Clinic 360 efficiency: How AI powers profitability beyond documentation

Marla: Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for coming and spending your time with us today. My name is Marla Ranieri and I am the head of clinical innovation and Strategy at Prompt Health, and I'm really excited. To be here to talk about how AI powers profitability beyond documentation, and to have a great group of panelists with us to speak to all of you today and answer all of your questions.

And we do have the chat feature on the side. I will be asking you guys questions to put in the chat to get your feedback. To get your responses, I want all of you to be engaged in addition to a Q&A button at the bottom, which if you have specific questions, we would really love for you to use that q and a button 'cause we are going to make sure we address those questions.

And if we don't today, then we will make sure to follow up and address those questions after the call. From that, I really want to make sure when we talk about AI and hear from you guys what you're thinking about ai, it ends to be, a lot of times people just think documentation, GhatGPT. And yes, that's a huge win.

Really excited that we finally have bridge that gap and got documentation and AI within documentation into the rehab industry. And that's really becoming baseline expectations. You are gonna see more and more clinicians when they interview at your clinic. When they come outta school, they're gonna be asking, do you have that AI documentation?

And can I use that? It's gonna be an expectation. But if we just think of that AI documentation. We're missing the bigger picture, we're missing beyond what else we can have and invest in, and what else could really be profitable for our clinics. So the good news and I'd love for you guys to put one or two in the chat right now is if you are using AI documentation, put one.

If you are not using AI documentation, put two. Love to hear from you guys to see who's already utilizing AI in that way. And as I said, the good news is that most of you guys, if you're on this call, probably are and even are using prediction health. So kudos to all of you. You've seen firsthand what AI scribes can do, and you've taken the leap to introduce it to your team.

But as we said you really probably grown to love and trust this AI scribe. But it's the tip of the iceberg. And in fact, it, you probably are a lot comfortable now with all of the other pieces that you're overlooking. All of the other inefficiencies that may be slowing down your staff. So if you just stop at that documentation, you're only solving one piece of that puzzle while your front desk billing team admin operation staffs are still drowning in manual processes and potentially leaving money on the table.

So the bigger opportunity that we're here to talk to with you today is how AI can transform the rest of your practice and seamlessly integrate with your workflows. Automating scheduling and wait lists, reducing denials, tightening, billing, improving reporting, and elevating the entire patient experience.

And I want you all to think back to when you first implemented AI tools like scribing or even when you first started using chat, GPT. Maybe you were skeptical. Maybe it felt uncomfortable, maybe you didn't even believe it could work in healthcare, but once you tried it, you saw the time it saved, and you probably can't imagine going back to the way it was before that.

So now let's imagine applying the same shift across every other area where your clinic feels pain and saying you don't know what you don't know. So until you've experienced AI in those workflows, you might not be able to see how much margin, time, and peace of mind you've been leading on the table.

By settling for some outdated systems and just accepting the way it is. So that's what we're gonna dig in today, and like I said, we've brought an amazing group of leaders on this call, sharing their knowledge, sharing their experiences with you so you can learn from them, and we'll hear directly from them today.

So I wanna kick it off with a poll on who's joining us. You're gonna see real quick, it's gonna pop up. Wanna know, are you guys, clinicians, admins, billers other owners. Would love to hear students who's on the call today and see and make sure we can tailor this talk specifically for you. So I will give you a second or two to.

Answer that question. Great. All right. And then now let's introduce our panelists. I am gonna go through each one of them and let them actually introduce themselves to you. They're gonna share their role, their company, and why they're here today. Pedro would love to start with you as well First.

Pedro: Hi all.

I'm Pedro Teixeira, co-founder and CEO of Prediction Health. But now very excited and honored to be VP of AI Engineering at Prompt. Obviously a clinical background and general nerd background as well, but I think there's a lot of really exciting and diverse things for us to talk about.

Of course. We've spent a lot of time on documentation in the past, but I think there's so many exciting things for us to share and I'm honored to be here also with some wonderful folks applying AI and a lot of different tools across their practices and organizations to achieve really great things.

Marla: Thank you, and it is such a pleasure to have you here at Prompt working with us and bringing all your skill sets in the AI world to, to prompt. And let's go next to Whitney Terry, we'd love to hear a little bit about you.

Whitney: Yeah. Hey guys, thanks for having me on today. So I run operations for East Tennessee Spine and Sport.

I've been running operations for us, which includes both the operational administrative. Financial gamut since 2016. At the time we were two outpatient facilities and since that time we've grown to nine. So we are all in the Knoxville area, east Tennessee region. And I'll be honest, a lot of our growth over the last two to three years has been, directly correlated to our integration of AI and more specifically, our latest clinic opening with us transitioning to prompt.

In this year. So excited to share with you guys today more about what we're doing operationally in addition to what our clinical team is already, really enjoying as far as the scribe tools Marlo alluded to. So thanks for having me,

Marla: and it's a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much, Whitney, for being on today.

Yeah. And next we have Zach. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Zach: Yeah, I'm Zach Smith. I'm a doctor, physical Therapy, also the co-founder and co CEO of HIDEF Physical Therapy. So we're a smaller outpatient sports clinic based out of the Seattle metro area. And as CO CEO we've split our roles and my role is mostly in like operations and finance side of the company.

I'm also the AI pioneer of our company, so I'm the one that’s mainly bringing in all the AI technologies into the company to help us become more efficient in scale. And so hopefully we'll be able to share some stuff with you guys today that'll help you guys to implement some of these tools that we've used to really increase our efficiency on a company-wide level which has helped us scale over the past six years.

