Emerging Trends And The Future Of EMR’s With Sharif Zeid Of MW Therapy

Over the past 15 years, EMR software has evolved into a necessity for healthcare providers, with benefits and capabilities changing significantly over time. Sharif Zeid of MW Therapy has been in the industry for almost 20 years and has seen those changes. Thus, he is in a good position to share his insights on the Physical Therapy Owners Club podcast into what is trending in the EMR industry and what to look forward to in the future. Joining Nathan Shields, Sharif talks about how patient portals, AI, marketing tools, and management reports can all be had in an EMR nowadays. He goes into detail on how these digital innovations can significantly improve the capabilities of PT clinic owners, and how to utilize them with utmost care.

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I am excited to bring on Sharif Zeid, Founder and Business Director of MWTherapy , an EMR company. Sharif, it’s great to have you on.

I appreciate it. I’m excited to be here. I can’t wait for the conversation so thank you for having me.

It’s good to have you. I know you guys have been around for a few years and I want to share with the audience your story, how you got into MWTherapy, how long you’ve been around, all that stuff, and especially how to get in touch with you. To get into the meat of the discussion, you’re the Founder and you know about all the other EMRs and yours in particular. Tell us about some of the trends that you’re seeing when it comes to EMR software in general.

I have been doing this for a while so see the arc of the story a little bit as if we were watching a movie. What we’re seeing is a lot of folks adopted their EMR. It seems like forever ago but for most practices, it was somewhere in the 10 to maybe 13 or 15-year range from 2023. Before, almost everybody was on paper. Think about 2005, ‘06, ‘07, and ‘08. In 2008, everybody remembers when the iPhone came out. You have to change your mindset when you go back to those years.

Since a lot of people have been with their EMR for a while, we’re seeing a lot of interest in the market in terms of maybe it’s time for something new, especially if in that entire time they’ve been one of one thing. We’re seeing a lot of folks open to an EMR switch where they weren’t before and not always stoked about making a switch but willing to consider it.

Some are for cost reasons and some could be for features. There’s an infinite number of reasons, staff and team happiness, things like that, that mesh in with other things like retention and challenges around keeping employees. We’re seeing a lot of that. As a result, the EMR space itself is evolving to offer new things. That’s the broad trend that we’re seeing out there in the space.

It’s interesting to think back. I opened my clinic in 2002 and we were paper-based. Eventually, we brought on an EMR and then the new thing was to be cloud-based. If we could have cloud-based EMRs where we didn’t focus on having all the storage here on site, we could have everything on the cloud, and having access from our phones was a big deal. Now, you simply have to have that as software.

That’s the gradual trend of most technology. It’s nothing new but it’s cool to see that EMR has come that far. It is expected that we can have all access all the time on any device. Going forward, there are a lot of nuances and big movements toward other things like it was to get to a cloud-based service. Where do you think we’re headed in some of those regards?

I couldn’t agree more. This is a point of inflection for this stuff that there’s some level of maturity with it in the space. Also, practice expectations. They’ve changed. Going to the cloud was a big thing. It’s not a big thing anymore. It’s considered a baseline expectation, like a car should probably have four wheels and a radio in it to get started to get down the road. It’s 2023. From my exceed, I’m saying, “What’s the next couple of years going to look like?” Part of that is to look back at the past years and then look forward. There are some critical areas where we’re going to see things.

To rattle off a couple of them and we could probably talk about them but patient-facing tech is big in terms of how patients interact with your practice. If you look back to that years for your practice, bringing on your EMR involved and working with your staff had nothing to do directly with your patients. Now, we’re talking about what can patients do with your practice digitally. That’s things like online booking, registration, paying online, and a smattering of others. Patient-facing stuff is big.

Working with your PT staff has nothing to do directly with your patients. With EMR software, we are now talking about what patients can do with your practice digitally.
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We can’t have a conversation like this without mentioning AI. It became the new buzzword. A couple of years ago, I was laughing because the big word was big data and everybody was talking about big data, “Do you have big data?” “I have big data.” “Are you doing anything with it?” These buzzwords come and go but they can have a lasting impact. AI is probably one of those that nobody’s going to get out without having some impact from AI. EMR and in general the PT space is no exception to that. That will be big.

