C-Level Magazine spoke with Ken Ginkel, founder and CEO of The National Dizziness and Balance Center about how a specialty center is helping employers and employees get back to work quicker. Here is our conversation.
CLM: Ken, how are you helping companies get employees back to work quicker and safer following a work-related injury?
Ginkel: At National Dizzy & Balance Center, we work with many types of companies who need their employees to return to work ASAP and want a highly structured and safe Return to Work Program for their employees. Our program is different than many other specialty centers, as we combine physicians, audiologists, and physical therapists all within each of our clinics to offer a true multidisciplinary evaluation and treatment approach to adult concussions/mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), dizziness/vertigo and general balance problems.
Our clinics also offer the unique advantage over most other clinics in the Twin Cities area, in that we have very advanced diagnostic balance testing labs in each facility, to ensure our patients are diagnosed correctly. This enables our team to create a very specific and individualized rehabilitation program for each patient, which establishes a starting point for the patient’s rehabilitation program and enables us to re-test the patient after a month to see how they are progressing. This gives us immediate feedback on the overall effectiveness of a patient’s individualized therapy program and helps us to fine tune each patient’s program to maximize results and gets patients better faster, with better outcomes, and ensures a safer return to work duties when they are ready.
CLM: How are your results typically different than other medical specialists in the Twin Cities?
Ginkel: Our programs at NDBC utilizes a unique approach for diagnosing and treating our patients compared to many other clinics. We have the technology and highly specialized and trained medical experts to specifically determine the source of the patient’s problem, and then definitively treat the source through an individualized therapy program. This approach to treatment is what separates us from non-specialized care received in most clinics, as many clinics take a more generalized treatment approach based on the patient’s symptoms, and never really getting to the root of the patient’s problem to design their treatment plan. At NDBC, a common patient we see referred from companies is one that suffered a fall and related concussion while at work and is not showing much recovery. This patient at NDBC typically sees up to 50 percent reduction in both costs and number of therapy visits over other clinics in the Twin Cities due to the specialized and highly focused nature of our programs. Getting the patient better quicker has numerous benefits, namely; better outcome for the patient, much quicker and safer return to work results, lower risk of long-term care needed, and lower costs for the employer and health care system in its entirety. This type of highly focused and objective delivery of health care is the future of health care we believe, and NDBC is proud to have developed one of the best programs in the United States for our specialty niche.