Marla: Yes. And one early adopter. Love hearing, you're gonna be able to tell us all about those challenges and where you're at today. So thank you so much for joining us.

Zach: You got it.

Marla: We really have a powerhouse group with us and setting the stage. This is perfect for Pedro to just tell us a little bit more about, starting at the very top, why is documentation only one piece of the puzzle and an important piece and what other areas do you feel that are right for AI transportation transformation in clinics?

Pedro: Yeah, part of the reason I got so excited about AI all those years ago was because it seemed like it was such a powerful tool, right? It's not any one feature. It's, artificial intelligence and, the more intelligence you have, it should be more great things that you could accomplish with it.

There's clinicians and of course I was a clinician, so I understood the pain points of writing all your notes at, 1:00 AM and how that's not fun. We say, everybody deserves a sidekick, right? Because everybody can get benefits for all those different things. So in that case, clinical documentation, you're repeatedly having to do something where you're interpreting these inputs that they can be written in all these crazy different ways, right?

But that's a problem that, billers have to do. They have all these different payers and all these different requirements and the information comes in all these ways and these obscure codes that get perhaps used sometimes when denials come in, they deserve a sidekick. They should have some tools to help them deal with that.

Understand, where the source of something is. But then maybe to automate a lot of the drudgery of having to deal with that. On the billing side, there's on the scheduling side, right? So you have. It's so important to get people scheduled on, 'cause if they don't show up right, you can't treat them.

You can't take care of them. So the schedule is a huge point of leverage and, a human isn't maybe always available for every single little thing and they can't call every single patient and double check things. But automations, these AI tools can give you this way to interface and automate and have a lot more presence there to make sure that you're utilizing your available schedule really well.

For patients, we're not quite there yet, but in the future you could imagine that the AI is another very natural way to interact. 'cause you can talk, just talk to it, you can text to it, you can write things, and it's able to interpret that and understand what you're trying to get at, and then help you in a way that, there might not always be a person at your clinic ready and willing to hop on the call or answer messages in the same way that AI in the future may be able to do.

And all of this automation AI tool. Either you can do new things that previously you just didn't have the the bandwidth to be able to accomplish, right? Or you can really reduce your costs 'cause it, having a human dedicated to a task. Is an expensive thing, but being able to augment that person with these AI tools and automations makes a really big difference.

A way to help both on the revenue side, but also the cost side for an organization. And at the end of the day, we wanna be really useful to folks. And the AI's a great way, a great technology that you can apply sometimes to accomplish a lot of those really important goals.

Marla: Absolutely. And scaling with that staff, you already have, like you said it's really that addition, taking away those areas to make yourselves just be quicker, faster, and more efficient.

And moving over, Whitney, if you can tell us a little bit more, let's get really practical. How have you used AI in your clinics? And of course letting us know a little bit of how your staff feels about it too.

Whitney: I would say so like I, I mentioned earlier, we transitioned to prompt in April, or I guess it was March of this year.

We were previously unhappy with our EMR system from a standpoint of felt like cancellation rates no-show rates were higher. The concept of our model is. Providing that patient experience, speaking to quality of care. But as our clinics aren't just a one clinician, you drive up, it's a box shop op, that you drive up to.

We have pretty robust clinical schedules. We have nine to 12 clinicians in each of our locations. So already just by me rattling that off, you can imagine the administrative problems that you have with same day cancellations, no shows. We were using prediction health, which was great. But then we were able to transition to prompt utilize Prediction Health and then.

Combine that with Prompt Plus our online scheduling rate I know I spoke to this a little bit, but utilizing the wait list opportunities we've seen a five to 7% increase actually at each location where we're utilizing that tool. Which for us has been huge. It's hugely beneficial.

Our staff, our overhead costs have been reduced. Having had to expand our administrative team, maybe in 1800 visit clinics like we would have before, we're utilizing two administrators at that location and they're able to actually just point, click and invite patients to come come back in for therapy without having to scroll through 30 patients, trying to see who's the best fit for that.

So I would say for us specifically, that's been huge. And then again, from a billing perspective. Same thing, just the flow the capability of actually it's almost like an ongoing dialogue of AI with our clinical team as well as from the front to the clinical team to then our billing team, which we utilize timber for that as well.

But really our denials our denial rate is I think 1% at this point. We feel like we're getting the most opportunity to provide for our staff and for our patients. Just through utilizing the processes specifically. That Prompt Plus is added to us alongside of our utilization of prediction health.

Marla: Wow, kudos to that 1% denial rate. I that's amazing. Yeah. And such great examples of how you're using it and helping aid your clinicians and your rest of your staff. So thank you. What about you as well, Zach? Can you tell us a little bit more, I know you've been robustly using it in your clinic.

Where are you using it beyond documentation in your operations clinic too?

Zach: When I think about AI in general, I think about. Optimizing processes that are, that used to be manual or when someone has to do something that, takes an inordinate amount of time and hours. And then, when Whitney talks about like scaling up staff, really what you're talking about is you just don't have enough time of the day because these tasks take such a long time.

So for example, like calling insurance companies to verify benefits like that, I think in the near future is gonna be a thing in the past and right now. We use a combination of prompts, auto benefits verification combined with an AI service that calls insurances to verify benefits and like things like that help us to take tasks that would've taken a long time to do and now automates it.

And so that's one of the big things that, you know I'll double onto what Whitney said with. With wait lists and things like that. When we run a clinic, like we run where we want run one-on-one care and we're trying to maintain high quality care, if you have open appointments, you are letting a lot of revenue slip.