The other two are marketing growing tremendous importance for practices in the last couple of years, like increased competition, different regions of the country having different pressures, reimbursement pressures, all those sorts of things, and driving marketing. The last one I would say is the importance of worthwhile actionable analytics and data.

A couple of years ago, it was like just writing your notes on the computer. It’s cool. Now, I can see it on the computer. We’re trying to say, “How do I take all this data? I’ve got EMR and documentation clinical. I have billing data.” Those are four things when we think about the next couple of years that we are thinking about, hearing about, talking about, and focusing on.

In regards to the patient-facing technology or the patient portal, that sounds cool that patients can have access to the calendar and their bills with the EMR, and that would be nice. Do you see EMRs such as yours maybe integrating similar apps? I’ve had representatives of PT Wired and Weave on the show and even people talking about RTM utilization. These apps help engage patients with their home exercise program. Did they do them or not? There’s an app for the clinic where you can go in and say, “What was my home exercise program?” Is that some of the stuff that you’re talking about as well besides calendaring and access to their balance?

Those are great examples of patient-facing technology. It’s a fancy way of saying systems that patients interact with. Usually, the clinic interacts with them too to put in and fill the bucket with something that’s interesting to do. Those are great examples. There’s patient engagement. Patient-facing tech is this big bubble. It’s not one thing. You’ve got different takes on it from different folks from some of the folks that you mentioned doing different things. Some have a HEP focus and some have a different focus.

From our perspective as an EMR, our focus is on the core functionality that a patient needs to do to interact with the things that they would otherwise do over the phone call to make a payment, schedule an appointment, become a new patient, and maybe even some things that they might do in person like check-in and answer some basic questions about, “Has your insurance changed?” We are very into patient portals.

We have our own that we’ve built. That’s how important we think it is and is going to be to the space. While we do integrations with all kinds of products and there’s room for many of those in the engagement space in general, we think that it’s requisite or if it’s not now, it will be very soon for an EMR to have a competent portal where patients can do things.

Remember, the whole idea is it’s a win-win. The practice wins because they’re offloading work potentially to the patient who’s happy to take it, which is the other half of the win. The patients win because while they’re buying something on Amazon for $8 at midnight, they may also be booking out towards their plan of care or they may be paying a bill to you so you’re getting some more velocity on the money. It’s a rare win-win.

I mentioned the expectations. Patients’ expectations are also sky-high. They’re like, “Why can’t I do anything with your practice online? It’s annoying. Stop sending me paper statements. I don’t want stuff in my mailbox anymore.” There are lots of opportunities. The last thing so I don’t ramble too much, RTM is this interesting area, something that we’re tuned into as well. It all fits into that same bucket. RTM requires patients to engage with the practice digitally. There are lots of opportunities and maybe some reimbursements that come with it, which would be a nice welcome opportunity.

Is that something that your EMR has capabilities with regarding RTMs? That’s a new thing and it’s nice if an EMR is capable of.

We do have some functionality around RTM. It’s an evolving area. It’s interesting. We have some clients that are very into it and doing a decent bit of it and some that are kicking the tires on it. Some still don’t quite know that it exists. The big debate I’m hearing out there is, “Is it profitable?” The reimbursements are great to have new access to a new stream that didn’t exist before. However, it has to be weighed against the time of the monitoring. That’s the last word in it.

That’s where technology can help too because if we can help automate some of the monitoring parts of it within the bounds of the regulations and the rules and make it easy to focus on patients who maybe aren’t complying or things like that, then we can bubble up those people. We’re very tuned in. We do have functionality around it. I expect that to be a growing part and fit into all of this same bucket of patient-facing stuff.

