Grow Your Practice Podcast
The Pelvic Health PT Opportunity Feat. Kimberlee Sullivan & Carine Carmy of Origin
Pelvic health physical therapy has spent years on the edges of mainstream healthcare. Yet demand is growing, awareness is increasing, and new care models are making treatment accessible to patients who previously had nowhere to turn. For physical therapy practice owners, that creates an important question: Are you overlooking one of the biggest underserved opportunities in PT? On the Grow Your Practice podcast, Chad Madden spoke with Kimberlee Sullivan, PT, DPT, WCS, BCB-PMD, and Carine Carmy of Origin. Their conversation explored the expanding pelvic health market, virtual care, clinical outcomes, and the role technology can play in making care more sustainable. The Problem: Demand Exists, but Access Still Doesn't Carine's introduction to pelvic health came through her own experience as a patient. After nearly a decade of pelvic pain, numerous physicians, procedures, and treatments, she was finally introduced to pelvic floor physical therapy. Within roughly two months, she experienced significant improvement. That experience highlighted a much larger problem: patients can spend years looking for answers before ever being referred to a pelvic health specialist. Kimberlee has witnessed the same issue throughout her 24-year career in women's health and pelvic health physical therapy. Symptoms such as incontinence, pelvic pain, painful intercourse, postpartum problems, and difficulty sitting or exercising are often normalized rather than treated. At the same time, access remains limited. There aren't enough trained providers in many communities, and insurance reimbursement can make providing long, one-on-one pelvic health visits financially difficult for independent practices. Key Insight #1: Practice Owners May Be Underestimating Demand Kimberlee knows this from experience. Before joining Origin, she owned a practice for 16 years. Despite being told there might not be enough demand for specialized pelvic health services, her practice eventually grew to 13 physical therapists and still carried a two- to three-month waiting list. She also made an important point for orthopedic practices: you may already be treating pelvic health patients without realizing it. Patients don't always disclose pelvic symptoms during an orthopedic evaluation. But recognizing those symptoms gives clinicians an opportunity either to provide appropriate treatment or create a referral pathway. Key Insight #2: Virtual Care Isn't Just a Backup Plan One of Origin's most interesting findings came from a retrospective analysis involving just under 5,000 patients. The organization wanted to understand whether virtual pelvic health treatment could produce meaningful outcomes compared with traditional in-person care. Their analysis found clinically comparable outcomes across multiple diagnoses. That challenges a deeply ingrained assumption in physical therapy: that effective care must always involve hands-on treatment. Education, breathing strategies, relaxation, self-treatment, exercise, and patient empowerment can all be delivered virtually. For some patients, the virtual environment may actually provide an advantage. Someone dealing with pelvic pain, painful intercourse, previous trauma, or anxiety about pelvic examinations may feel safer learning in their own home. Key Insight #3: Virtual Care Has to Be Built Intentionally Carine emphasized that telehealth shouldn't simply become the appointment offered when someone can't make it into the clinic. It needs to be treated as its own service. That means specific therapist training, clear patient expectations, strong home-program engagement, appropriate technology, and deliberate operational systems. Origin eventually developed a dedicated virtual team rather than expecting every therapist to constantly switch between in-person and virtual delivery. Using AI to Give Therapists Their Time Back Technology is also changing the administrative side of practice. Origin developed tools layered onto its existing EMR to reduce the burden of documentation. According to the discussion, evaluations that once required approximately 20 to 25 minutes of documentation could sometimes be completed in five minutes or less. Therapists reported completing certain follow-up notes in under a minute. The goal isn't technology for technology's sake. It's giving clinicians more time and energy to treat patients instead of spending hours finishing charts after work. Conclusion For practice owners, pelvic health represents more than another specialty service. It sits at the intersection of enormous unmet demand, increasing patient awareness, virtual access, and rapidly improving technology. The practices that recognize those shifts early may be able to serve patients who have historically struggled to find appropriate care while building a valuable new growth channel at the same time. The opportunity isn't necessarily creating demand. It's recognizing how much demand is already there. Learn more about Origin at https://www.theoriginway.com/