And that's why a lot of companies have gone to the two-on-one or three-on-one method because they're like, Hey, I'm gonna just stack up the schedule and we're gonna get a lot of people dropping off. But at least because we triple stacked our schedule, we're gonna have people on the schedule. And our clinicians aren't just gonna be sitting around getting paid, which is a massive loss.

And it's like the airline industry, right? It's like once that appointment is gone, once that seat on the airline is gone, it's gone. You can't get it back. That's lost revenue. It's not like you have that appointment sitting on the shelf where you can now deliver that in the future to someone.

So it's really important to stay on top of that and be able to maintain. And so in our previous system, we used to have, it was almost like one front desk's entire role. Was to take all of the wait list and like manually write it into a block at the bottom of the schedule. We would just have this long note.

You had to click into it and look and it was very tedious. And then you had to take that and go over to our text system and then text that person. And then if you sent out five texts. Like all those people would get back to you. And some people would, they would say, you'd get five people that say, I wanted that appointment.

And then you'd have to tell all those other people manually. No, I'm sorry, someone already took it. And so even that simple process has reduced one front desk per clinic that we're in and to us, like in, in the Seattle area, a minimum wage employee here is $20 and 76 cents an hour. So that is a massive cost savings for us.

And when we talk about not just cost savings, but also the time cost, that would be to. Hire that employee to maintain that employee's employment, to do all the training and things like that, to audit that person. And with AI we just see such a high accuracy where the tasks are automated and we know it's getting done.

And like some of the features I love, for example, are like looking out at certain appointment times, knowing where the person's supposed to be scheduled. Hey, this person can come in on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays after 4:00 PM and it just automates that entire process out. And so now. I used to, as an owner, used to jump into schedules on the weekend and be like, man, I gotta text some patients to fill the, all these cancellations that are coming in.

And now it's just it's automated. It's a one, it's a one button press. And pT used to be a it still is and it always will be a heavily payroll intensive business to be in. But with these kind of tools and what we've tried to implement is how do we take AI and technology and. At least make our business less payroll intensive and be able to empower people to do more throughout their workday.

And like I said, we're doing everything from and prediction does this, which is awesome. This like direct to dictation box, which I don't know if any of you guys have done this, but it's control shift y it's an awesome feature. 'cause you could dictate in. But I do that everywhere in my entire personal life, right?

So I have whisper on my computer and I'll go in and I'll write, I write emails and I don't ever text somebody without the voice to text anymore. And I think like this, PTs largely are not used to this dictation. And it's because things like. I used to dictate via apple, and it was like, I would say patient reports, and it always thought I was saying picture of a horse.

And so then I'd have to spend all this time going back and editing all this stuff. But now you've got things like the dictation feature on prediction Health, which is like remarkably accurate, knows all the medical terminologies, it's HIPAA compliant and all this stuff. And so there's really no excuse why not to do this.

And physicians, Pedro as a physician. We, they've been using technologies like this for a long time and I remember going and shadowing a surgeon recently and. He was impressive as a surgeon, but I actually told him, I was like, man, you're actually more impressive in your dictation skills because you speak at a 10 x clip.

I have never heard a human speak this fast. And he's using just like a straight voice to dictation. Now that system's pretty smart to edit some of the stuff. I think some of the stuff that, that Prediction Health is doing is taking this to a whole new level where, you could walk around with a mic if you wanted to.

You could be eating a sandwich and you could be dictating entire note. And then it would just go in, into your note. And so like the operational efficiency of this has become so well high. And then the other thing that has helped is we know a lot of clinic owners that have documentation time blocks on their schedule.

And so opportunity cost loss is so huge, right? If you're in a market like us and you're, you're averaging well over a hundred dollars a visit. And then you're blocking out two or three of those a week that quickly adds up to tens of thousands of dollars per clinician. And now you're talking about, hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions AT depending on the scale that you're at.

And all of those things lead back to what most PTs goal is, which is to. Provide high level care and to be able to maintain that. And so I think, for us, at least in a market where we see more people shifting to multiple patients per hour, these are the technologies that have allowed us to maintain our one-to-one care.

And also, by the way, have profit margins that are in the top 5% of PT clinics, 25 plus percent profit margins on our business. Which is it's been awesome and our clinicians are happy. And so it's just like this snowball effect by using this technology. It's really impacted so many different facets of our business that, I get excited about this every day and going into these kind of, webinars and doing my own research and finding tools to make us more efficient and teaching our clinicians, and that's a huge part of.

Of our business down

Marla: well, and the passion shows through. You're not staying stagnant. You're continually looking and getting excited when the team is doing better because of what you're searching and seeking and bringing in. So I love that. And Whitney, Zach touched on it about how it.

The RCM and the AI and billing and RCM has been so impactful. Would love to know from you, and you did say you've got 1% claims rate. Can you tell us a little bit about what is the AI in RCM billing that you're utilizing through your new system now that you've switched to get to that 1% rate.

Whitney: Yeah. So I would say that it's twofold for us. We're utilizing, obviously there's a CPT coding factor that occurs throughout the process. So if you're talking from a clinician standpoint, when they're going through and they're documenting their note they're supported not only by prompt in CPT code selection, they can be supported by prediction health to make sure that they're optimizing whatever codes they're selecting through that process.

And we spend a lot of time with our therapists just in regards to that specifically. And so then that way, by the time it gets to our billing team, if there's no red flags, nothing we have a setting actually through PROMPT that allows that to go on straight through. And then those corrective measures, it's, if it's flagged actually AI is the one in those crosshairs essentially that's pulling those things back quickly for review and then allowing us to send those things out.