I have one more question before we get off of that. In the last few years, I haven’t seen a lot of EMRs do it. Do you have the capability or do you foresee the capability of keeping credit cards on file? In terms of patient collections, that could be huge. Especially if you have a cancellation policy, it’s almost inevitable that you have a credit card on file if you’re going to charge it. It makes it so much easier on collecting on the backend. There can be some intricacies with HIPAA and whatever regulations there might be but keeping your credit card on file is a huge game changer for a lot of small businesses that have a hard time collecting the $60 and $80 balances.

Right on trend, I always think back years ago the patient portion of the reimbursement was maybe not as big a deal because patients paid 10% and the insurance paid 90%. As everybody’s trying to chase these premium reductions and as a result, higher deductibles, more copays, and things like that, the patient part is not something you can blink at anymore. In my experience, most practices are pretty hesitant to send anybody to collections at the end of the day. Whether that’s a good strategy or not, because you take such a hit on it anyways, you don’t want to get there.

To answer your question, saving a card on file is a nice convenience for the patient because if you pitch it that way, they’ll take it that way as, “We’ll get your balances and keep them up-to-date in terms of collections.” It’s hard to find a faster way to get it going. Yes, we do have cards saved on file. We’ve had it since 2019. We’ve solved all the HIPAA challenges around that. It’s tremendously beneficial. What we recommend is that clients can integrate that into their paperwork at the beginning where you have consent to treat and consent to charge. You put it up in front and you’re like, “Here you go, give us your card. It’s going to be so easy,” and everybody likes it. It works well.

I’m asking specifics regarding MWTherapy but maybe your experience is similar to a lot of EMR capabilities out there. What’s your capability in terms of sending messages direct to text through the EMR? Is that a possibility?

It is. We rolled this out. We call it patient conversations. We have that capability. It’s in the app on our end so it means what the clinicians and the staff use. The patient has their phone and that is part of our patient portal. We were able to check off some security boxes too. It’s better than just emailing, plus texting is the new email as they say. You get an email but you open a text or whatever that saying is. Years from now, maybe I’ll have to have a chip in our head at that point. Email is email and it still has its place. We’ve been using texting for a while for things like reminders and we’re expanding that, texting patients as much as we can where it makes sense.

Talking about AI, it’s a new thing but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It’s here to stay. AI is going to go or stay around.

It certainly seems that way. The stock market certainly seems to agree if you fall for any of that stuff. It’s here to stay. Like anything else, it’s still not fully clear what it means and for whom it means anything. This dream is like, “ChatGPT will write my initial evaluation for me in two and a half seconds flat by saying Nathan is a patient,” and then it goes from there. How realistic is that?

We can only dream.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of potential. The biggest challenge specific to PT and healthcare is the security aspect of it because AI requires lots of information to be functional and useful. Healthcare doesn’t lend itself to just sharing everything you know about everybody with ChatGPT so that I do something and then ten minutes later, you have a conversation with it. All of a sudden, you have my patient data. We don’t want that to happen. That’s the longer term.

Artificial intelligence requires lots of information to be functional and useful. But healthcare doesn’t lend itself to sharing everything it knows about everybody with tools like ChatGPT.
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Shorter term, it’s immediately potentially useful for things like marketing. If people aren’t thinking about that, they may want to. I’ll give you a simple example. Can you use ChatGPT or whatever your favorite one is, Bard from Google, or whomever to jumpstart a marketing effort, a written article, say a blog for your post for your website, or some other thing you’re going to send to your referral base? Can you have it write the first draft? I wouldn’t send anything it writes on without reading it. Can you get it to jumpstart you? That has no HIPAA stuff attached to it.

Savvy practices are at least playing around with it and then way longer term, maybe it has some clinical value in terms of diagnosis or treatment. That’s an even harder problem to solve. It’s not going anywhere but in 2024, is it going to change everything? Probably not. There need to be some incremental steps that make sense.

