What to Expect at Your First In-Home Physical Therapy Visit

There's a short list of things that make the first visit faster and the documentation cleaner. None of them are required — your therapist will work with whatever you have — but the more of this you have ready, the more time you spend on care rather than paperwork.

• Auto-policy declarations page (the front sheet from your auto insurance card or policy packet) if your case is post-MVA.
• ER or hospital discharge paperwork from the day of the crash or the surgery.
• Any imaging reports you've received — X-ray, MRI, CT.
• A current medication list, including over-the-counter and supplements.
• Names and contact info for your referring physician and any specialists involved in this episode.
• Comfortable clothes you can move in — gym shorts, leggings, a t-shirt. No special clothing required.

You do not need to clear a room, set up exercise equipment, or have any particular kind of furniture. We've treated patients in studio apartments, two-story walk-ups, and assisted-living rooms. Whatever space you live in is the space we'll use.

Your Doctor of Physical Therapy arrives within a 30-minute window of the scheduled time and calls or texts when they're a few minutes out. They'll bring a portable treatment table (about the size of a folded ironing board), a small bag of equipment, and a laptop or tablet for documentation.

The first few minutes are introductions, a quick walkthrough of the visit, and confirming the basics — name, date of birth, what hurts, and what you want out of care. If a family member or caregiver is present, the therapist will check in with them too — they're often the people running the home program between visits, so they're part of the conversation from day one.

This is the conversation part. The therapist asks how the injury or surgery happened, what symptoms you have, where the pain is, what makes it worse, what makes it better, what your day looks like, what you used to be able to do before, and what you most want to get back to. It feels conversational because it is — but every answer is being mapped against a clinical framework.

Be specific. "My shoulder hurts" is less useful than "It hurts when I reach into the back seat of the car and when I try to put on a seatbelt." Specific functional examples drive the plan of care more than pain numbers do.

The objective exam is the hands-on part. The therapist measures what the body is actually doing — how far each joint moves, how strong each muscle group is, how you walk, how you transfer in and out of a chair, how you climb stairs, how steady you are with your eyes closed. The specific tests depend on your diagnosis, but the categories are the same.

• Range of motion (ROM) — measured with a goniometer for relevant joints.
• Manual muscle testing (MMT) — graded 0–5 by muscle group.
• Special tests — orthopedic provocation tests specific to your suspected diagnosis.
• Gait analysis if you're walking; balance testing if fall risk is part of the picture.
• Functional assessment in your actual environment — stairs in your home, the chair you sit in, the bed you sleep in.

Many of these tests use the abbreviations you may have seen in your discharge paperwork. The PT terminology guide explains what each one means.

Before treatment starts, the therapist walks through the plan of care: what the working diagnosis is, what the prognosis looks like, what the short-term and long-term goals are, how often you'll be seen, and how long the episode is likely to run. You'll be asked to weigh in — goals are negotiated, not handed down.

Then the first treatment happens on the same visit. We don't wait until visit two. The treatment is usually a mix of hands-on manual therapy to the symptomatic area, a few therapeutic exercises that introduce the basic patterns of your program, and any pain-modulation work that's clinically indicated.

Before the therapist leaves, you'll have a written home exercise program — usually three to seven exercises with photos or short videos, sets and reps, frequency, and clear criteria for when to call us if something feels off. We don't hand out generic sheets. The program is built for your environment, your symptoms, and your goals.

You'll also have your next visit scheduled before the therapist leaves. Typical cadence is two to three visits per week for the first few weeks, dropping to once or twice a week as you progress.

Within 24–48 hours, an evaluation note is sent to your referring physician. From that point forward, the physician receives a progress note every two weeks. You don't need to do anything to make this happen — it's built into the workflow described in the step-by-step guide.

First-visit experience is the same regardless of city. We staff Doctors of Physical Therapy across the major Florida metros:

Full list of 47 cities on the Service Areas page.