A lot of times within the same day my team is pretty in tune with those notes and when we're tackling those. So that to me has been the most impressive is not only seeing that, but then the turnaround time on, on what we're getting as far as. Feedback on, okay, we're li we're missing a modifier here, or perhaps these codes are not going to give us the optimal, message when we're sending this to the insurance company.

Let's take a look at this again and then resend this. So that to me has been great for us. And I will say that just talking from like a. The one thing I think probably Zach and I danced around a little bit is the patient experience, right? Patients love this, like the wait list feature. A patient loves it.

Do you know how many times a day I get phone calls that I don't answer because I don't recognize the number? And if somebody texts me from that same number I'm responding. The wait list feature just enhances that so much from a scheduling perspective. So like. Where maybe my fear and even in allowing AI's interaction and insurance as well as scheduling is oh, my people are no longer using critical thinking skills.

It's optimizing it. So it's really been the opposite of what I, I was. I'm not a Zach. I'm not an early adopter. I'm not excitable about ai. I want my people to think I'm classically old school, little old lady in that regard. But it has really just enhanced the features around us so that patients aren't getting these denials from, insurance companies aren't calling us with these issues of.

If they don't understand why their care wasn't covered and why we didn't apply this code, or same thing with the scheduling aspect. So really just overall I would say that, the patient experience is enhanced so much. And that's that kind of speaks to both levels as far as maybe the RCM as well as that scheduling aspect of what we've been able to accomplish.

Yeah,

Marla: that. Thank you. That's fantastic. And you did talk about that CPT insights and all of that and everything combined. So Pedro would love to know from your perspective as well how is it, how important is it that all these different AI features that we're talking about actually integrate with your EMR and what are you doing on your end to make sure that the AI and the integration of the EMR is just really enhanced?

And bring back the revenue as Whitney has been talking about, and Zach has been talking about.

Pedro: So one of the really key lessons for us was that having something that feels cohesive, that feels seamless, just delivers a lot of user happiness. You can have a great tool but if it's not where you need it, when you need it you miss out.

So we did our best to make sure that the sidekick experience and documentation was, very cohesive, very integrated. It wasn't like a separate thing that somewhere else. And then when we joined forces with prompt, part of, like a really large part of why we were excited to join you all right, was because there's all of this other stuff that could be cohesive, right?

Because what you do in the documentation and in the visit and which codes you picked and the quality of that documentation. That affects whether or not there's a denial right there that affects, whether or not you're gonna end up getting paid, for that visit. There, if the person doesn't get scheduled right, then that's gonna affect, that's a lost opportunity to deliver care.

And so across the entire experience, across every person. That uses the EMR, not just the clinician, right? There was this opportunity to take things that you could do in one area with a tool like Sidekick, right? To merge in value from all these other areas. And we had a lot of folks very frequently tell us like, Hey could we help with denials?

We'd be like if we had the data and we understand what's missing, right? Sidekick to make sure to help capture that or, the CPT Insights feature very similarly, like you could find out later that, this code isn't covered or something, but what if you just bake that in on the front end when you're actually, picking.

So make it really easy to do the right thing. So that sort of cross pollination, this like seamless integration from not just like the, again, the documentation, right? It's a small piece of it. It's also like all of the things that influence that, right? From getting the patient in the door to keeping them engaged, to to then the billing, which is just really critical.

You have to be able to get paid so you can continue to deliver really great care. And so much of the information there now is something that can get leveraged and pulled in, to sidekick or just handled more automatically there and taking care of these things that. It's impossible to remember all the details for all the payers, for all the compliance and billing and denial, risks that you might run into.

And there's also so much work that is not the thing that people love to do. To Zach's point earlier, right about like text messaging patients, you don't do it. 'cause that's the thing you love to spend your time on. You do it because it makes a difference for your organization.

And finding tasks like that, that you can just automate, and give to the AI and the models. To do for you makes a really big difference. 'cause then you're freed up to go do so many other high value things.

Marla: And looking at that combination and how you said it's so inter integral in being together and actually embedded in your EMR we'd love to hear, Zach, if you tell us what that actually means financially for you.

Can you tell us what this a and r has, AI has brought back in revenue or any statistics that you can show us from your clinic about success. Oops, you're muted.

Zach: I knew I was gonna do that one time today. So when I think about AI and how we use it for our growth and how it's impacted us, I think about one, so this year for the first time, and I don't say this to brag, but we landed on the Ink 5,000 list at 8 858.

So we had 493% growth over the last three years. And really largely a lot of that has become. These tools. And so for us on the billing side, for example, we use outsourced billing. We haven't insourced it yet, and. This year that was on the table for us to insource billing, which obviously that comes with a lot of increased payroll costs.

It comes with a lot of increased logistics. My operations director now has to start to manage that process. But with the switch, so we used to pay, 6% on the previous EMR that we were at. We were able to, even just from switching to prompt, we cut that in half. And then this year, because of all the new tools and how easy it is, we've actually negotiated a fee with our billing company.

That is so equivalent to what it would be in housing it, that we've saved so much money that it actually paid for an entire prompt subscription. Like people come to me like, 'cause I do business coaching and people come to me and oh, this EMR is so expensive what's the differentiator?

And I'm like, you literally cannot. Forward not to be on something like this if you're a small business because it just makes you so much more efficient that even if you look at the cost savings on billing. So we've saved over six figures in billing costs per year just using prompt. And by the way, if we in-house this, we can even make it cheaper because now instead of having to have.

A biller per two or 3 million or 4 million in billable charges, you can have one per six or seven or eight. Like I've seen people pushing the limits where they've got a one biller and they're doing 10 million in in, in build charges. And it's amazing because. Because of all of the automated processes, the billers could focus on the high leverage activities.

