The Direct Impact This Innovation Has on Revenue
Mansoor Ahmed returns to share results from therapists using AI dictation for documentation, including gains in visits per day and EBITDA, and why owner involvement drives the outcome.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Paul Martin's Crucial Conversations. We are bringing one of our most favorite guests back today for today's episode of Crucial Conversations. And so today we have Mansoor Ahmed. Mansoor is the CEO as you all know of Wiz Health. And really excited to talk to Mansoor since our last discussion today about some updates on what's going on and what Mansoor is seeing because he's in the innovation of physical therapy world every single day. And so I'm anxious to hear how things are going at Wiz Health, some of the updates, some of the things they're seeing with results as well as just general innovation in this industry.
Man, sir, it's great to have you as always. Thank you very much, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here with you. All right, let's jump in. All right. So, you know, it's been many months since we had our first discussion. And what I'd like you to do, Mansoor, is share some of the biggest takeaways that you have seen with some of the therapists out there that are using Wiz Health and very specifically Wiz Dictate. And I'm really interested certainly in describing updates as well as how has this enhanced productivity and revenues because that's what every physical therapy business owner is trying to drive from innovation.
So walk me through some of the updates. Yeah, absolutely Paul. As you know viz dictate is an AI documentation solution on your mobile app and the providers who started using it have seen a significant improvement in their work life balance and as a result 90 to 95% of providers who transitioned from typing to dictation have not gone back. They have stuck with it. And what they're seeing is that they can see more patients. They can finish their documentation before they go home and spend more time with patients and also hit their productivity bonuses.
So, it's a win for them for sure. Now, there's a significant habit change that they have to think about when they make this change. And that really is when you're typing, you're thinking at a slower rate than when you're talking. You know, when you dictate, you're actually documenting about four times faster than typing. So, you have to make that mental switch and get used to dictating. But once you get used to dictating there is no going back. Now in terms of you know how this has helped clinics in terms of their productivity what we have seen is significant increases in VPH.
And most of the providers are seeing at least one additional visit per day. Now, if you do a simple math, $100 per visit, that's $2,100 in incremental revenue to the bottom line. Now, most of our costs are fixed salaries and rent. So, any increase in revenue really results in better EBITDA. So, one clinic for instance, a three-month period this year compared to last year, you know, when they did not have the tool, they saw a 9% increase in productivity, but they had 8% less providers. That's significant because what it did was it translated into 15% higher [snorts] EBITDA.
So, so we think that this is a win-win-win solution. Win for the patients because the P the PTs are spending more time with them. Win for the providers because of the reasons I mentioned and win for the clinics because it's resulting in higher productivity and better EBITDA. So, so those are the takeaways. Now one thing that I have to mention to you is the benefits and the improvements are also a direct function of management involvement. You know just like any other project like if you have a coding initiative project you know to improve coding you have to be involved and for those clinics where the clinic directors have been involved the owners have been involved we've seen very good results.
We had one clinic where the owner was not that involved and the results were very mediocre. So so that's something as a takeaway that we have to think about. Sure. So leadership has to be involved. And I think you know as a leader you really have to be involved mostly when there's change. And you know while you know the downstream benefits of this are enormous it is change and yeah owners got to be involved. It's also really interesting Mansoor you know going from typing to dictation and you know I myself I thought about this I was in a physician visit and I really liked hearing what was going to go in my note and in fact I asked a question about it and then he was able to answer it and then it we just continued on from there.
But it didn't seem like his attention was, you know, a mile away. He seemed like he was still listening, you know, eye contact while he was dictating, which I thought was interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Some of our best providers, we talked to them and we said, "How have you incorporated dictation into your workflow?" Because that it has to be part of the workflow. And what they tell us is that they inform the patient. They say, "Look, we're not we're not talking to our friends. We are actually dictating your note and documenting your visit." And they're documenting specifics.
It's not a general template. They're documenting specifics about that patient. And what they do is when they're watching the patient exercise, they just complete the dictation. And so the patient knows that they're getting better patient care. And not a single patient has had any issues with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and going back to the productivity as well, you know, we as we engage companies and do assessments, I it's very rare that we don't find a company that is having trouble recruiting and you know, it could be, you know, we're down three therapists, but then when you look at the productivity, if their productivity was at or above what should be expected from a physical therapist on a weekly, daily, hourly basis, is they wouldn't need three more therapists that they can they could do it right with the therapists that they have.
So I think that's again another big push to drive that productivity when you're down therapists. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Mansoor, what has been the impact of Wiz Health products on again what we just described? The biggest challenge in rehab right now is recruiting. How are you finding this impacts company's ability to recruit better or not? Okay. Very good question, Paul, because I asked the same question to the owner of a of a you know, several clinics in Dallas. And what she said was this. She said, "Look, if you were to talk to candidates, you will find that most of their offers are similar.
