40 Years Of Practice Has Taught Her A Lot

Ann has more years of experience under her belt than most massage therapists ever dream of attaining. She started young, at just 19 years old, during a time when many people didn’t know what massage therapy was. It wasn’t a new concept to Ann, though. She’d been dancing since she was 4, and she exercised Thoroughbred racehorses for a living. As an athlete, she understood the benefits of massage therapy and wanted to share it.

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It was just a part-time gig in the early days of her massage career. Her main job was exercising racehorses, and she traveled worldwide to do that: California, France, and Belmont, NY. For 15 years, wherever Ann happened to be living and working with racehorses, she also did massage.

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Then she met her husband, a Thoroughbred racehorse breeder from Kentucky, and her life changed. She moved to Lexington, KY. Then in 1994, she took her first full-time job as a massage therapist. Kentucky was a very different place from where she grew up in California.

“When I got to Kentucky, no one knew what massage therapy was. They thought I worked at an Asian health spa.” 

Ann worked in a physical therapy clinic, as well as a day spa for a little while. Then, she met a therapist who was planning to open a massage school, but before building the school, they opened a massage clinic. That’s when Ann went into clinical practice, and her career flourished from there. She worked with the University of Kentucky men’s basketball and co-ed track teams for 11 years and eventually became an educator.

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She’s Shaping The Future Of Massage Therapy

Ann is more than your average massage therapist; she’s a mentor, a teacher, and an advocate for the massage therapy industry. Ann teaches kinesiology and ethics at the Lexington Healing Arts Academy. She’s the Government Relations chairperson for the Kentucky AMTA, and she also runs a thriving massage practice with 3 therapists working with her.

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She’s spent most of her life honing her craft and advancing her skills. Ann specializes in manual lymphatic drainage and works with post-op clients after cosmetic surgeries and reconstructive, such as mastectomies, abdominoplasty/tummy tuck and liposuction. She has a rare skill set that’s taken many years to develop, including training in visceral and neural manipulation. Her schedule is packed with clients she’s known for years; so there aren’t many openings for anyone else.

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Her goal is to have a few massage therapists in her practice with training in similar modalities. That’s important so she can refer her overflow of clients to someone in-house. Currently, she has three very skilled massage therapists working with her, with multiple credentials, including: massage therapy, PT assistant, and manual lymph drainage.

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It’s clear that Ann’s practice is a healthcare practice. Her work as a therapist and educator, as well as her participation in the AMTA is advancing the standards of the massage therapy industry. Most massage therapists want to be recognized as healthcare providers. Ann’s active role in the AMTA, at a state and national level, is encouraging that agenda, thus shaping the future for the next generation of massage therapists.

ClinicSense Works Great For Ann’s Practice

Ann has a lot of advice for massage therapists starting out in the business. Her first piece of advice is to have a website where clients can book online. This can streamline your operations, and it’s what she’s putting in place to promote the therapists in her own practice.

Next piece of advice: Keep your paperwork organized. ClinicSense can do this for you. As a healthcare provider, SOAP notes are essential to Ann’s practice. ClinicSense has a variety of SOAP notes that are fully customizable; so they work for every scenario and every practitioner. That was the biggest draw for Ann when she was choosing a booking software.

“The reason I liked ClinicSense in the beginning was because of the SOAP notes, and feature. A lot of the other programs didn’t have SOAP Notes that are formatted like ClinicSense”

Ann stresses the need for setting boundaries and having clearly stated policies. Making sure your clients understand the rules of engagement from the beginning is so important. ClinicSense makes communicating those policies to first-time clients easy with customizable consent forms.

Often, new therapists have policies but don’t have a good way to enforce them. In Ann’s practice, if a client cancels less than 24 hours in advance, they’re charged for the full rate of the service. With exceptions made for illness and emergencies, ClinicSense has helped eliminate no-shows in her practice through appointment reminders (which give clients plenty of time to cancel). Plus, the No-Show guard gives her away to enforce her cancellation policy, if need be.

There are a lot of software options available to massage therapists, and Ann has tried more than one. ClinicSense has everything she needs.

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