NEWS

Athletico Physical Therapy is one of the nation’s largest physical and occupational therapy providers to communities, employers and athletes in more than 550 clinics throughout 13 states. Services include physical and occupational/hand therapy, workers’ compensation/employer services, athletic training, virtual care and a multitude of specialty programs. Athletico also has a new Home Therapy service offering that relies on Margie from AlertMD (an Updox partner) to help them match patients with therapists to expedite care and streamline referral management.

Prior to Margie, Athletico’s process was entirely manual, creating a time and resource burden for admin staff who were also busy with other tasks. With 15 to 25 new patients and 200 - 250 home visits per week, Athletico needed a way to automate and streamline their patient referral and intake process.

Through Margie, new patients complete a survey via a chat-bot on Athletico’s website to schedule a Home Therapy appointment. A push notification is then sent to participating Athletico therapists in the same geographic area. The first therapist to respond to the notification is assigned to that patient.

“Margie definitely makes the process easier by automating intake and initiate scheduling for us,” says LeeAnn Hulteen, PT, Manager of Home Therapy Services at Athletico. “Prior to this, we were managing referral information manually and had multiple text threads to determine therapists’ availability to accept a patient. The ability to notify therapists on a mass scale about a new referral in the area changes the game for us and reduces the time it takes to match patients with therapists.”

Athletico prides itself on delivering outstanding customer service and their high customer satisfaction survey scores reflect that. “Ensuring excellent service from a patient’s first encounter with our company is essential to building a positive relationship,” says Colin Crawford, PT, Director of Home Therapy Services at Athletico. “With Margie, we’re able to notify therapists of available patients in their area, starting with a streamlined, easy process.”

Athletico began using Margie for Home Therapy scheduling in August 2020. Implementation was smooth. The Margie team hosted training sessions and webinars for Athletico’s clinical and office teams. Patient adoption has been well received, as the Margie survey form was created to be quick and easy.

“AlertMD and Updox have been very easy to work with. They were open to suggestions and allowed us to tweak the workflow to make it fit our service offering. The ability to customize a product to suit our business needs is a big advantage and we’ve always been impressed by their responsiveness,” says Colin.

Increase practice patient intake while improving patient satisfaction

Margie helps businesses convert more referrals and recalls into appointments with automated outreach to increase patient volume. Margie’s automated phone, chat and messaging system can be easily implemented within the practice and supports sending images, videos, and interactive responses to patients for improved engagement. Margie streamlines the referral process to eliminate phone tag and support self-scheduling. Learn more at https://www.alertmd.com/margie.

Hands-on care is great. Hands-on billing is not. Manual processes slow down healthcare – impacting cash flow, billing costs, and staff satisfaction – while taking time away from direct patient care.

When Ardent Health Services wanted to improve efficiency and automate processes associated with patient engagement and charge capture – they looked no further than AlertMD. Headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., Ardent Health includes 31 hospitals, with 1,5000 providers and 26,000 employees across six states. Together, their hospitals serve 2.6 million provider encounters daily.

Cindy Willis, Director of Professional Auditing Services for Ardent Health, first heard of AlertMD through her work with a different health system. When she joined Ardent Health in 2017 and worked through their acquisition of UT Health East Texas, she knew immediately that the system could benefit from what AlertMD offered and began implementing AlertMD’s charge capture solutions for streamlined cash flow.

“Overall, AlertMD eliminates so many manual processes for us and simplifies processes across the organization for our staff and our physicians. Our time to charge is easily trackable and it provides better checks and balances. We save time in billing and payment processes and can get claims out the door faster. That improves our cash flow overall,” she says.

“Charge Capture from AlertMD helps us increase the amount of charges processed in a month,” says Cindy. “Let’s say you have a small practice and see 300 patients a month. You are probably carrying over 100 charges in a month because you couldn’t get them processed. Now, if that same practice was using AlertMD, those charges could be auto-batched and submitted. The practice could recoup 95 percent of their charges that month because they are submitting in the same day. It just makes better sense for a business.”

Hospital providers also agree. “They think it is phenomenal. Because they are so enthusiastic, staff in other areas are asking when they’ll get to use it,” says Cindy.

Another benefit of AlertMD’s charge capture solution for Ardent Health is better documentation of services and that it will even suggest codes for providers. “That really takes it an extra step for us and a key selling point,” she says.

Cindy reports that their implementation of AlertMD went “fantastic. AlertMD has a great support team and are very committed to relationship building as part of a continued partnership. We’re very happy with how things are working out. The return on investment we get from AlertMD just speaks for itself. No more manual work or effort lost. It’s incredibly efficient.”

Learn more about how AlertMD helps healthcare improve patient engagement and increase profitability.