And then a lot of these AI systems are going after the low hanging fruit, the stuff that's easy to go get. And also just from a standpoint of reducing denial rate, like Whitney talked about, you think about like AI gets wrapped into a lot of different things, but when I think about AI in this sector, I think about like machine learning.

And so when I think about this is your EMR is gonna become smarter and smarter at this over time at figuring out, hey, this insurance in this region accepts this charge in this format needs this modifier on it, and you're, and it'll prompt your PTs to bill in a certain way that makes it more effective so you get less denials.

'cause right now it's an arduous process or it was, it's way less now with prompt, but it used to be like every time a PT was onboarded, I have to. Teach them all the intricacies of which insurances they could bill these codes to which ones you can't. They had to have a paper. If they didn't reference the paper, they billed the wrong charge.

We had to send it back. And it was like even simple stuff like billing, Medicare, the wrong Eastern code, like instead of the G code, you're billing, you're billing the wrong one. And so all of these things start to sell, fix and it's got this trickle down effect where now I have to spend less time trying to train and oversee and make sure that all my clinicians are.

Are doing the right thing and we're not getting these denials on the same thing over and over again. And those are the kind of things that I think kill your business and it kills your ability to scale. Because a lot of people dread scale because they look at their business and they go, oh my God, I have 20 clinicians right now.

How am I gonna scale this to 50 or let alone a hundred? When I can hardly even, like I, I feel like the wheels are falling off and I'm duct taping things together to make things work. And so all of these integrations where things talk to each other, like even just as simple as the front end billing or the backend system talks to the front end system, right?

Like just the integration to be to know, hey, this is what was charged, this is what the balance is. And then these systems are starting to predict, hey, this insurance is gonna. It's gonna reimburse this much based on the average codes that this clinician charges, and you can even start to customize what you quote.

A patient based on the location they're in, what their insurance is and all that kinda stuff. And so not only does it make our systems more accurate for predictive, revenue flow, but we also really improve the patient experience in that the patient really understands. Like what they're gonna be billed, what, what the cost of healthcare is.

'cause healthcare for a long time and now, with some of the acts that are that are in place where, you know, no surprise billing act and things like that, which doesn't protect people as well as it should. It's one of those things where you buy and then you figure out the price later, which is crazy to me that's ever existed.

And a lot of these systems now and prompt has these great setups for, even being able to predict co-insurance percentage and charge that person on the front end. All of these systems have just made us so much more efficient and that's what's led back to that ability to grow 493% over the last three years.

And it hasn't felt like this thing. 'cause right now, I'll tell you, I'm doing less in the business than I ever had to because I'm not like, like I used to just go to sleep at night and be like, I wonder what I'm missing. And I wonder what's just falling through the cracks. And I wonder what like. What's gonna come back and bite me in the future?

And now I feel like because all of these systems are so reliable and they're more reliable than humans and it doesn't replace humans 'cause there's a lot of human need here. But the great thing is I could sleep so much better at night and have so much more peace of mind with a larger company because of like technology.

E even the sidekick stuff, I, if you talk about reducing denial rates, the biggest fear for a lot of clinicians is, or clinic owners and managers and people in compliance is coming back and getting audited. And I can sleep easy at night knowing that, I've got real time data to see are my clinicians writing notes?

That are gonna pass if we get audited, are they billing like appropriately and all of that kind of stuff. So it's taken off a lot of the compliance risk. Where even before when you audited a chart, you had to pull, a hundred charts. It took so much time and then you might have still missed the 10 notes that were gonna be a problem for you later down the road.

And so now we've got like a hundred percent barrier against that. And so it's just, it's led to a lot of peace of mind and success for us.

Marla: So you're saying that the right EMR with AI embedded in it is not a cost, it's an opportunity and investment. And congratulations on that. Gosh, that extensive growth and INC.

500, that's very impressive and exciting to be a part of.

Zach: Thanks. Appreciate it.

Marla: And Whitney what about you in terms of growth? How has AI helped with recruiting new teammates or growing your team, and how does that look like when you're talking to clinicians, admins, billers, all of the above, who are interested in being part of your company?

Whitney: It's an incredibly easy sell. I think that a lot of especially in a market where it is very competitive and very saturated, especially in our region people are looking for different benefits these days. So they want, a higher paycheck. They're not really interested in health insurance, but they want a work-life balance, right?

And so what better to provide them with a work-life balance than actually providing them? With a tool that they can utilize on site so that they're actually able to check out when they clock out, they wanna go home to be able to do, to focus on home and that's exactly what we're able to provide for them.

Honestly we host a lot of students as well, and it's such an interesting experience. How many students. Do well because they come from a system in another rotation where they've already utilized prompt or already had this experience. So when we're, and even in the hiring market people who have had, we're just seeing so many more students who even had opportunities for on clinicals.

That saves us training time as well. Not only is it helping us in this recruitment process, because it's a system that people are already familiar with, it's also helping us from as. Standpoint of, Hey, I don't need to give, tell you that you need to go watch these, four hours of training videos.

So it's been a nice give and take for us. Being able to market ourselves differently because I think, it is one of the things now that sets us apart. We're not ki we are independently owned. We've stayed that way. And so making sure that we're continuing to differentiate ourselves as the market continues to change is.

It's such a huge deal for us. And I would say administratively same. Recognizing that people can have this ability to prioritize things that don't require them staying on the phone constantly with an insurance company trying to get those benefits that's outsourced. You are looking at patients who are able, like our staff is so excited if they do online scheduling, right?

