The reason your best
clinicians leave
is not a mystery.
Hiyer runs structurally anonymous pulse surveys and scores them against the largest proprietary PT workforce dataset in existence. Ten years of CQI+. Six thousand respondents. One number that predicts turnover before HR sees the letter.
Four steps. Ten minutes
of setup. Insight at n ≥ 5.
- 01
Upload your roster
Drop a CSV of employees or add people by hand. We issue one-time survey PINs per cohort. No email capture required.
- 02
Team takes the CQI+
17 items on a 0-10 scale. Four minutes, mobile-first. Anonymous by architecture, not by promise.
- 03
Scores unlock at n ≥ 5
Benchmark overlay the moment five responses land per cohort. Clinical vs support vs office vs remote slice automatically.
- 04
UpDoc AI reads the data
A plain-English read of what changed, what it means, and one specific action to take this week.
Five categories.
Seventeen items. One score.
Each item scored 0–10. Individual answers are never visible; scores unlock at five respondents per cohort. Sub-items roll up so you can zoom to a specific supervisor trait or stay at the high-level retention number.
- RetentionIntention to Stay for the next 12 months
- CompensationSalary and Benefits
- CultureWorkplace culture, Work-Life, Mediocrity, Ownership, Brand, Citizenship
- LeadershipSupervisor clarity, autonomy, respect, willingness to back you up
- ColleaguesAtmosphere, diligence, constructive ideas, leadership
The burnout valley
is at year eighteen.
Intention to Stay by years of experience, from the Job Market Pulse 2025 Year Ten report. The 15–20 year bracket is the lowest in the field. These are mid-career clinicians, mid-salary, often mid-management. They are also the hardest and most expensive to replace.
Anonymity by architecture.
Distribution by us, never by you.
Most workforce-engagement tools put the employer in charge of distributing the survey link, then ask employees to trust that the boss isn't tracking who clicked. Smart employees don't fill those out. We built it the other way around. UpDoc holds the email list and sends the invites. Then structural guarantees take over: every promise below is enforced at the database layer, not in our terms of service.
UpDoc sends the invite, not you.
Invitees get an email from UpDoc Media with a single-use code. Reply-to routes back to us, so an employee asking 'is this legit' doesn't accidentally email their boss. The from line is a third party, which is the social shape that makes employees actually fill it out.
You see aggregate counts. Never the mapping.
The list of who got which code lives behind a Postgres-level deny rule. Your dashboard shows how many invites went out, how many responded, which cohorts cleared the n≥5 floor. By construction it cannot show which email matched which code.
No user_id on responses. Ever.
The responses table has no foreign key to any identity. Removing this would require a visible schema migration.
n≥5 cohort suppression is automatic.
Dimension scores return null until at least five respondents per cohort. Nobody sees a single person's answers, including UpDoc.
Timestamps bucket to 15 minutes.
You can't correlate who answered when. Kills the 'it must have been John' guess.
Append-only audit log.
UPDATE and DELETE on the audit table are revoked at the Postgres grant level. We cannot rewrite history.
Your scores don't exist
in a vacuum.
Ten-year longitudinal dataset
Since 2015, UpDoc has published the Job Market Pulse, Talent Acquisition Survey, Practice Management Survey, and CQI+. 6,291 responses across 2020-2026. 50 states. The largest proprietary PT workforce dataset in existence.
Structural anonymity
Not a promise, a schema. UpDoc distributes the invites so the employer never holds the email-to-PIN map. Then no user_id on responses, n ≥ 5 suppression, bucketed timestamps, append-only audit. SOC 2 Type I in progress.
UpDoc AI on every cycle
A plain-English read the moment enough responses land. Cites your actual numbers, names root cause, hands you three calendar-able actions for this week. Closed-loop tracking shows what you did and the score delta next cycle. Signal tier and above.
Cohort-level segmentation
Clinical vs support, office vs remote, or custom. See which slice is pulling your Intention to Stay down without ever seeing who inside it.
What you see, minutes after responses land.
Sample values. Real dashboards cite your actual numbers and the 2020-2026 benchmark for your cohort type.
Click through the real thing.
Seven panels, at your pace. This is what an owner sees the minute responses land. Tap a tab, use the arrows, or swipe on mobile.
Sample values. Your cycle pulls your org's actual numbers against the rehab-therapy peer median.
