Lake Washington Physical Therapy is a fun, interactive, and community-based clinic. With one look at their philanthropy and dog bio page, it’s easy to see.
Between managing patient scheduling, consulting for other practices, and even seeing patients himself, clinic owner Ben Wobker also makes it a priority to be super plugged into technology for his practice (after all, they’re nestled right between Google and Microsoft).
Ben was already well acquainted with the world of tech, but Luma pushed his practice to the next level.
The major pain points we had were sending reminders out to individuals that, at least with our EMR, could not be disbursed to T-mobile for some reason. In Seattle, we have a T-mobile regional headquarters, so I would say 10-15% of people are on T-Mobile. We had to email them or call them. Which, if you look at statistically, email response is about 30%, and phone is about 10%. So to get to that 70-90% through text is pretty huge.
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Our cancellation rate is already significantly better than the national average prior to Luma. For the physical therapy industry it’s about 10.5% which is high. Ours is about 6%. Luma allowed us to get down to 5%. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but with our family of clinics we have 14 or 15 practitioners, so 1% is a substantial amount by the end of the year. Annually, that’s about 20-30,000 dollars.
For us, we’ve had a really lengthy waiting list and it was difficult to get through everyone on it. It really took the equivalent of a quarter to half time MTE to basically address the cancellations we’ve had previously. We also wanted it to be done fairly, we wanted everyone to have a fair chance. If you get on our waitlist, you will get contacted. We didn’t want to play favoritism.
This gave us a huge leg up on that. We saw our vacancy go from around 17% in our EMR, to around 9%. Vacancy equals loss of revenue, so for us it’s been a really smart adjustment. We’ve transitioned both of our clinics on to Luma for that reason.
“Right now, Luma is the best medical tech product available. We grew by two physical therapists this year and did not have to hire any additional front office staff. That’s how impressive Luma is.”
As far as our reviews go, we were way ahead of our industry, but it was very laborious. What Luma does automatically, we had to send out manually. This has allowed us to be responsive and proactive versus reactive. Before going into this, we had 90 Google reviews over the course of 7 years, and since we’ve had Luma, which has been about 8 months, we now have 130 reviews. I think having the reminders being so easy to fill out over text is a huge component to that.
I do consulting for other clinics. We are working on transitioning these clinics on to Luma because I think it’s probably the best product available as of right now. Seattle is very tech savvy, and so our patients are always baffled by how behind the medical industry is.
From our front office standpoint, we grew with two physical therapists this year and we didn’t have to hire any ancillary staff. The fact that we grew by two but didn’t have to hire any additional front staff…that’s a really impressive statistic.