So if they see this, these appointments roll in. It's contagious. Your staff really feels that they're excited about it. I had even written a statistic. For us it's led to about a 5% increase our online scheduling automation, just utilizing that component. So for one of our clinics specifically, just as a general example for folks that's 90 visits a month.

So that's a pretty good chunk. So these are majority of folks that we're going after as far as. Cancellations are same days. Anything within that 24 hour period, that's really where your biggest loss occurs. For us financially is trying to recoup those. So seeing that 5%, that extra 90 visits, that's led, we average in our insurance cases about $88 a visit.

That's an extra about $8,000 a month, and that's one location. So I can take that and extrapolate it out to nine, that's a huge differentiator in a month of productivity. And I didn't hire anyone to do that, right? I just gave, I brought somebody in and gave them this tool to do that. So it, it has really changed kind of the way that we're able to target and go after people, because this is an age of technology and people are excited to use these tools in a way that's productive and not damaging.

And I think that's the difference is that. We feel like Prompt and Prediction Health have given us tools to really make our staff effective in what they're already doing without eliminating what they're doing because they're still required, right? And so it just is enhancing a patient relationship, enhancing an experience because I don't have to be on hold with that insurance company.

I don't have to pick up the phone when a patient just wants to. To be texted to schedule. So there's just so many added benefits, of that for us, that really, I can be a poster trial for you guys for just the online scheduling. Not to mention what it's done for us from a sidekick in scribe component and really that balance.

It's been a really easy sell as far as bringing kind of clinicians on staff and they're completely bought in when they utilize the tools okay.

Marla: That's Pedro. That's gotta feel so good to hear. Congratulations. Yeah. Love to hear. Well done. Yeah. And

Pedro: no, it makes it all worth it for sure.

Yeah. Cool.

Marla: And that is the goal that we can hire more, keep. Clinicians in the field, make them happy, do what they want. And also, obviously all those other admin pillars because those turnover, that turnover rate is high when they're not happy doing mundane tasks. Really great. Whitney, love hearing that.

And Zach, you have a little different perspective as well. As you've said it's helped you grow without gaining outside capital. We'd love to hear a little bit about that. Where you see that these AI tools and operational, the different operational areas that you said you're able to step a little bit back from and dive into that piece.

Zach: Yeah, for sure. The first thing I'll say though, too is like the just about the sidekick of them talking about. Clinicians loving it at first, everyone was like, a little bit like, oh man, I don't know if I wanna be recorded. All my conversations. And now if I feel like if I took away the prediction health, like we would have a riot or some sort of protest at our company.

And it's gotten to the point where like the first tool we just onboarded someone. Yesterday new PT we're actually. This kind of stuff helps us hire really quickly 'cause we're onboarding four PTs this month in a two week period. And one the onboarding's super easy. You said even if they don't have experience with Prompt, like some of our clinicians don't have experience with Prompt.

By the way, the training videos are great. They're not four hours. They're super fast and they're animated and they're entertaining. It's not like some silly boring thing that you have to go through. But it's like the first tool that people, like our directors are like, did you get 'em?

Prediction, access and like our clinician who just started, she's got 20 evals on her schedule this week. And it's she's not like clinicians. We used to get clinicians all the time that are like, I don't want that last minute eval 'cause it's gonna kill me paperwork-wise. And now you've got clinicians who are willing to take on those last minute evaluations and talk about like efficiency.

There it is. Not only are you able to book last minute. Follow ups really easily, but you're able to get a valves on the schedule. That's huge to be able to get people in one from like a business standpoint of filling the schedule with evaluations is, everybody loves, everybody wants more evaluations.

That's what drives the business. But from a patient care standpoint. Those PTs are willing to move those patients up from next week or two weeks out, or three weeks out because yeah, no big deal. I can do this really easily. And so that's, that's been one of the major things that's helped us.

And then, like way less turnover because people don't have to do all this, like these mundane tasks and like the all of the arduous processes we try to take away from all job roles. We talk about clinicians mainly. Maybe I'll sound like Jerry Durham out here, like front desk, like our front desk enjoys their life so much more now because like the, like instead of doing all these manual tasks and spending so much time on the wait list and the cancellation list and the lost patient report and all that kind of stuff, you.

And even like plan of Care can be automated out. Our front desk staff are able to focus on the important things, which is like customer interactions. The people that are in front of them, they're not having to handle all of those phone calls for bookings because people are booking online.

We used to just get a lot of people that couldn't even view. Their own appointments and they, so they'd have to call us just to be like, Hey, what's my appointment? And now that's gonna interrupt the customer service process at the front desk. It's, we've seen great NPS scores actually increase from our previous platform, and I don't want to tie it directly to.

Prompt in our processes, but I think just as a whole, we are able to deliver such a higher level customer experience that now, like company-wide, our clinician NPS scores a 97 over across the board, and it's just because like our clinicians can spend so much more time. Doing the things that they want to be doing and should be doing versus like documenting and I'm gonna go into some of the like reducing, duplicate of work and all that manual entry stuff.

But I think about an interaction I just had with my own physician where I went in. He was asking me questions. He would ask me a question, I would answer. He would turn to his computer and he would type for Sirius X. It felt like 60 seconds, and it was like the most awkward conversation that I've had for a very long time, and I thought to myself in that moment, I was like, man.

I go in and watch our PTs at work all the time now, and I don't see any of these awkward conversations that you're used to in medical and it, so it really helps you flip from what is like the traditional medical experience of someone having these fragmented conversations where it almost seems like the person's not listening and they're just looking at their computer.