Reads the data
the way a COO would.
Plain-English read of your cycle the moment enough responses land. Cites your actual numbers, distinguishes surface metric from root cause, hands you three calendar-able actions for the week. Cycle-over-cycle drift surfaces dimensions trending the wrong way before they trip a hard threshold. Never invents data.
You're sitting at 5.50 Intention to Stay with clinical staff. That's a live turnover risk, 1.3 points below the latest peer median of 6.80. Expect exits in the next 6 to 12 months if nothing changes.
The problem isn't immediate supervisor or day-to-day culture. Those are healthy at 7.10 and 7.50. The crack is trust in upper management, 4.50, sitting 1.3 points below the already-soft peer median of 5.80. It also drifted down 0.7 from last cycle. Trajectory matters.
Do this week:
- Stay conversation with three clinicians, 20 min each. Ask what leadership decision in the last 90 days dropped their confidence.
- Pull last quarter's all-hands recordings, identify one decision you can clarify or reverse this week.
- Send the team a one-paragraph note about what you heard and what's changing. Plain language, no corporate framing.
Stuck? Just ask.
Every dashboard page on Signal and above has an Ask UpDoc AI button. Open it from anywhere, type the question, get a specific answer in seconds. Includes one-click hand-offs to the right page so you stop hunting.
Built into the product, not a separate help portal. Pulse is self-service; AI help is the unlock for Signal and Enterprise.
What clinicians
actually say.
Ten themes pulled from the 30% optional narrative response rate on the Job Market Pulse 2025 (Year Ten). If you’ve walked a clinic floor in the last six months, you’ve heard at least three of these from someone.
- 1.Burnout and overwork
High productivity demands, excessive paperwork seen as unnecessary for patient care, and consistently long working hours. Overworked without adequate compensation is the most-cited driver.
- 2.Low pay and stagnant wages
Therapists feel underpaid relative to the DPT credential. Wages are not keeping pace with cost of living, and annual raises (when they exist) are seen as insufficient.
- 3.Insurance reimbursement pressure
Stagnant or declining reimbursement is consistently identified as the systemic driver behind low salaries and high productivity targets. Owners and clinicians both feel it.
- 4.Productivity standards compromise care
Pressure to meet billing quotas is forcing therapists to juggle multiple patients simultaneously and shift focus from skilled service to volume. Cited as a major source of stress.
- 5.Management and culture quality
Unsupportive, non-existent, or unresponsive management worsens everything else. Conversely, supportive supervisors and positive peer relationships are highly valued.
- 6.No clear path forward
Many therapists feel stuck. No visible career growth or promotion beyond entry-level positions. Stagnation, decreased motivation, and burnout follow.
- 7.Flexibility and work-life balance
Therapists want more control over schedules. The job often encroaches on personal time. Flexibility, after compensation, was the number one concern raised.
- 8.Frustration with the broader healthcare system
Payment structures prioritize efficiency and metrics over patient care. Therapists feel the system is not designed to support quality outcomes or clinician well-being.
- 9.Concerns about the future of the profession
High education costs, low starting salaries, and the rise of "PT mills" are seen as threats to the long-term viability of physical therapy as a career.
- 10.Positive workplace dynamics matter
Good coworkers, mentorship programs, and strong benefits packages (PSLF eligibility, insurance, retirement) are acknowledged as offsetting some of the negative aspects.
Source: UpDoc Job Market Pulse 2025 Year Ten Report, Section V. Themes paraphrased to fit landing-page voice; not verbatim quotes from individual respondents.
The math.
Plug in your numbers. We’ll show you the cost of doing nothing, what Hiyer costs, and how few resignations have to be prevented for it to pay for itself. Defaults pulled from our own data: Job Market Pulse 2025 (n=200+), Talent Acquisition 2024 (n=176), PT Productivity 2020 (n=546). Adjust to your reality.
Worth knowing: our 10-year longitudinal data shows the correlation between paying more and people staying is only 0.59. Comp helps. It is not the lever.
Start where you are.
Upgrade when your data story gets more interesting. No per-seat math, no annual commitment on Pulse or Signal.
