Best Foot Forward: How an EHR Sealed a Partnership

Dr. Adam Siegel and Dr. Michael Zuri met during their residency and developed a relationship that went beyond friendship. When Dr. Siegel got married, Dr. Zuri was his best man. So when they had an opportunity to join forces and create a joint practice together, they jumped on it.

Seeing a merger as a way to realize their dream of sharing a practice, Dr. Siegel and Dr. Zuri began to discuss how they could join the two practices together.

Having seen many other practices go through the laborious transition from paper records to an EHR, All Podiatry Group had avoided adopting an EHR themselves. They had decided that the time and headache they’d save from the EHR wasn’t worth the downtime of transitioning all their records. APG had just accepted the inefficiencies of paper records.

But now that they would be merging their practices, Dr. Siegel and Dr. Zuri quickly realized that choosing the right EHR, one that would allow them to access health records for multiple clinic locations and accommodate workflows, would be essential for creating a successful partnership. This meant they would need to take the decades of paper charts from All Podiatry Group and input them into a modern EHR.

Dr. Siegel already had experience with DrChrono EHR after choosing it for his practice when he established Modern Foot & Ankle in 2017. He knew that it was designed to work for one or many medical offices, which made it a great fit for their merger. Once they decided on DrChrono, it took less than two weeks of downtime at All Podiatry Group to achieve full adoption of the system. The results were immediate.

With common conditions and recommendations prepopulated in the dashboard, doctors’ notes became more detailed with less effort. Doctors were also able to take before and after photos on the iPad, logging them into the patient chart. Finally, because billing profiles were integrated with the EHR, the practice could immediately submit claims after visits without extra coding, making the newly merged practice more productive and efficient.

With DrChrono, administrative staff was able to spend far less time focused on repetitive tasks like check-in, appointments, and phone calls. The userfriendly interface was easy to get the hang of even for staff members who were completely new to the field. Erika, for example, worked at the front desk. She had a background in the hospitality industry and had no experience working as a medical admin, but she picked up the new system as fast as the veteran administrators.

Now that all patients were able to check-in at home on their computers, it reduced wait times from half an hour to a few minutes, allowing staff to spend less time monitoring the waiting room. Scheduling appointments were just as easy. Patients booked a time online and were automatically reminded with DrChrono’s text and email alerts. After a visit, DrChrono followed up with patients and requested a review, helping the newly merged practice build and maintain their online presence and reputation.

When an old patient came in, staff from All Podiatry Group loved no longer needing to go into storage to pull old patient charts; everything was uploaded into the EHR. They also saved time checkingeach patient’s insurance eligibility as this was also automatically done for them. The fax machine became a sort of joke because it sat there unused once the team began using DrChrono’s eFax integration.

In the process of the merger, Dr. Siegel learned that All Podiatry Group had developed some unique practices over its decades of operation. They were worried that their new EHR might not be customizable enough to accommodate APG’s unique approach. However, they found that DrChrono gave them tools to integrate many ways of doing things, all of which they were able to integrate during their short transition to the platform. Now, the merged practice is 90% paperless and the offices use digital tools such as Box to keep an electronic paper trail for consents and receipts. DrChrono’s unique blend of automation and customizability has made their partnership greater than the sum of its parts.

Case in point - the two practices are now poised to scale their profitability. With many of the previous processes that relied on manual work now automated, onboarding new team members and opening new offices is incredibly straightforward. And with overhead and staffing costs are greatly reduced, doctors and administrators can spend more time caring for patients and less time caring for repetitive tasks. Without sacrificing the quality of care, Dr. Siegel and Dr. Zuri were able to cut time spent on administrative tasks and see more patients than they ever did before. As Dr. Siegel put it, “the name of the practice is Modern Foot and Ankle, and I think the way to make an office modern, is by having the most up to date, the best technology available.”