getting to know a lot of great and wonderful people.  Upper management was out of Chicago area and did not seem to listen much to the workers in MD.  Local management doesn't manage as they should and seems to pass some of their responsibilities to others.  I couldn't even get my supervisor to talk about my reviews and they weren't even giving raises.  I wrote emails to the Presidant and the CEO of the company about unhappiness of employees and raises but never got answers or back or anything.  They just don't care and think that if they can buy everyone out then the employees will have nowhere else to go in their field.  I finally had the area supervisor approach me over the phone about contacting the President and he infuriated me enough to quit on the spot.  If you expect to get a job with rewards for your work forget this place.  I feel badly for all the great workers in the clinics.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Physical therapist 27 salaries reported	$93,296 per year
Physical therapist assistant 22 salaries reported	$29.89 per hour
Operations associate 6 salaries reported	$15.42 per hour
Screener 7 salaries reported	$53.78 per hour
Personal trainer 4 salaries reported	$24.38 per hour

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