Meet the A-lister from Webpt - Russell Olsen

Throughout my career, I’ve been most interested in solving big problems and breaking down barriers in health care. I’ve mainly done that through unearthing cutting-edge, financially viable technological solutions that solve the healthcare industry’s most glaring inefficiencies—thus empowering care teams to improve patient care while lowering overall healthcare costs.

My first foray in the healthcare industry was at MDdatacor (now Symphony Technology Group), where my team uncovered new ways to use natural language processing to transcribe physician notes. This helped reduce variations in care, thus improving the quality of care delivered. From there, I went to Phytel, where my team founded a methodology that leveraged automated engagement to extend the reach of care teams and improve population management. After that, I transitioned to IBM to lead the development and launch of Watson Care Manager, which used AI and machine learning technology to better equip care managers to provide personalized care at scale.

Intelligent automation is yet another innovation I foresee having a major impact on the healthcare industry. In my current role at WebPT, it has played an integral role in bringing efficiencies to otherwise manual processes, thus freeing up our employees to focus on more complex support issues, enhance the customer experience, and deepen customer loyalty. Implementing intelligent automation has also lifted the need for our customers (rehab therapy providers) to perform repetitive tasks that can take them away from spending time with patients. This, in turn, fuels a better patient experience and ultimately drives better healthcare outcomes.

In 2018, WebPT acquired BMS Practice Solutions, the largest and most-tenured billing and collections company serving the rehab therapy market. Our goal with this acquisition was to round out the revenue cycle management (RCM) capabilities of our integrated, end-to-end business solution, which empowers rehab therapy providers to attract and retain patients; streamline workflows; defensiby and electronically document; remain compliant with healthcare regulations; obtain payments more efficiently; and ensure consistent delivery of high-quality care. However, following the acquisition, we faced one major hurdle: transferring patient data that was housed in BMS’s legacy electronic medical record (EMR) system to our own.

Switching EMRs is already an incredibly laborious undertaking for providers—one that requires a lot of time spent on mindless tasks. Knowing this—and also considering the sheer size of the project at hand—we decided to look into automated solutions that would seamlessly transfer our customers’ data for them, thus eliminating the manual tasks and errors that often cause customer frustration. Automation Anywhere’s cloud-based A2019 platform soon became the clear choice.