Practice Experience Podcast: Revolutionizing Patient Access to Care

Rehab therapy has always had a bit of a brand problem. With all the advancements in technology that physical therapy has seen over the years, many patients still don’t know how to access physical therapy—and other rehab services—or even what these services are. That’s why providing access to care is so essential for rehab therapy practices to serve their patients better and improve the practice's overall business health.

In this episode of The Practice Experience Podcast, Heidi Jannenga, PT, DPT, ATC, Co-Founder and Chief Clinical Officer at WebPT, and Greg Peters, Co-founder and CEO at BetterHealthcare, get together to address the current problems facing patients wanting to access care and how they think they can solve them. 

Throughout the episode, Heidi and Greg will tackle subjects like: 

• what access to care means today,
• why connection in health care is so important, and
• How hospitality and patient experience have a role to play.

Episode Highlights: Improving Patient Access to Care

On How Access to Care Has Evolved

Greg: When I think about patient access, I see it as the most critical point when a patient—really a human being—decides to become a patient. Regardless of where they're going or what specialty they need to see, they commit to getting help and addressing a problem. If we can be part of that solution to make that better in terms of patient access, it becomes something to build on because clinical care is better than it's ever been. It's only going to get better. Access is the beginning of the journey for all patients.

On the Idea of Connection

Greg: When I was working with other physical therapists, we started to ask ourselves, “How are our patients finding us or getting on our schedule?” Then, my co-founder, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, would say, “Every time I leave the room with a patient, the first thing they say is, do you know a physical therapy clinic close to my house?” Often, he couldn’t answer because of insurance or other issues… So, I just said, what if we built a consumer-facing marketplace where people could schedule appointments into physical therapy clinics? And so we did with BetterPT in January of 2017, which later became BetterHealthcare.

On Hospitality and Patient Experience 

Greg: I think a big question is, “Can technology bring a little bit of hospitality?” It's not service, it's hospitality. So, how does technology play in that role? We've always talked about that. I think one of the benefits of technology is data collection, from a patient journey perspective. There’s lots of paperwork in healthcare and lots of redundancy still.

Heidi: How do you exude your personality from your practice through this one-dimensional computer screen? BetterHealthcare has done a great job creating a great user interface and user experience.

On Whether Online Scheduling in Health Care Needs to be Hard

Greg: Patients are going to be the best advocates for physical therapy. We hope to make their experience better. The secret sauce idea comes from my mom. She's almost 80, and when we first started, I just kept sending her experiences asking her to book an appointment…She says, “That can't do it.” So we really tested and retested that whole idea of, “Hey, you can book an airline ticket. You can book a car. It can't be this hard.” 

But it is that hard in healthcare. I think we picked a vertical where, from an integration standpoint, there's so much to unpack, but that's also our specialty. I'm very optimistic about our future because we're the best at what we do.

On the Importance of Processes to Help New Technology Succeed

Greg: Change management is hard, period. There's no other industry that has faced change management more than physical therapy has in the last decade. All of a sudden, we see these new technologies—and let's face it—new technologies that aren't necessarily improving the workflows. Instead, they're adding another workflow. It's just that it's necessary. I think we're starting to see some of that improvement in the process.

I think where our heads are at is that one, we started in PT. I love physical therapy. It's part of who I am as a human. Our focus is really on physical therapy, making access to care great, and getting to an acceptable level of standardization of creating access to care.

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