You haven't even made eye contact for the last 30 minutes. And so it just, like, all of those things lead to a better MPS score, which at the end of the day reduces your churn of patience, which is huge, right? Like people walking out the door, again, Jerry Drum. Arrive, pay and stay. It's if you're not coming and you have the automated arrival, you have the automated payments collection stuff, you have the automated stay with having high NPS and driving lower churn.

So now you're reducing your cost of marketing. 'cause if it's costing you $250, to bring a customer in or a client in. And now you're not churning, you're churning out half as many. Then your your customer acquisition cost goes down. Your lifetime customer value goes up and your value equation is massive.

And then you could just spend on the right areas to drive business growth. And that's really what we've looked for with trying to partner with technologies to be able to improve things like that. And then, looking at even like we said. Turnover at front desks kills people because you get a person that comes in at four months or six months or a year and it's just like takes, it feels like it takes 90 days to get someone up to speed because you have to teach them all these like intricacies of like your SOPs.

And now the SOPs have become largely simplified and we just onboarded two front desks. This week to expand to our new clinics. And it's like they're already up and running after a week because it's just Hey, these are the systems. Watch these training videos. They're super simple. And now a lot of this stuff is automated.

And so basically your role is just, be nice, welcome people in, make sure that people know how to use the kiosk. And like all of that kind of stuff has just led to. To our ability to just continue to to grow without, like you said, adding overhead and just like making people so much more efficient.

Marla: Yeah. Wow. I mean that, that's such a great way to go through the whole patient cycle and tell us where all those automation pieces like you mentioned and how it leads to better completion rate of therapi of patients, less turnover from your front desk admin and just overall happier outcomes because.

Everybody is still there and helping get them to the final piece. Thank you, appreciate that. And Pedro, if you wanna give us a little bit more about what, what's coming in the next months. I know we have so much that we even are in little beta testing, but ai, where you see it going, what's coming?

That Whitney and Tara and Zach will be able to use even more in their clinics,

Pedro: And. AI should do really useful things for people, right? If you're gonna go and do something, technology or not, it should do useful things. So there's a theme I think, across this entire, chat we've gotten to have here which is physical therapy.

Rehab therapy has all these headwinds, all these like things, making things harder, and folks are sharing tools that are making things easier. Which has reminded me of a story as Steve Jobs would tell which is once they looked at how much energy it takes different creatures, including people to travel a certain distance, right?

And the condor was by far the most efficient. And I was like, oh, that's, a bummer. Like we totally get left in the dust by this condor that just glides, miles and miles. But then someone had the insight to like what if we put a person on a bicycle, how far can they go if they had the bicycle and then they set the new record, right?

They leave the condor in the dust. The bicycle makes it so much easier for people to travel distances and i'll touch on some future exciting things, but the principle that I like to share or emphasize is that the tools that you use can make your day-to-day a lot easier, right? So you could walk a mile, or you could ride a bike for a mile.

And not only could you maybe have the bike take you the mile, but maybe if it slowly got more and more downhill. Could the, or could the bicycle get even better as you go? So as I'm gonna touch on some things looking forward, I wanna encourage folks to think about am I on the bicycle? Is my bicycle getting faster?

Are my tools, are my systems making it easier and easier for me? Or do I wake up each day and have more friction, more things that I have to deal with? And so as we've been thinking about, what should we accomplish, as this unified entity, right? For AI tools and for other features.

We've been considering what are the bicycles that we can build for people, and how do we make those bicycles faster and faster? So documentation clinicians, we, you all are quite familiar with that, right? The s the I, the CPT assistants, that's great. But now how who do we give the bicycles to?

The billers the schedulers, et cetera. So you should see that the technology. That you decide to use should be getting better and better. So for billing, we heard a lot of really great examples where things are to get automated and clean claims just go out the first time so that you don't have to do a bunch more things.

Can we make it then easier to take them the edge cases, the denials? Can we merge that into what the clinicians have in front of them to warn them ahead of time or capture the information on in the right spot? There's so many of these little edge cases that happen where like a certain payer doesn't cover this code or not.

When you combine this and that. You can't remember all those things, right? It just should happen. It should remind you, it should make it easy, right? And feel like you're pedaling downhill on that piece for scheduling. There's a lot of exciting things for us to do to make sure things get scheduled.

Obviously we have the automations now, a lot of great pieces brought out here that are really the key. But can we do something to make that even easier for patients to, be able to go back and forth to reschedule in more natural, ways and things like that. For the for the compliance stuff, right?

We've got all of our historical stuff. Could that compliance stuff happen? And that suggestion, that nudge when you're actually in the room with a person, get that integrated in because having a more compliant note also then probably reduces the denials that you're gonna have and the data that might be missing, that's gonna cause someone to have to do something else later.

And so I list, these things and these are the trends, right? This is what you'll see. The system should be getting smarter and doing more for you, either because it becomes easier, it happens in an automated fashion, or it, pre-fills the information for you. It, it calls the insurer and looks something up.

It does the claim statusing for you. There's all these really exciting things or AI to do and. If you're on a bicycle and the hill is getting, steeper and you feel like you're picking up speed with less and less effort, that's what the AI tools, that's what the AI systems that you use should do across your entire, life and all the different things you use, but especially the EMR that you're using to help deliver care to patients that come to you looking for help.

Hopefully that's a fun way to think about it. And excited to, to share and build and launch more things to folks soon. But yeah.

Marla: Perfectly said and so inspiring and I hope everybody is on a downhill bike going, as fast as they possibly can. 'cause that's how we all work together to better this industry.