I had Pedro Teixeira of Prediction Health on a few episodes ago. The cool way in which they’re using it is for compliance purposes. It can assess your documentation and say, “This might need to be worded this way or if you are going to do this exercise, then you should bill this code and it pays better.” It can assess your documentation for compliance purposes. I can’t remember off the top of my head. I should go back, review that, and see where he saw some of the AI stuff going.

They’re doing some cool stuff over there. I know some of the folks over there and that’s a great implementation for this stuff. The insurance is going to be doing this to practices so in a sense, practices need to do it to insurance. I don’t know how else to say that politely but it’s a double-edged sword and it needs to cut both ways. Back to that thing about having a ton of data, who has a ton of data? Insurance companies have a ton of data so they can put that to work for themselves. They love to find new and novel ways seemingly every day how to not pay claims or how to pay less on a claim.

This isn’t about PT practices over billing or anything crazy like that. This is just putting things in a way that maximizes your payment for legitimately provided services which is deserved. PTs get beat up a lot unfortunately in the reimbursement wars. There’s a lot of sentiment out there about not being valued enough. That’s true. I’ve watched that happen every year. We get the CMS final rule. We all go in, try, and read 1,800 pages without falling asleep. It’s the same theme.

Physical therapists get beat up a lot in the reimbursement wars. There is a lot of sentiment out there about them not being valued enough.
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Look at the past couple of years you’ve had the PTA modify or try and find a way to pay less here, general reductions, and then fighting about Medicare Advantage plans, on and on. United try and chase each other to pay the lease. It’s a battle and both sides have to bring to bear what they have. That’s a valid and legitimate positive use of the data.

Would you assume that somewhere here in the next years, you’ll be incorporating some aspects of AI into your programs as well?

For sure. It’s here and it has value. We are moving in that direction.

Tell me a little bit about some of the marketing tool integrations that you have in AI. I’ve always preached the four buckets of marketing. You’ve got to reach out to current patients who are already existing and coming to your practice, reach out to past patients, and reach out to physicians and develop those relationships. Number four, have some social media presence or do things physically in the community at events, fairs, runs, and so forth. What tools are you seeing being integrated into EMRs?

We have our marketing tool called Engage , our Engage module. That hits the first three buckets that you mentioned. It is an automated emailing and messaging tool for current patients. While they’re in their course of care, we also message them before they start their course of care. Once they’ve become a patient but they haven’t started yet, we have some gap in there. Post-discharge types of things like check-ins, birthdays, and automating around that.

Current and past patients are pretty well covered. It’s a lot of set-it-and-forget-it. We automate this so that every year on the patient’s birthday, we want to email them a happy birthday and maybe a little plug for some wellness service we offer, a free checkup, or something like that, that’s a very popular, free screen or something along those lines.

As far as physicians go, we have tools like fax blasting, which everybody loves to talk about faxing in 2023 but it’s still there. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. My joke is that faxing will outlast AI somehow. It’d be 2092 and people will still be faxing. I don’t know how that could be true but I feel that it will be so I’m going with it. Fax blasting is an interesting way to go through a traditional medium but get in front of somebody’s eyeballs, which is what it’s all about.

As far as social goes, we have integrations, products like MailChimp and what have you that can help with social. We can push data over to those systems. Those are good platforms to do your posting out of and stuff like that. There are lots of ways to leverage it to hit those 4 constituencies or 3 and then through the in-person and stuff like that.

It’s funny to come back full circle but with a lot of this stuff, a lot of the question is, “What can the person receiving the message do?” If you’re marketing to Nathan and you’re like, “We have a great practice,” it’s like, “Great. Now what?” “I visited your website. What can I do?” “What if you can register online?” You have a path to do something.

People don’t generally just randomly visit websites for fun. They see something and they’re like, “That applies to me. Let me check it out.” If you don’t give them a way out other than to make a phone call, we know intrinsically from your experience that picking up the phone is the last thing anybody wants to do. They don’t want to do it.

It’s the least-used app on my phone.

