Integrated Musculoskeletal Care Sees Operational & Financial Gains with DrChrono EHR & RCM
About the Practice
Integrated Musculoskeletal Care, or IMC, grew out of a small orthopedic clinic and was the brainchild of CEO Chad Gray, who wanted to improve and standardize the delivery of musculoskeletal care. In 2010, IMC opened its doors and began implementing its unique model with self-insured employers and health plans in Tallahassee, Florida.
Since then, the company has expanded into multiple states, from Arizona to South Carolina and Texas. They employ about 25 physical therapists, a handful of chiropractors and also provide telehealth services to clients in every state but Alaska. The company sees roughly between 8,000 - 9,000 new cases per year.
“We’re a little bit unique in that when we are building a new practice, it’s not based off of demand from physician groups or hospital groups. It’s in conjunction with self insured-employers that we have direct contracts with. Oftentimes, we’re in manufacturing locations or in near-site facilities that are close by so that employees and family members of the employers that we work with have easy access to access our care,” said Nick Belles, VP of Operations.
IMC specializes in outpatient orthopedic care, particularly for those on the pre-surgical side who are looking to avoid procedures, injections, MRIs and CT scans. Because of their relationship with self-insured employers, most clinics tend to treat a working-age population, but their patient demographics are still quite diverse.
The Challenge
IMC had previously partnered with another EMR company in hopes of receiving customizable features important to their physical therapy clinics. But the process was arduous and became too cumbersome to maintain.
“It took too much time to get there, and a lot of the features we needed just weren’t available. Because of that, we were working partially electronic and partially paper-based, so our clinicians were still required to have paper-based charts,” Nick said.
In addition, as newer clinics were growing, the feasibility of adding more administrative staff was low.
“As we expanded, we really needed something completely electronic and to have tablets that were easy to use for those new clinics.”
Billing was also a struggle. Their integration with a third party billing system was unreliable, and because the company hired their own billers on staff, it required extra internal resources to ensure accurate and timely payments.
Introducing DrChrono
In April 2019, IMC made the official switch to DrChrono. A colleague from a partner clinic used the system, and up until that point, they’d been searching for physical therapy-specific platforms. However, they found DrChrono to have the high level of document customization that their offices needed.
“Our clinicians perform a very specific type of physical therapy, and that doesn't always integrate with more traditional systems. We needed the ability to build our own forms in the system and make it an easy transition.”
In addition, Nick found the EHR to be user-friendly and more intuitive than others they’d found. And while they weren’t originally intending to hand over their medical billing efforts, they decided signing up for DrChrono RCM could offload much of their administrative overhead. The custom report generator alone was simple to use and has provided useful insight into the business’ operations.
Nick was also impressed at how DrChrono’s RCM team was able to quickly get up to speed with a more complicated type of billing that IMC required.
“We have a lot of direct contracts with employers, where we’re billing bundled case rates, instead of individual CPT codes each time,” he said. But DrChrono’s RCM experts were able to swiftly handle the unconventional process.
Impact
Not only has the customization and ease-of-use heightened IMC staff’s productivity and efficiency but having a dedicated RCM team that shoulders the billing burden has optimized their practices as well.
"We were able to essentially just have one billing contact person on our side,” said Nick.
Between January and March 2020, the practices’ clean claim rates averaged 99%, with an average of 14.8 days spent in Accounts Receivable. And Nick is confident that IMC will continue to benefit from DrChrono’s cloud-based EHR, customization and billing experts.
“I can certainly say just from a bottom line standpoint, it's much better now that we're integrated with DrChrono.”