Here is a summary of that conversation. If you’d like to hear the entire interview, just click “play” on the video player below.
Can you give a little bit of background about Therapy Advantage?
Therapy Advantage started in 2007 and is based out of Columbus, Ohio. We started in a home office in Columbus, and now,15 years later, we cover almost all of Ohio, and we’re up into the Southern part of Michigan.
That’s how things have progressed for us over the past few years. Operationally, we have three branch offices. We have our Columbus office, our Northwest office, and our Cincinnati office.
Can you talk to us about how Therapy Advantage handled the patient matching process before CliniConnects?
It was a manual process. You would have to remember things like where the patient lives and who are all the therapists that live in that city – or cover that county. Then an employee would mentally match up patients with therapists.
It was all done manually. We literally had a list of every therapist, every discipline, and the counties that they cover. And that’s what we referred to.
Then, we would manually text everybody. “Hey, can you take this patient? Hey, can you take that patient?” So, lots of tracking, lots of manual work with lists, and so forth.
What would happen if someone in the office with a lot of data in their head decided to leave?
It was a constant struggle.
Recently the intake coordinator for our largest branch quit unexpectedly. She had a lot of information in her head, and my fear was always, what happens when she leaves – or if something happens to her? Fortunately, we implemented CliniConnects several months before she left.
It would be a complete mess if we had not already implemented CliniConnects. With her gone, we have all-hands-on deck. Normally, that would be chaos. CliniConnects gives us one place to store all of the data from anywhere because it’s web-based.
What was the reason you originally made the decision to implement CliniConnects?
There were two main reasons. First, I didn’t want to rely on somebody’s memory. That’s too much control in one person’s hands. I wanted to regain control of that data.
Second, we’ve been making a companywide push to automate over the past year. Everything we can automate, we’ve been automating. That led us to CliniConnects.
How do you feel that the service has been so far that you received from CliniConnects?
I can honestly say that I have never worked with a company that has provided as much customer service. You guys are unbelievably accessible.
I most appreciate that I can call and ask something like “Hey, can you implement this in CliniConnects; can you somehow tweak this to help me with this problem?” And your team digs into the problem. You want to solve the problem and the root cause. Often, the system already has the solution, but I just don’t know because I’m a newer user. Usually, one of two things will happen. You’ll show me the feature that’s already in place, or we can implement a new process.
It’s awesome.
If you were to summarize how it's helped you and your team, how would you summarize that?
That doesn’t happen with all referrals, of course. We all have to deal with some problem-solving, and you’ll never get away from that. But automating a large portion or percentage of the assignment process, it’s huge. It takes a process that required a person to problem solve every referral and automate it. Anybody can push the buttons through CliniConnects. You don’t need a high-level thinker. You can let the algorithm run. That’s the beauty of the automation of CliniConnects.
We want our admin team and coordinators to have elevated thinking. We want them to problem solve and make decisions that are best for the company and be able to move puzzle pieces around and manipulate caseloads. But when your team’s bogged down with simple actions like texting 50,000 therapists every single day, they don’t have the capacity to make those higher-level decisions and do those higher-level tasks. Allowing the system to take all of that automation work off them means that our people have the capacity to do the higher level thinking that I need them to do.