They can almost forget to load that app and 50% of people wouldn’t realize that it was missing for 6 months. Even to order a pizza, they’d rather order it on an app than call somebody and say, “Did you say pepperoni?” “Yes, I said pepperoni.” You get the order and it’s mushrooms. Nobody wants that anymore. With this marketing stuff, it’s coming to a full circle in some ways what has become standardized in the eCommerce space where you have a site, people can buy, and there’s a cart.

There are these triggers that if you leave something in your cart, we try and come back to you and entice you to buy it. Every year, you get a coupon on your birthday and that makes you feel good. These concepts are not necessarily new but they are new for PT. There are lots of marketing but lots of practices are consciously thinking about and investing in it in a way that they weren’t even a couple of years ago.

It’s cool to see what’s happening, especially as you make that link back to patient portals because back in the day, probably in 2012 or 2010, we were trying to make sense of Infusionsoft and how to do all these marketing campaigns through emails. It famously had its nickname of Confusionsoft because it was difficult to navigate. Now, you can plug and play some of these things and it’s nice to see that trend forward. It’s not just a reaching-out module but also linking them back to a patient portal so they can get back into your system and giving them action items to go off of.

A lot of those tools are very powerful but at the cost, it takes more to learn the tool and use it. Building out some of those complex journeys takes skill and time. We recognize that that’s part of one of the things we try and do with Engage. We’re specialized in the PT space so we know what the journey should be to some degree.

We’re able to simplify that a little bit and deliver to somebody, “Here’s what needs to be done. It’s after the fourth visit. It’s after discharge. It’s this thing.” There are always practices that are on the edge of the curve on the front. They may still be using those kinds of tools because they are great and they can do a lot and build out even more complex stuff along the way.

Tell me a little bit about analytics then. You brought up four things initially. Not knowing MWTherapy very well, the downfall of almost all EMRs that I’ve seen in the PT space is the inability to get appropriate, accurate, and easily obtain management reports, productivity reports, or even billing reports. Billing reports are a little bit easier usually but how many skilled units do we bill per visit per hour? How many patients are we seeing per hour on it? What’s our average visit per plan of care? Those things had to be so much manual effort. If available, there’s a lot of time and energy to find some of those reports. Talk to me about some of the progressions that are being made in terms of analytic EMRs.

The changes that are happening there mirror the owners who are running these practices and the level of seriousness they take with the analytics. Some time ago, it was very basic like how many notes did we write and how many visits did we see. I’m not even sure honestly that going back a couple of years, many people were doing anything with that information. They wanted to know it to confirm what they were intuitively feeling like the practice is doing better, doing worse, or staying flat, which are three very generic blocks.

The sophistication with the owners is much more, “I need to know about in-depth coding data so that I can teach my therapist how to code correctly or maximally for the services provided.” It fits in with that earlier conversation about prediction and all that stuff. The desire has grown tremendously out there. In addition, a lot more owners, in a positive way, are using the data so they’re not just knowing the data but if the arrival rate and reimbursement are low, now what? It’s a team meeting, an in-service, a change in protocol or procedure, and a change in systems. All kinds of different things you can do to react to these things are being taken very seriously.

We want to serve that desire. We have a lot of reports. We do take a lot of pride in the ease of them. Sometimes, it is coming to a singular number. What’s our percentage of copays in the last month or something like that? What’s our arrival rate? Sometimes it’s more complicated. We have a great report for a plan of care tracking that a lot of people tell you who’s over and under and gives you that measure of compliance. We said 2 visits a week for 4 weeks and they’re doing it and then we make it actionable. If they’re under booking relative to the POC, then the front desk can see that and say, “I’m going to get in touch with this person and get them to book. That loop can be closed.”

I will say this because it’s a fun conversation at least for a minute, for a dork like myself. The thing that people need to know about reports is that any report can have a methodology. If you’re serious about it, what you have to do is understand the methodology of a report. I’ll give a very simple question, “How many visits did you do last month?” The immediate question is, “Do we want to include cancels and no-shows? Do we want to exclude certain patients? We don’t count those as visits even though technically, they’re on the calendar as a visit but it’s a free screen so we don’t want to count that.”