You know, benefits, salary range, except if you're competing with a hospital, that's a different story. But if you're competing with PT clinics, most of them have fairly similar benefits and fairly similar salary packages. So what is it that differentiates one clinic from the other? And so what she has done is she talks about work life balance which is especially important for the young grads. She talks about how we've got or she's got the tools with the dictation with the AI documentation tools to be able to make sure that they can have a good work life balance as well as hit their productivity bonuses.
So she's using this as a recruiting tool and she's had some very good success with that. And so she also views it as a retention tool. You know, for a therapist who's been typing and taking home for almost, you know, one hour a day or so on, if they are now able to finish work, if they're now able to spend more time with patients that they really enjoy, if they are now able to hit their bonuses, their productivity bonuses, and take more money home, you know, chances of them leaving and going to another clinic go down.
And so, it's become a retention tool. And so I think this has benefited both recruitment as well as retention. Yeah, sure. You know, and I think the whole work life balance I can tell you when we started hearing that from business owners this probably started maybe 10 to 15 years ago that therapists were really interested in work life balance. I should have known my kids were very interested in what could they do in terms of a business or a job that would give them that work life balance.
But we just never thought about that as therapist 20, 30 years ago. But it's a real thing and we either embrace it and help and guide young therapists on how to achieve that work life balance. Or we dismiss it. We look the other way and we say, you know, we were never like that and then therapists will just go find a company that has the level of understanding them so that they actually talk about it. So I think it's huge and the fact that you know some of the innovative things that you guys are working on as well as others are guiding that could be a big boost for the industry for sure.
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, one of the tools that we in the past, and we we've been doing this for probably 20 years, something that we call our payer cheat sheet. Now, that doesn't mean we're cheating, but what it does mean is that when you see a patient, we used to have, you know, in the chart somewhere, you know, a grid and, you know, the lettering and typing was about this big and it had all the insurers and all the rules and all. And we just, you know, said a prayer that the therapist would look at that before they treated their patient to know what they can bill for, what they can't bill for, how many units, etc., etc., etc.
So you know this enabled therapists to have you know notes on multiple payers and they could find some specific payer for the patient they were working on. It was moderately effective if owners really pushed and guided that. But it sounds like Wiz Health may have come up with a better solution to that than the paper with a thousand words. [snorts] Right. So, you know, Paul, one of the best things about talking to end users is that they have answers and they have solutions in innovations that make a lot of practical sense.
So I was talking to a PT and she said, "Look, I know this the schedule is on my mobile app, but what I don't know is how do I, you know, what are the requirements for this payer? Can you put all that information so that at a glance I can look at it within two seconds? I know exactly I've got my phone in my hand and I can look at it within a second." And I said, "Wait a minute. You already have that data in the EMR somewhere someplace.
Look, I don't have time to go and hunt and peck and figure out where the data is in the EMR. And when we interviewed several PTs, 70 80% of them were not even looking for that data. You know, they were just treating the patients without thinking about all the payer requirements for that visit by that particular payer. So what we did was we actually built all that data in. We spoke to some compliance experts. We are not being prescriptive. We're not telling them, you know, what treatments or how long to treat.
All we're doing is we're saying this is the payer an AMA versus 8 minute rule. Perhaps they don't pay for hot packs, hot and cold packs. They don't pay for that. And oh by the way you know they they require time in timeout you know those requirements which are important to make sure that particular visit is documented and also gives the pts some thought about how to optimize their time you know what's the best use of my time for this particular visit and it provides them and so we call it payer reminders you know it's just a reminder it's there for you and so it's a high-tech version, but it's on their fingertips.
And so that further makes sure that you don't lose revenue and you're treating the patient appropriately. And so that's the solution by talking listening and talking to the end users. Yeah. And have you found the response is that therapists are embracing having that information or you know in the past it's been you know I do what I want as a therapist and what it doesn't matter what gets paid for or not I'm going to do what I need to do. Which side do you think that's leaning towards?
It's too early because we're in the initial phases of roll out. So, it's too early to answer that question, but I think in the next few months, we'll have hard data because we'll be able to prove did they look at it and did they do something about it before they actually treated the patient. And so I think in the next few months, we'll have hard data to answer that question, Paul. I'll bet you a beer at the next PPS that you get very positive response from them having the information.
Yeah, I'd say we also talked the other day and you said you guys have added a new product in regards to patient eligibility which is also a key piece to that whole patient flow through to getting paid. Talk to me a little bit how that works. Yeah. So, Paul, one of the challenges that we have with front desk is constant turnover. And sometimes you have folks who truly don't fully grasp all the nuances of eligibility and it's fairly complex. And so, if you look at traditionally what's been done, front desk either looks at a PDF which is five, six pages long and try to decipher it.
