CMPT Frequently Asked Questions
Interested in applying the CMPT to your practice or facility but not sure where to start?
Start here!
CMPT Help offers tips, troubleshooting and how-to information on the CMPT publication and its related resources. To use this resource, first click on the category below most closely related to the question or issue you are having, then click on the appropriate question for specific guidance.
I am having difficulty with…
Understanding the Basics (what is the CMPT and how is it useful?)
Applying the CMPT
Data Collection (how much data and how long will this take me?)
Tabulating and Allocating My Staff Resources
The Modified and Generic Core Set Codes
The Client Intervention Rating Scale
The Excel® CMPT Workbook
Still having difficulty applying the CMPT to your practice or facility? Send us an email at pd@legacy.physiotherapy.ca.
Understanding the Basics
What is the CMPT?
The CMPT is a standardized calculation tool that allows clinicians and clinical leaders to better understand their human resource needs and local client intervention patterns. The CMPT provides a practical framework for leaders to identify and correct resource gaps or inefficiencies in an individual practice, department, or facility.
How does the CMPT work?
The CMPT is comprised of a short series of standardized calculations.
- Step 1 allows you to take stock of your available human resources.
- Step 2 enables you to catalogue the complexity and total time needs required for client intervention.
- Step 3 compares the collected data from steps 1 and 2 and provides an evidence-base for optimizing staff and client allocations, or for advocating resource changes.
Which professions are the CMPT useful for?
The CMPT framework is designed for use by physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech language pathology, audiology and other health professions. It can be used to evaluate the resource needs within an individual profession or a combination of these by individuals working in multi-professional programs or settings.
Can the CMPT be applied to other medical or health professions?
While the CMPT provides a model that could be of interest to other professions, the code sets and complexity rating scales outlined in the CMPT publication were developed for specific use by the rehabilitation professions. As a result, the current tool may require modification before being applied to other health professions.
Is the CMPT restricted to particular practice settings?
No. The CMPT can be used to map and manage caseloads in any health and/or social environment, including private clinics, community programs, schools and hospitals. It can be effectively used for calculating the resources of individual clinicians and multi-site facilities.
Why should I use the CMPT?
As a manager or administrator, you can use the CMPT to assist you with human resource and program planning, waitlist management, and caseload benchmarking. The CMPT allows you to relate intervention time to client outcomes, which can serve as a useful indicator of the value and impact of the professional services provided when advocating for resources. It can be equally useful for determining the number of therapists required to manage the client needs of a particular service or for determining the number and complexity of clients that individual therapists or service delivery teams in their charge can effectively manage.
As an individual therapist, you can use the CMPT to critically evaluate how you allocate your time. The CMPT can help you assess whether you are managing your time appropriately, whether you are over-extending yourself, or are potentially able to take on additional clients or projects in the time you have available.
Applying the CMPT
What resources are available to help me use the CMPT?
In addition to the official CMPT publication, CPA is developing several support tools and resources to assist physiotherapists and physiotherapy leaders in applying the CMPT to their practice or facility. The FAQ list you are reading is one such resource. Answers to many common questions can be found here.
CPA has also developed a Microsoft Office based Excel® CMPT Workbook that automates many of the calculations contained in the CMPT. Individuals can use this as a job aid to quickly tabulate existing human resources and needs, develop accurate client profiles, and maximize caseload allocations all within one electronic document.
Other resources, including tutorials and case studies, are currently in development and are scheduled for release shortly.
How do I code for group classes?
You can use the CMPT if you work with individual patients or with groups of patients (eg, group exercise classes). Since the health situation of each individual in the group will be unique, you do not need to indicate specific ICF codes for those situations. However, you will still want to catalogue the group activity in Step 2, noting it as such and assigning it an appropriate intervention complexity rating, and indicating the total length and number of sessions it comprises. This will allow you to ensure that appropriate staff time is able to be allocated to this activity in Step 3.
Data Collection
How long am I supposed to collect data for?