What the practices that are successful with this are doing is they understand what the report is made to do because that can differ. Some can give you the shotgun approach like, “We count every visit, canceled or not, every color all the time.” Others will give more granular filters. We do have the facility to build reports for people if they need it. A lot of times, what we’re seeing is there may be different aspects of the business. There’s a wellness aspect to the business that’s cash and we want to think about that differently than we do other pieces.

We do try and honor all of those things and use what we think are very common sense assumptions or designs and then try and make that transparent so that the person can understand what it is and not do something because they think they’re interpreting the data in some way. I always tie this back to clinical. Everybody does their poster presentations and they’re beautiful. A lot of the time is dedicated to explaining the parameters of the study or the assumptions that were made. It’s the same thing and there’s no simple answer.

Another one is, “What’s your average reimbursement per visit?” “Which visits? Do we want to include all insurance? Do we know that XYZ is an outlier and they screw up the average so we want to take them out of the pool before we do that so we don’t end up with a skewed number that is messing us up?” It’s intriguing that data has tons of value and practices should value it. I don’t think they should overvalue it but they should value it and use it to make changes and actions that are going to improve the metric, maintain the metric if you’re happy with it, or increase it if it’s not quite where you want it to be.

I’ve always looked at our industry, the physical therapy industry specifically, as being 10 to 20 years behind technology-wise. I’m wondering. You’re in that space. Are there things that you wish the industry had or was implementing from a technology standpoint that’s not capable to take on at this time that the rest of the world is integrating? Is there anything like that?

People think of healthcare in general to some degree that way. A lot of it is because security hurdles are some of the challenges that most clients don’t think about anymore. Our company and industry in the EMR space have taken on a lot of those pieces. We try and present it as like, “Here’s a login screen. Go.” It’s never that simple. I don’t think the PT space is any worse than any of the rest of healthcare. Everybody’s got a story about their physician or dentist. For whatever reason, dentists are very good at being at the forefront of some of this stuff.

I was thinking to myself, “Why is that true?” Part of it is their visit cadence is so different. If they don’t remind you 60 times, you don’t show up for the cleaning 6 months later. They’ve been by necessity done it. There’s an old anecdote about Microsoft Word, which I’m sure everybody knows. They did some study and said, “Most people are unaware of 80% of the features in the thing.” It can do all this stuff and nobody does it or even knows about it. A lot of times with an EMR or any system, EMR is a good one because it’s a backbone. It’s all about implementation.

If your staff are not on the same page or your processes are very ad hoc, meaning nobody sat down and thought about how to intake a patient, and you just go, “Nathan’s at the front desk. I don’t know. He does it on the phone. The patients get in there. I have no idea,” it’s not bad in the sense that your patients are getting in there but if we spent an hour thinking about it, maybe we could have a better patient experience, have less work for Nathan, and we wouldn’t need two front desk people. Maybe we would only need one and we’re struggling to hire that second one because there’s nobody out there to hire but it turns out with some process improvements and meshing that with the tech.

My only thought is you can’t just think about software like you open the box and it makes your practice better. I see this all the time with owners that I talk to. The ones that are consciously thinking about the process and how it fits in with the humans and the tech seem to have the best handle on things and have the best time in situations where somebody leaves. That can often be a huge problem like, “Nathan has been here for twenty years. He just left. We don’t know what to do.” The practices that are intensely focused on that seem to bounce back or not even have any detriment from that stage. It’s like, “Bring somebody in new. Here’s how we do it. This is our process.” It works.

Software is not just about opening a box to make your healthcare practice better. It is about consciously thinking about the process and how it fits in with human users.
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That resonates with me that we might not be aware of the capabilities of a lot of our EMRs because we don’t spend the time in them. We use them to meet the bare minimum and get the things that we know need to get done. If we knew a little bit more and optimize what we had in front of us, there could be better processes and procedures, less manpower necessary, or even time and energy necessary if we optimize what was in front of us.