They go to websites or they sometimes even make phone calls to f figure out what the eligibility is. Takes five to 10 minutes to do all of that and they also then have to figure out whether an O is required or not for initially val or for treatment and then they have to figure out okay what's the patient estimate you know for this particular visit. So all these things that they do really has not changed a whole lot. So we found an opportunity to completely automate it.
We said why is all we need is the basic information, the insurance information, the insurance ID. We can get all this information, extract the right data by putting in some smart rules and algorithms and then fill all that data within the EMR. So the pay the front desk doesn't have to put in data in all these different fields. All that is done automatically for them. And so now what we have done is alleviated that burden from the front desk and they don't have to worry about authorization rules because we have a very smart database which knows exactly by payer by plan sure what you know authorizations are needed and all that is built in.
And so I was talking to the to the supervisor of the front desk at one of the of one of our clients and what he said was what this has done for him is he says I don't have to worry as much about eligibility because I know it's accurate and I know it's consistent. And the other thing is I don't have to worry about training. So he says when I have a new person at the front desk it takes me two weeks to train instead of two months.
So I think that you know we have to look at every single process and say how can we remove the administrative burden how can we make life easier for the front desk how can we make it more act how can we make our processes more accurate and that's exactly what we've done. Sure. Sure. And all of that driving towards that therapist to patient relationship and truly driving a connection. Because sometimes that comes down to time and if the front desk is over here trying to you know as opposed to engaging with the patient which is the first start of engagement right makes a big difference.
So really interested to know Wiz Health your team and what are some of the fundamental principles that guide how you guys will select the next area of focus of innovation and kind of how you select your targets to determine what innovation is needed and necessary. Yeah. So one of the things I try to do Paul is I try to talk to very experienced folks you know be it executives be it therapists and I ask them what is a problem which is you've tried to solve for several years and have not been able to solve and then I go look for tools you know new technologies which might exist that did not exist before to help them solve it and the classic example Example of this was when I was talking to the senior executive of a large pback company.
What they said what he said was he said I'd been trying to solve this documentation burden for several years and what we realized is now we have a new tool genai you know chat GPD and Gemini and so on and that's what we leveraged in order to build this dictate. So so that's one way we look at it. The second way we look at it is, you know, if you just stand and observe and look at the processes and look at pain points and I'll give you a small example.
A couple of years ago, I was I was sitting next to a front desk person just observing what she was doing and an elderly gentleman walked up patient. He walked up and he said, "I need an appointment." And u the front desk person responded, "Mr. Smith, what time would you like it and when would you like it?" and he said,"Well, Thursday at 8:00 would be great." And she looked at the schedule and she said, "Yep, we've got a slot. Thank you very much. And we'll confirm this slot." And I started thinking about it.
I said, "Wait a minute. 8:00 to 10:00 is the busiest time in our clinics." You know, I know that because, you know, we used to own those clinics. And so the first thing that I did was I talked to the practice owner and I said, "Why did she do this?" And you know, she was slightly exasperated and she said, "Look, I've tried training, but sometimes they forget and so the wrong patients are being put in those slots when those slots could have been used for folks driving to work for instance." Sure.
Right. So then we started thinking about this. Why does the front desk need to remember all of this? So we started building a tool which has all the rules for the payer, all the rules for the clinic, any preferences by the patient. You know double booking versus single booking rules initially valves versus visits you know all and then also we can build in probability of arrival. We know what type of you know patient has a challenge which with being there. So we can build all these rules and we built them so that we could now predict exactly which slot needs to be booked for which patient and so we give them three options.
We say this is the best option just like Google maps you know if you're selecting a route you know it tells you the best route and it tells you an alternate route. And so that's what we've done and we're very excited about the AI scheduling tool which we will be bringing to the market in the next couple of months and we think that will really simplify the life of the front desk person but at the same time optimize every single slot you know and make sure that it's automatically filled and it's also the right slot for that particular patient.
Sure. Sure. You know, it's interesting because I feel like every physical therapy practice has like that one, maybe two front desk folks that can do that. They just they automatically they just they just do it, right? But you got the other nine or 10 that only do it sometimes and then on a bad day they do it zero. And just like you said, you got a Medicare patient coming in at 8:30 in the morning when you know when the therapist talks to the patient. I could have come in anytime today.
It didn't really matter. But I like eight o'clock. So anyway, I think that's huge. And I think for that to kind of think for them will really be a gamecher. Scheduling, we say this all the time, when it comes down to productivity, scheduling is one of the biggest factors in driving that productivity. If it's not done right, it's really hard for therapists to be productive, right? You can predict your VPH based looking at your calendar. Yeah. So let's go beyond what where your focus is again, which is kind of enhancing you know therapist productivity, front desk productivity and let's look two years and even five years.
