College Park Physical Therapy was sold on the promise of AI automation and reduced staffing needs. The result? More manual work, worse patient outcomes, and lost revenue.
Their previous RCM vendor heavily marketed AI automation, touting reduced staffing and streamlined billing. But the reality was very different.
Instead of delivering efficiency, the AI platform created additional manual work for her team. They still needed to bring on a full-time biller to process all their claims, and on top of that, they were still paying 4-5% of collections to their vendor.
Their monthly collections were reduced dramatically, while aging AR was skyrocketing and sitting unresolved.
Since making the switch to Prompt, Shelley’s been able to:
Shelley operates 4 outpatient orthopedic clinics with 16 full and part-time providers, and averages about 450 visits a week offering aquatics, pelvic health, vestibular care, and EMG testing.
With 4 locations and that many providers, Shelley needed a billing system that could keep up with her volume and reduce the workload for her staff.
Shelley’s previous system made an aggressive AI sales pitch that promised the world, including reduced staffing needs, more revenue, and less expenses. But that decision proved costly: without the right people behind their AI to handle the many AI glitches and inefficiencies, that system caused over $200,000 in billing mistakes that couldn’t be recovered.
Shelley was frustrated that instead of AI streamlining processes, she was stuck paying a 50-hour-a-week biller. She was paying more for worse results.
"We were told it would be full-service billing and that is not at all what we received,” Shelley said. “If you don’t have the people behind the AI, it’s almost worse than an inefficient human on the other end.”
After just 6 months on that system, Shelley realized the setup was unsustainable and began searching for a new solution.
Shelley knew she had to change, but the emotional and logistical toll was high. “It’s a lot of work to enroll and get everything in line with the clearinghouse,” she said. “That concern was huge.”
On top of that, she was concerned about getting buy-in from her staff and her patients. “We had just changed systems a few months ago, and now we were changing again,” Shelley said, “Our team had barely learned the old system and we were switching again, so there were a lot of things I had to consider before making that jump.”
Her research into Prompt included a 2-hour call with a reference client. “Every question I had that was a potential red flag for me, she gave me a really great answer,” Shelley said.
And at the same time, Prompt’s support team and structured onboarding made a huge difference. “Prompt has a system in place like none other to train people ahead of time. Everyone was watching the same videos, everyone was able to ask the support team questions, and that is something that nothing else that I had looked at had.”
Since switching to Prompt, Shelley’s practice has seen a 21% increase in reconciled collections. “It’s not because of a volume change in the number of patients we’re seeing,” she emphasized. “It’s truly an improvement in the collection process.”
In her prior system, lack of visibility and reliable automation resulted in over 500 denials over the course of a year that went unnoticed and unresolved–costing Shelley’s clinic time and money.
With Prompt, “claims are submitted, processed, and either brought back fully reconciled or we know what to do,” she explained. “For the first time ever, I’m on a good flow. I can go to the bank account and expect to see certain payers on certain days. I never had that kind of predictability before, ever.”
Prompt’s clinician-facing features have had a big impact.
The AI-supported documentation accelerates evaluations and removes some of the burden from Shelley’s staff. With intake feeding directly into evals, therapists get 10 to 15 minutes back per evaluation, allowing them to bill more units or do a more thorough evaluation for trickier cases.
“We had a staff meeting today and I asked everyone if we wanted to keep the AI features turned on, and it was a unanimous yes. My clinicians love it. They love the suggestions, they love that it makes their paperwork easier, and they love how it automatically populates from patient intakes,” Shelley said.
Shelley knows first hand how overwhelming switching to a new EMR can be, especially when you’re trying to recoup lost revenue or bring a large team on board. “It could make you take pause and think, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’” she said. “But I can honestly say, I can see the long term now, that there will definitely be a return on the investment.”
For any clinic owners thinking about making the switch, Shelley has just one piece of advice: “I’m glad I did my homework, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have made the switch sooner.”
If you’re curious about how Prompt can help transform your practice, request a demo today.
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