To help ensure that your caseload calculations accurately reflect true local needs, it is recommended that you begin by collecting data in four week increments, quarterly in the first year, in order to establish accurate baseline data. After your baseline is set, you may reduce the size and/or frequency of subsequent monitoring batches. Appropriate batch sizes and sampling frequencies needed for ongoing monitoring will vary based on your local situation, and should take into account factors such as the overall number of clients seen annually and the amount of homogeneity among your various client groups.
I am in charge of a large facility with several therapists. Am I supposed to input every client seen by my therapists?
Enumerating every client will guarantee that your data accurately reflects your local needs. However, this is not often feasible to do on a continuous basis, nor is it required. Taking a statistically-significant sample of your clients can be the next best thing. It is recommended that you begin by collecting data for all clients within your quarterly data collection periods for the first year in order to establish accurate baseline data. After your baseline is set, you may reduce the size and/or frequency of subsequent monitoring batches.
Can I share the client data collection workload with my therapists?
If you are responsible for several therapists, asking them each to assist with coding their own clients and then compiling the results can make good sense. After all, the treating therapist understands their clients best. You may wish to use a shared version of the Excel® CMPT Workbook to allow your therapists to compile their data electronically.
Sharing the task of coding however warrants a word of caution. Since coding and ranking intervention complexity entails some degree of subjectivity and individual critical reasoning, group discussions before and during data collection on how to code common presentations or rankings can help groups to standardize ratings across therapists and increase the overall reliability of your collected data.
I’m very busy and don’t have a lot of time for playing with numbers. How long will the CMPT take me to complete?
Since the number of therapists in your charge will likely not fluctuate greatly from month to month, Step 1 can be fairly quick to calculate. In Step 2, therapists can be empowered to catalogue and submit their own client data to you on the provided electronic Excel® CMPT Workbook. This will allow you to focus on immediate facility needs that call for your attention. Once staff and client data has been tabulated, the CMPT will allow you to efficiently map your resource allocations. This final step can be seen as similar to staff scheduling and may take a comparable amount of time to complete.
Tabulating and Allocating Staff Resources
How do I calculate for different professions working on the same patient?
Since different professions may require different levels of intervention for a patient, it is recommended that separate calculations be prepared for each profession. Patients being treated by therapists in different professions can be cross-referenced and monitored, if necessary, by the unique Client Identifier used upon coding.
How do I account for my rehabilitation assistant staff within the CMPT?
For the purposes of CMPT calculations, rehabilitation assistants can be treated similar to other rehabilitation professionals, and a separate workbook initiated to compile the staffing and client needs data associated with their specific workloads. Patients being treated by both therapists and rehabilitation assistants can be cross-referenced between workbooks and monitored, if necessary, by the unique Client Identifier used upon coding.
How do I know if my staff resources are allocated appropriately?
Individuals and facilities should aim for differences approaching zero in Step 3, once all staff allocations have been assigned. Remainders approaching zero indicate that existing resources are appropriate to meet existing client needs. However, higher positive or negative time remainders suggest a discrepancy between the available staff resources and client needs. For example, a remainder of -40 could indicate a need for one additional staff at .25FTE. Similarly, a remainder of +40 could indicate a surplus of 40 hours per month of staff time that could be used to take on additional clients or projects.
I have allocated my staff appropriately, but my calculations in Step 3 still do not sum exactly to zero. Have I done something wrong?
Not necessarily. Since Step 3 of the CMPT asks you to consider the average intervention time for all clients at a given complexity level, it is not uncommon to have a small remainder once staff resources have been allocated. Remainders of ±5 at this step should be considered negligible and will tend to eliminate themselves in actual practice as a result of small variations in individual client treatment time requirements.
The Modified and Generic Core Set Codes
What are these codes? They look complicated to learn.
The CMPT client codes describe the health status of clients, taking into account their body functions and structures, activities and participation, and any environmental factors relevant to their situation. Although these codes are based on the standardized coding system of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), the CMPT codes provide therapists and leaders with a simplified, easy to use set of client descriptors that they can use when monitoring their human resources.
