Pros
The starting salary is slightly higher than market pay. Good benefits package including strong healthcare options, reasonable PTO and several holidays. Rehab gyms are clean and well-stocked with functional and contemporary equipment. Easy to acquire DME for your patients when appropriate. If leaving on-time and not working weekends is important to you, this may be a good fit.
Cons
Altamed bills itself as a progressive and inclusive organization with the mission of delivering quality healthcare to underserved populations. While working at Altamed, I felt like my hands were tied and my strengths as a therapist were repressed by insecure, micro-managing administrators who treated their therapists like factory workers. I felt like I was working in a hospital in the 1970s. Want to know what our manager's priority was? That we clocked in and out on time. Not a minute early. Not a minute late. With Covid scans, signing in at the front desk, a multi-step computer timeclock that often froze...this process easily took 5-10 minutes. But you will hear about it if you were late or early. Professionals with master's and doctorate degrees don't need to be sitting at their computers, worried about clocking in or out. Or getting reprimanded if we wrote an email on the weekend or helped a patient after hours. We are professionals. This is our job. Let us do it. Don't weigh us down with red tape. Not that Altamed sees its therapists as qualified, intelligent professionals. While they highlight the amount of education it affords its physicians, we were give ZERO dollars for continuing education. Not a dime. This is really unacceptable in the current market and shows that you don't value what therapy brings to the table. Don't you want your patients to have the best, most current, most evidence-based rehab? Rehab managers are dismissive of input from the team. Not only do they not solicit ideas, but they will dismiss any suggestion that might change "how we've always done it." Creativity and innovation are seen as distractions, as nuisances. Sadly, the way that rehab administrators treat their team sets the tone for the entire company. I wasn't used to being treated like a tech by physicians...until I worked at Altamed. I am not sure that the doctors appreciate or understand the amount of education today's therapists have...but they didn't acknowledge this in daily interactions. Physicians, nurses and even social workers think they know better than the therapists what patients will benefit from rehab and what kind of rehab should be provided. This results in poor care, poor utilization, and resentment among the therapy team. I've moved on to an employer that values quality treatment, inter-professional collaboration, and professional respect. So happy to have left a top-down, authoritarian organization where only administrators and physicians seem to have value.