Pulse
1 location, 1 cohort
- Quarterly CQI+ cycle
- Benchmark overlay
- Branded results dashboard
- CSV PIN export
- Email support
Signal
Most popular1 location, unlimited cohorts
- Everything in Pulse
- Unlimited cohorts + drilldown
- Industry benchmark overlay
- UpDoc AI: diagnostic + prescriptive read on every cycle
- Hiyer powered by UpDoc AI: in-app help, ask anything
- At-risk email alerts with three-action playbook
- Cycle-over-cycle drift detection
- Closed-loop tracking on every alert
- Quarterly 30-min strategy call with an industry expert
Enterprise
10+ locations
- Everything in Signal
- Multi-location drilldowns
- SSO (Google, Microsoft)
- REST API + rate limiting
- Dedicated CSM
- Custom contract
Enterprise features ship mid-2026.
Index Access
No client data, aggregates only
- Ten years of UpDoc workforce data
- Quarterly dataset refresh
- All dimensions, all cohort types
- CSV export + REST API
- Comparison charts
- Embeddable widgets
Index Access enters private beta Q3 2026.
Four-week hands-on setup with Gene or Ben. Designed for practices with three or more locations or anyone who wants to stand up a real retention program rather than just a survey.
Not a new idea
with a polished deck.
Hiyer is the productization of ten years of UpDoc workforce research. The dataset existed before the software did.
- 2015
UpDoc Media founded. Launched the first Job Market Pulse with one question: what are PTs actually getting paid?
- 2016–2019
Expanded to Talent Acquisition, Practice Management, and the Corporate Quality Index. Built the largest proprietary PT workforce dataset in the country.
- 2020
COVID hits. Our longitudinal data captured the pandemic's real-time impact on PT compensation and practice operations, the only independent view of the disruption.
- 2021–2023
Launched HIYER™ as a SaaS platform. Transformed survey expertise into a workforce-intelligence tool that runs inside your practice.
- 2024–2025
Year Ten. Published the 10th anniversary Job Market Pulse showing PT salaries reaching $96,853. HIYER™ deployed across multiple rehab therapy organizations.
Built by clinicians
who understand the problem.
Hiyer isn't a generic HR tool with rehab copy sprinkled on top. The CQI+ index, the at-risk thresholds, the way we talk about mediocrity: two decades of running clinics, distilled into software.
The engine behind UpDoc's data-driven approach to healthcare workforce intelligence. Gene bridges the gap between clinical expertise and business strategy, bringing a perspective shaped by years as a practicing physical therapist turned industry analyst.
The architect of UpDoc's research methodology and the Hiyer platform. Ben's systematic approach to data collection and analysis has built the most trusted compensation and workforce dataset in physical therapy.
Questions we hear.
Who are my responses visible to?
Individual responses are visible to no one, including UpDoc. Distribution itself is on us: UpDoc holds the email list and sends the invite directly, so the employer never holds the email-to-PIN map. Once a response lands the schema has no user_id, timestamps are bucketed to 15 minutes, and scores unlock per cohort only at five respondents or more. You read aggregates.
Why does UpDoc handle distribution?
Because employees can correctly refuse to fill out a survey their employer mints and emails. Even with structural anonymity downstream, the social trust says 'my boss could be tracking who clicked.' We close that gap by holding the email list ourselves. Your team sees the invite come from UpDoc, not from you. You see aggregate response counts, never the individual mapping.
Is this HIPAA-regulated?
No PHI is collected or stored. Hiyer measures workforce sentiment, not patient data. SOC 2 Type I work is on Vanta, expected by Q4 2026.
What's the CQI+?
A 17-item workforce health index built specifically for rehab therapy. Seven years of CQI+ longitudinal data (2020-2026), part of UpDoc Media's decade-long workforce research program. Includes the headline Intention to Stay plus sub-items across Compensation, Culture, Leadership, and Colleagues.
Can I cancel?
Yes. Monthly subscriptions. Cancel from the Stripe customer portal; access continues through the end of the paid period. Aggregate data retains for 90 days in case of reactivation.
Do you offer trials?
Every tier includes a 7-day free trial. You're not charged until day 8. Self-service, no sales call required for Pulse or Signal.
How is this different from SurveyMonkey or Culture Amp?
Those are general-purpose tools. Hiyer is rehab-therapy-specific and benchmarked against the only 10-year PT workforce dataset in existence, with structural anonymity (not just policy) and UpDoc AI that speaks operator language, not HR-speak.
See what your workforce
really thinks.
Seven-day free trial. No sales call. Your team's answers are anonymous by architecture, not by promise.