You know, Tom Carton and I group is he always asks companies one, three, five years, where are you going to be? Where do you think this industry in terms of innovation could or will be kind of looking out two and even five years? Yeah. So Paul I think any tool which will enhance the patient experience will be readily adopted and so think of kiosks you know it's an easier way for the patient to interact with a knowledgeable front desk person at the same time helps the clinics reduce cost but it gives them access and you can Think about what's going on in outside PT.
You know, go to a McDonald's and you have a kiosk, right? Or you go to a grocery store and you have a kiosk for selfch check. So I think you will see more of patient experience tools become more and more common. We also I also think that AI will become a utility. And what I mean by that is just like electricity, it'll get built into products and so you'll see that built into building products. You'll see it built into anything that can help you eliminate human error or improve the process.
So, so I think that's what's going to happen in the near term. Now, long term there's certain trends which business trends or you know demographic trends that we know exist. You know, we have we have an older demographic now and that's going to continue. Demand for P pts will continue to increase or physical therapy will continue to increase at the same time you have consolidation in the industry you have reimbursement pressure we have margin pressure so all those things will still I think exist so then the question then becomes which technology how are you going to use technology and which technology are you going to use to make sure you provide patient what they need when they need it and also how can you do all of this at a lower cost.
Sure. Right. So that's the conundrum, right? And so you've got all these tools out there. You've got teley health, but now what we're seeing is the emergence of a hybrid teley health. And so I was talking to a PT friend of mine and she said she's getting a whole bunch of ads for her to treat pel women's pelvic health patients at home. So, this is perfect for a PT who wants to be a stay-at-home mom, for instance. That's that's an emerging trend. You've got advanced prosthetics, you've got, you know, virtual reality, you've got augmented reality, you have, you know, motion detection software.
So, you've got all these technologies. So, the question then becomes, you know, when will any of these technologies hit an inflection point? You know if you look at technologies what typically happens is they go through this hype cycle right there's a hype of the new technology there's a disappointment and then gradually it becomes part of life sure and if you look at inflection point even for AI back in 2010 deep learning algorithms existed but only with the introduction of chat GPD by open AAI in November of 2022 22 did the whole explosion of the awareness of AI start taking place and so now it's being built into products and it's going to take a few years to get there so I think all these technologies have the potential to improve the patient experience at a lower cost but at what inflection point that's the difficult question to answer now if you look beyond that you know payers are also using AI in different ways, but if they and they have the deep pockets to do that compared to providers.
And so the challenge that we will have is if payers start using it to look at claims and start denying claims, it becomes harder for the providers. So that's something that we need to think about. My personal goal and hope is that for systems to be truly interoperable. You know, we've talked about interoper interoperability for decades now and but it's not happened. So if you look at you know the data that a PT gets for a patient's health a patient may have seen his primary care might have gone through a surgery at an ASC and now come to physical therapy but what does the PT get just a referral which just says knee surgery you know four times a week for six weeks they don't have the full picture so if that became a reality that would be a gamecher for us because we could provide better patient care.
So, these are the things I see down the road happening hopefully and I'm very optimistic about our future. Great points and you know, we're continuing to reach out because we want to make physical therapy business owners aware of what's going on out there. Many times as you know in your own business in your own clinics you know you're inside you don't see but you know there are companies that way beyond tellaalth it's remote physical therapy and you know they could be in California and see patients all over the country and again you lose that therapist the therapist hands you lose the whole therapist real deep interaction and you know so I my voice out to the industry is let's be aware and there may be situations where as opposed to continuing to try to just beat them, you know, maybe we join them.
There may be a segment of patients in our market that, you know, we could be the right referral source that they just will not come in and see a therapist, you know, three times a week for four weeks. But we become a part of that or again we continue to fight it. But you know there are companies out there that are doing this now and I want to make you know everyone aware of it as opposed to just you know hoping they don't succeed so that we continue to have our patients.
But, you know, if there's a way to partner with some of these companies with, you know, obviously, you know, hands-on physical therapy, that could be an opportunity for some of the larger companies and maybe some of the smaller regional and local companies. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We have to we have to be innovative in order to make sure that we can serve the patients as well as take care of our own businesses and be profitable. Absolutely. And I think awareness is the first step, right? So Mansoor, as always, you have given us an enormous amount of information.
I'm real excited to hear how things are going at Wiz Health and how you guys, you know, it started with Wiz Dictate. And now, you know, it's a whole array of products. Really excited to see how the eligibility side goes because I believe that's an absolute gamecher. But let's keep talking and I really appreciate you spending time with us today. Thank you very much, Paul. It was a pleasure talking to you. And for any of you out there who have any questions on my conversation today with Mansoor Ahmed and Wiz Health, click below and let's talk. Thanks and have a great day. Thank you.
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