WebPT is the nation’s leading rehab therapy platform for enhancing patient care and fueling business growth. Offering solutions for scheduling, documentation, billing, outcomes tracking, and business reporting, its vision is to empower rehab therapists to achieve greatness in practice. Over its 11-year history, the company has grown from a small business of two operating out of a Phoenix coffee shop to a prominent organization with more than 500 employees. Now with 40% market share, WebPT’s user community is more than 15,000 clinics and 85,000 rehab therapy professionals strong.
In 2018, WebPT acquired BMS Practice Solutions, the largest and most-tenured billing and collections company serving the rehab therapy market, with the goal of bringing a comprehensive, end-to-end clinical and business solution to therapy practices of all sizes. However, there was one last hurdle: transferring customer data, housed in BMS’s legacy electronic medical record (EMR) system, into its own EMR.
In the rehab therapy space, switching EMRs is a notoriously tedious undertaking, requiring a lot of time to replicate simple tasks. Although it could be done manually, the sheer size of this particular project caused the company to consider other solutions that would seamlessly transfer the data, and ultimately save time, money, and frustration for employees and customers alike.
WebPT has always been keenly focused on innovation to help its customers enhance operations and fuel business growth. So, investing in robotic process automation (RPA) to bring efficiency to otherwise manual processes was a highly attractive option that would allow employees to focus on delivering fast service and exceptional customer experience.
Russell Olsen, SVP of Innovation and Product Management at WebPT
Since WebPT is fully cloud-based and serves a highly-regulated industry, the company required a secure, web-based solution that would not only streamline employee workflows but also deliver a better customer experience by eliminating the strain on resources that often comes with switching EMRs.
As the world’s first web-based and cloud-native RPA-as-a-service, the Automation Anywhere Enterprise A2019 platform was the clear choice.
In 2019, WebPT successfully leveraged the Enterprise A2019 platform to efficiently transfer 11 data EMR transitions from BMS’s legacy system to its own. This alleviated the burden from customers, resulting in a more positive experience through the transition.
Initially, some of the biggest challenges were understanding the needed requirements for the virtual machines while also meeting security standards and HIPAA compliance requirements.
To handle these complexities properly and securely, specific bots were created to execute these use cases: clinical documentation, scheduling, and patient appointment reminders. From there, the company was able to build additional bots that were similar but could accommodate customers with different configurations and complexities. For instance, large, multi-practice clinics needed a slightly different bot to handle the practice’s more complex demands.
To date, 24 bots are in production and handle each of these iterations. RPA has allowed WebPT to continue to scale more efficiently giving the company more flexibility to maintain normal operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automation has also alleviated the need for simple, repetitive tasks, freeing up employees to focus on more complex support issues to ensure high standards for customer successes.
With the help of bots, WebPT can execute on 35 data transitions from BMS’s legacy EMR system to the current one concurrently, enabling a 5x workload capacity increase. This will save an estimated $700,000 in labor costs.
Kellie Cohen, RPA Developer/Data Integration, WebPT
WebPT wants to continue scaling its automation program by adding to its team of bot builders, which currently requires two full-time employees. This will allow the company to start prioritizing issues within the business and automate areas where there is opportunity to gain more efficiencies from both an employee and customer perspective.
Before the end of 2020, the goal is to expand automation outside of operations, eventually rolling it out company wide.