This is probably a conversation for another day but this is what the whole thing about owners working on the business versus in the business thing that we often hear. Getting out of the day-to-day if you can, at least a little bit of time, that’s when you have the mind space to think about how it’s going and how these processes are working as opposed to just putting out fires all the time. That’s something you focus on, talk about often, coaching roles, and that sort of stuff. You have this time. Here’s what you could do with it if you want to put it into the business. This is a way that you can productively do so. It can make a big difference. It could maybe even deliver you more time, which is where you started with it.

Maybe you do sit down and watch all the training videos regarding the EMR. What do they say? Ninety percent of people never watch all the videos and then complain about what the system doesn’t have after the fact.

I can confirm that. It might be 99% but whatever it is, it’s a high percentage. Our challenge is to make it intuitive enough that people can go in and do it. I still think you can get a lot more if you put a little bit of that time but it’s a funny one and true.

How did you get into this space after all? You’re not a physical therapist, Sharif. How did you decide to get into the physical therapy space of all spaces to develop the software?

I’ve been in the tech space my entire career. I’m a finance person with an education pedigree. I’ve always been on the line between finance and tech. I always loved tech. I had a different startup years ago that was fitness-focused. Through that project and app, I started meeting PTs. You see them. They’re doing exercise clinically and they liked what we had at that time.

This is going back many years but there’s so much more to everything than exercise tracking. That’s how I ultimately got in. We said, “We have this great exercise tracking platform.” I’m thinking about I’m wearing a Garmin and many people do. Fitbit didn’t exist. All those things were not a real thing. It was a novel space at the time.

I have met some different PTs. We put together an advisory group of PTs, build out the EMR, got it out the door, and then have been steadily adding to the product since. It’s been a very exciting ride. I got to meet and work with a lot of great people over the years and still get to do that, which is pretty cool. I’ve steeped in it at this point. I know practices pretty well. I’m fortunate to work with some good folks on my team here too that are learning the same.

How long has MWTheraphy been there?

We’ve been around for a while. We pioneered built-in billing back then, which is considered cool, which is interesting. What’s old is new again for us when we’re looking to do the same things and continue to be a vanguard for the space but also fit the business side well to keep the pricing reasonable. We know that the reimbursements aren’t where everybody wants them to be. We need to be respectful of that. We provide good service to back our product up, help everybody, and do what we can to elevate PT itself. That’s important to us because we believe in it. That’s something that we try and do our part in the space to make sure that those messages get out.

I know Will Humphreys over at the black therapy and my business partner holds you guys in high regard and loves your product, what you’re developing, and how quick you are to make some changes in the system that make it even better. If people wanted to get ahold of you or learn more about the EMR, how do they do that?

I’m a big fan of Will too, as I am a fan of yours as well for sure. I appreciate that. MWTherapy.com is the easiest place to start. I want to encourage everybody to find me on LinkedIn if that’s your jam and connect with me there. I love to have a conversation with you anywhere that works, any channel that you like. If you’re on Twitter, you can find us there at @MWTherapy. You might expect everywhere but if you’re interested in learning more about the product, it’s MWTherapy.com. If you want to connect with me, LinkedIn is great. I welcome that. I always enjoy meeting and talking with anybody and everybody. It’s an open door.

I’ve got to ask. What does MW stand for?

You’re not the first to ask. It stands for Merlin like the Magician and then Wave, which is the name of the company. There’s not a great story that I could share. I’ve always thought I should come up with a cool story. It’s like when you get a huge injury and you want to have a cool story about how you got it but it turns out, you just stubbed your toe on a piece of furniture. That’s what MWTherapy is. We are and have been in rehab so all of our clients are PTs, OTs, and speech providers but PT is the bulk of our effort and space.

Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it. It was great talking with you.

It was great talking with you too. I hope everybody enjoyed it. I hope to have an opportunity to come back on in the future so we can talk about the weather or anything else, EMR related, whatever goes on. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Nathan.

Thank you.

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