Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a tech frontrunner for therapy practices that aide in effectively reducing the administrative burden, offers the potential to enhance patient care, automates administrative tasks, reduces clinician burnout and aids in compliance and the billing process. We will explore how important this tool can be in helping therapists get back to elevating care for their patients and practices to grow and become more efficient and profitable.
AI and Enhanced Patient Care
Personalized treatment plans are the key to maximizing outcomes.
- Information and Data-Driven Insights
- AI can help therapists identify patterns in their patients’ progress by processing information rapidly, securely, and with intention. While this doesn’t replace the value of one-on-one care, it does assist therapists in tailoring treatment plans.
- Enhanced Patient Engagement
- With the advancement of communication and EMR-integrated tools, connecting with patients for personalized feedback and motivation is easier than ever. This encourages continuity of care, progression, and adherence to the home exercise regime.
Powering through Clinician Burnout, Compliance, and Billing
The wellbeing of your therapists directly effects the quality of patient care delivery. If they are happy, your patients are happy. AI has made significant strides in assisting in the paperwork load and other requirements that have become a burden to therapists.
1.Reducing Clinician Burnout
Documentation is at the top of the list! Scribe technology (voice-to-text) helps therapists autogenerate soap notes by listening to patient and clinician treatment sessions. Utilizing AI to nearly eliminate documentation can securely autogenerate patient and therapist interaction to populate relevant information for flowsheet documentation.
2. Combating Increasing Administrative Burden In Fall of 2022, APTA performed a study on The Impact of Administrative Burden on Physical Therapist Services. They found that services are delayed due to the increased volume of administrative tasks, “ultimately impacting patients’ clinical outcomes — due to of the amount of time and resources they must spend on documentation and administrative tasks.” Today the need for built-in efficiencies and advanced tools and innovation such as AI complements the software practices can use to ultimately enable better care.
3.Enhancing Compliance
AI can quickly recall regulatory requirements and potential compliance issues and can be a useful tool in generating reports for audits.
Secure Data: AI systems can reduce the risk of security breaches and manage patient data more effectively, with rules prioritizing vital information.
Billing Accuracy: AI can improve billing accuracy by automating the coding and billing process, ensuring all services are appropriately documented and billed, and reduces the likelihood of errors and increases revenue generation for your practice.
Reporting and Analytics: AI can integrate a suite of reports that pull data directly from our EMR using historical models as a reference. Known to increase ROI by 5-10x, this built-in analytics tool reduces compliance risk, captures billable units, and monitors coding.
4. Reducing Billing Errors
Accurate billing is the backbone of any successful physical therapy practice. It ensures that services rendered are appropriately reimbursed, thus maintaining financial stability. Billing errors can lead to revenue loss, delayed payments, and decreased efficiencies, which ultimately affect patient care quality.
Conclusion
Integrating AI technology in physical therapy is a powerful tool that will positively impact care delivery, reduce clinician burnout, and streamline compliance and billing processes; however, therapy practices must be carefully consider what elements of the practice AI will best benefit them.