And I do wanna open up to questions 'cause I wanna hear from you guys to find out what else you wanna hear about. First, you're just gonna see a poll pop up. If you wanna learn more about prediction health, about prompt, about both, about Whitney's clinic east Spine Sport, or about hi def Zach's, please feel free to put that in.

They are happy to share and talk with you and help. So feel free to. Mention what else you would like to learn more about, and then please put some questions in the q and a. I would love to hear from you guys. What else do you wanna ask Whitney and Zach, and what do you wanna know about? What are your fears or your hesitations?

And questions for them since you have them here for you today.

And as we're waiting for some questions to come in Zach and Whitney would love to just have some advice to additional clinic owners, admins, billers of if they are hesitant to make a switch or to adopt tools, just to give some advice on what helped you get to that point and why would you feel you can help them for these tools as well.

Zach: Yeah, I'd say, in a world of healthcare, we all know this. This has been, this is just reported all the time, right? Shrinking workforce. Rising costs. Lowering reimbursements. The switching costs, right? Like when people think about switching an EMR, switching a system, adopting a new system, it's really like the, that we talk about switching costs.

Is the pain of staying, is that higher? Is that lower than the pain of switching? And like I think the perceived pain of switching sometimes. Is higher than the actual pain of switching. And so I would say like really make sure that you are doing your diligence in looking at new tools that are coming onto the market in a variety of different areas.

Pilot things. Make sure that you know what's coming because companies out there are gonna adopt these tools and become more efficient, and they're gonna be the ones that start to take market share because it's much easier to take that market share because of their tools. And it's just like any technology, right?

You don't want to get left behind in this kind of thing, especially when it impacts the clinician's life. So much and that's your, your lifeline to a successful business is having happy employees. And then the rest solves itself. And so really making sure that you are auditing your systems and figuring out, like what I do every day is I come in and say, what are people doing all the time that I can automate, which I can, create some sort of system that makes them to not have to do this and then that they can focus on more high leverage or things that humans need to touch and that's really what, I, I think about every single day.

Marla: Thank you. And Whitney, any last minute pieces for the audience today as well?

Whitney: I think for us, we actually went through this process of feeling stagnant with our current system.

We went through a very big kind of research project two different occasions. And honestly prompts stood out above all the others just as far as the technology was concerned. And while, I think we're a little bit in a little bit different scenario. We have 75 clinicians at this point.

We have a lot of different age demographics in that as well, which can traditionally play a role. No offense to anyone who's above the age of 45 on here, that's a clinician, but that's really been something that has prevented us from moving into a change because your staff does.

They like what they like and they know what they know. And but. We literally, from the time that we did the onboarding until now, I have not received a single complaint from a therapist or front office member in regards to the functionality of the technology that they're utilizing.

To me that pays for itself because of how much that was a resounding issue with what we were dealing with before. So I would say do your research and the research will stand for itself when that time comes to make that decision. Okay,

Marla: great. And that's a great feedback coming from somebody who just made the switch, so appreciate that.

And we do have a couple questions coming in. So one is, could you offer the number of patients per hour seen in your clinics? And as you use prompt, if this metric has increased?

Whitney: Yeah, I'll take that one. 'cause I think Zach said they're one-on-one for an hour. So we actually, we do so we are in network with all insurance carriers in East Tennessee.

We actually schedule our scheduling's a little bit different, so we do an hour for every eval, and then our return patients are scheduled every 30 minutes. And there's overlap obviously with that. Our goal is for our clinical team to spend 45 minutes to an hour. So a lot of times we're in a situation where we're able to allow our therapists to really control their scheduling.

So if they have higher functioning patients, they can utilize their time and skills to make sure that those are maybe backed up with manual patients and things like that. So yeah, for us I wouldn't tell you that there's necessarily. A direct correlation to the average number of visits per day, per se.

But I would tell you that it's significantly reduced our cancellation rate.

Marla: I think that's a better way to frame it. It's not that you're just adding more patients, you're actually seeing the number of patients that you can in that day.

Whitney: Number, yeah. So we're hitting our metrics, which for our PTs is to stay between a 10 to 12 per day average.

And then. For our PTAs, 'cause we do utilize team systems. They're at an average of 12 to 14 per day. We're hitting those metrics and we're seeing our cancellation date rates reduce. So that's, that was overall the goal. Great.

Zach: I would say also, even if you're seeing a one-on-one caseload, you can still look at it as visits per hour because all the empty spots are not a visit.

And so if I look at a 10 hour day and I have less patients on the schedule, I'm seeing net less patients per hour. And so I'd say we've gone from. Yeah, like using all of these tools, right? All this automated stuff, all like maximizing all of the benefits of like prompt Plus for us. If I look at the last 90 days, an 18% cancellation rate, but a 90.

2.5% efficiency means I'm refilling a lot of those appointments. And so I am getting less openings on my schedule, which are leading to, a higher net, profit on the clinician. And so it's, our clinicians are averaging. More PTs per week or more visits per week than they were on our previous EMR, even in a one-to-one model.

And so that only scales I'm sure with two, two to one, three to one, those kind of practice models. It just creates more leverage.

Marla: Perfect. Thank you. And I know we actually are at time and there's a few more questions that came in at the end, so we will make sure to reach back out and answer these questions for you.

But we just really appreciate your time and being here today and understanding that you can still be evaluating your practice where you're leaking time, money, or energy. And there are ways and tools. To be able to solve those areas and continue to make all of your staff happy. So on behalf of all of prompt Prediction Health, Zach and Whitney, thank you for being here.

Keep this conversation going in your networks and we'll see you at the next webinar.

Whitney: Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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