Introducing Practice Independence (PIN #16)

Hello! 

If you’re a new reader, welcome to our community of forward-thinking rehab practice owners and clinicians.

If you’ve been with us from the beginning, first of all, you’re awesome. Keep being awesome. But you’ll also notice that we’ve evolved from “Rehab Tech Stack” to “Practice Independence.”

This reflects a new name and updated format while staying true to our core goal: developing the go-to resource for practice owners and clinicians ready to innovate and grow with technology.

Let’s get moving!

Stay informed, stay innovative.

Range of Motion 🏅 

• The Remedy: Elevate front-desk operations with AI. Indie Health co-founder and CTO Eric deRegt discusses how to pick the right AI application.

• Clinical Intelligence: Are healthcare orgs ready for generative AI?

• Indie Insider: Indie unveils redesigned website and opens user waitlist.

• Pulse Check: Tell us which administrative task(s) consumes most of your energy.

The Remedy 💪

Imagine a typical front desk at a rehab therapy (OT, PT, ST, CT) office. 

When an intake call comes in, the front-desk employee asks for all the information they’ll need to schedule an appointment. They manually enter that information into various systems or record it on paper to upload later.

At the same time, the employee must navigate scheduling appointments, managing insurance verification, handling patient check-ins, and more — often on their own.

The barrage of manual tasks invites error, like data entry mistakes or missed calls. It also doesn’t allow the employee to be fully present with the patient on the phone or those sitting in the waiting room. 

This prevents the employee from reaching their full potential — just think about the valuable tasks they could complete if they weren’t overloaded with administrative drudgery: building relationships with patients, implementing quality improvement initiatives, developing patient payment plans, and so much more.

The situation is not simply inconvenient for employees and patients — it also brings about downstream consequences, like:

• Employee burnout 

• Patient dissatisfaction 

• Issue with collections

• Lost business 

Work smarter, not harder

Evaluating operational workflows at rehab therapy offices has shown Indie Health co-founder and CTO Eric deRegt that hiring more people, or forcing them to work harder, is not the answer.

Instead, practices should adopt healthcare-specific, ideally specialty-specific, AI applications to handle systematic, repetitive front-desk tasks.

By tackling the grunt work, AI empowers people to take on higher-value tasks, allowing them to grow in their careers and drive growth for the practice.

But AI implementation is often a black box. 

This leaves practices wondering what solutions they actually need, especially when so many options are available.

deRegt has developed a process-driven framework for evaluating them.

He breaks down front-desk AI implementation into four concrete stages to demystify the process and reveal the capabilities that practices should seek from potential vendors.

Dive deeper into the process in our tactical guide.

Clinical Intelligence 💡

• Physical therapy isn’t just for rehabilitation — it can also be preventative care. (U.S. News and World Report)

• AI has the potential to transform rural healthcare. (Forbes)

• Healthcare organizations think that generative AI could help combat burnout. But are they ready for genAI implementation? (Healthcare Dive)

Want to learn more about Indie Health?

Indie is on a mission to improve the quality of life for rehab providers and their patients by combining technology with world-class rehab therapy. 

Click here to join the waitlist. We have limited spots available!