The code sets are not intended to be memorized. However, it is anticipated that shortly after beginning to use these codes in practice, individuals will begin to recognize the more commonly repeated codes that are relevant to their local client population. Reference lists of the Modified Generic Core Set codes for body functions, activities and participation can be found on page 34 of the CMPT publication. As well, printable versions of the Generic Core Set codes for body structures, body functions, activities and participation, and environmental factors have been included on the Reference Charts tab of the Excel® CMPT Workbook, for users’ convenience.
Why are there different codes for adults and children?
The child/youth-specific codes included in the CMPT help to account for the differences in impact that a given health condition may have on a younger person as compared to an adult. The additional codes also allow the therapist to more accurately classify the various activities, capabilities and other developmental factors that are more specifically relevant to younger clients, such as adaptability and the area of play.
If you work with a predominantly paediatric population, you may wish to incorporate the full set of children and youth codes provided by WHO in the ICF-CY into your client codings. These codes are available for purchase or online viewing through WHO’s ICF website.
What if the code I need to describe a patient’s presentation is not included in the provided lists?
Depending on your area of practice, you may find you need codes that are not included in the publication – and that is ok. A full list of codes can be downloaded from the World Health Organization (WHO) website (PDF). As well, the full ICF Generic Core Set has been included in the Excel® CMPT Workbook for users’ convenience.
Where do I find the body structure and environmental codes needed to classify my patients?
A full list of codes, including those for body structures and environmental factors can be found on the World Health Organization (WHO) website (PDF). As well, the full ICF Generic Core Set has been included in the Excel® CMPT Workbook for users’ convenience.
How do I know what the “right” intervention codes are for my patient?
Coding patients can be somewhat of a subjective exercise. What is most important is that all clients treated within your department or facility are being coded similarly. In addition, scheduling regular in-services for your therapists to discuss coding as a group and compare the codes used for individual clients can facilitate consistency and minimize significant variances across therapists in your facility.
My facility has a standard set of codes we use for client profiles – why should we use these ones?
CPA recommends that you use the codes provided in the CMPT publication when classifying clients. Using these standardized code sets will facilitate comparison of clients with similar diagnoses, and their intervention and human resource requirements both within and across programs, facilities or health regions. By providing an external standard for human resources planning and projection, this information can be employed for benchmarking and advocacy efforts.
The Client Intervention Rating Scale
How do I know what a patient at a particular Intervention Complexity Rating looks like?
The Intervention Complexity Rating scale presented on page 13 of the CMPT publication presents general guidelines for rating clients based on the complexity of the interventions they require.
Although there is some subjectivity in determining whether a specific combination of treatment techniques or number of sessions equates to a particular complexity rating, what is important is that all clients within the department or facility are rated similarly by the various professionals using the CMPT.
Scheduling regular in-services for the therapists in your facility who are using the CMPT to discuss the scale together can help develop consistency in client ratings both within and across professions. Factors you may want to address in such discussions include: the length and number of sessions needed, the time period over which services are to be delivered, the variety of treatment techniques involved, the number of other therapists involved in treating the client, and the extent of need for continuing communication with other care providers.
The Excel® CMPT Workbook
What formats is the workbook available in?
The Excel® CMPT Workbook is available for use on PC computers with Microsoft Office Excel 2007/2010 installed. The workbook has not yet been tested for use on Mac computers running compatible versions of Excel.
Will the workbook be made available in other formats?
No additional software formats of the workbook are planned for development at this time.
My therapist or client numbers exceed the space available in the workbook. What do I do?
Currently, the Excel® CMPT Workbook is capable of calculating situations of up to 50 therapists and/or 500 clients at a time. For situations that require you to input data beyond these limits, it is recommended that you spread the additional data over two or more versions of the electronic workbook, and subsequently compile the composite averages or sums manually in order to complete Step 3.
How do I make the workbook available to my therapists to input their client details themselves?
Many facilities have a centralized server or common drive for housing shared documents. Uploading a copy of the Excel® CMPT Workbook and granting read/write permissions to all eligible therapists and administrative staff can allow each member of the team to share in the data collection stages of the caseload management project. If your facility does not have a common server for staff use, check with your system administrator or facility leader for potential alternatives that may be available to you.