Paying careful attention to practice-related numbers can improve outcomes, reduce costs, and ultimately transform the profession.

About a decade ago, Kelly Daley, PT, MBA, realized something had to change. She'd spent her entire career as a physical therapist (PT) in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She'd moved up through the ranks, and now, as she began to take on leadership roles, she was refining her sense of health care as a system-the way the various players, from the patients themselves to the providers and the payers, interacted, collaborated, and ultimately did business. "And what I saw," recalls Daley, "was that if physical therapy, as a profession, were to have any impact on the decisions being made, it would need to have data to be persuasive."