The Challenge

WebPT is the leading physical therapy electronic medical record (EMR) system. With comprehensive and HIPAA-compliant technology, WebPT allows physicians to stay therapy-centric and for clinics to stay digitally scalable. Through

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Keeping Detailed Patient Charts Without Detracting from Patient Care

While WebPT streamlines making patient records more accessible and accurate, any physician using any EMR would tell you that patient charting is their least favorite part of the job. Instead of spending time with patients, physicians get bogged down making sure their records are detailed for their own internal use, patient reference, and to submit to insurance companies.

Often, updating patient notes includes typing the same phrases over and over again, from simple words like “patient” to longer paragraphs of exercise descriptions. That might not sound too bad for 1 or 2 patients, but imagine the headache of repetitively writing the same notes for your 10th patient all in the same day.

Quote about why patient charting sucks

That’s why WebPT physicians need an easy solution to quickly and effectively chart patient details and treatment plans.

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The Solution

Improving the physician experience

Michael conducts home visits as a travel physical therapist on a residential island in the Tacoma, WA area. Like many physicians, his days are lined up back-to-back with 8-9 appointments each day, when he checks in with how his patients are feeling, practices physical therapy exercises, and fills in evaluation notes

Patient notes on WebPT include subjective, exercises and assessments sections. Michael usually fills these notes in while his patient rests, but the 5 minute breaks are rarely enough to finish, and with the time spent driving between his 8 patients factored in, he doesn’t have any time to spare catching up on patient notes. His previous physical therapy clinic used a software with built in shortcuts, but when he switched over to WebPT, he immediately started looking for a similar solution.

Trigger: ptt Shortcut: patient

Trigger: x1 Shortcut: 1 set of 10 repetitions

Trigger: -cont Shortcut: Patient will continue to benefit from physical therapy to improvement their mobility and strength.

Already having a list of prepared shortcuts from his previous company, Michael was able to integrate Magical into his workflow in only 5 minutes. Now, Michael not only uses Magical to expand shortcut text, but also to easily fill in variable information between patients (for example, name or severity of injury). He uses Magical for every patient, every day, to quickly and efficiently document patient visits. In fact, his notes are so comprehensive that several of his coworkers have warned him not to burn himself out by spending too much time writing notes.

If I couldn’t use Magical, it would slow my progress to have to think more about writing a novel and less about getting through the key points are needed for patient care and patient documentation.

Michael spends all day on WebPT while he’s working with patients, and because of Magical he’s able to not only keep up with patients during his sessions, but catch up his notes quickly on the ferry ride home so he can decompress when he gets home and improve his work life balance.

All the little things start to add up… Magical makes it so much easier to quickly and efficiently document things… It saves a ton of time, and it’s free. - Michael Kovach

With Magical, Michael is able to save 1.5 hours a day keeping his patient notes up to date - or around 8 hours per week.

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Getting back to what matters: patient care

Jorge sees mostly Medicaid and Medicare patients at Steppin’ Up Physical Therapy in Fort Wayne, IN. Last year, he saw the most patients in his entire clinic (over 600!) and regularly sees 10-11 patients a day. In order to maintain such a high output, Jorge uses Magical to complete more than 80% of his patient notes, saving him an extra hour every day.

Steppin’ Up Physical Therapy’s motto is “Compassion, Hospitality, and Results.” With a person-first mindset, their physicians prioritize the eye contact and one-on-one time that show that they care about their patients’ recoveries. Before Magical, Jorge had stacks of digital sticky notes that he would copy-paste from, requiring him to keep his eyes on his screen. With a text expansion solution like Magical, he can care for his patients in a way that reflects his physician philosophy of putting patients first.

If you’re paying a copay to come see a physical therapist, you don’t want someone who’s just staring at your screen. It doesn’t feel like you’re being listened to. It’s a balance between giving patients my attention and not letting myself get behind.

Michael’s shortcuts not only help him refocus on his patients, but also help his patients continue to receive care through their insurance. Unlike many other fields of medicine, physical therapy requires extensive justification and detailed progress updates to ensure patients receive reimbursements and coverage from their insurances. Jorge’s shortcuts ensure that the insurance companies have the information they need to continue providing the necessary care.

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For any patient, goal setting and progress updates are especially crucial towards insurance documentation - Jorge might have up to six goals for a patient, and Magical makes it easy for him to fill all of the fields just a few keystrokes.

Especially where I’m at where I see a lot of Medicaid patients, I have to justify the need for therapy. When it comes to insurance, your job is to prove to them that the patients need it and to prove it more you need to be wordy. I don’t have to worry about that with Magical.

With Magical, Jorge ensures his patients continue to receive the utmost care without burning out from patient charting.

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The Results

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In the past 12 months (October 2020 - October 2021), Magical has saved 357 physicians over 10,000 hours for physicians on WebPT. They’ve accumulated:

• 50 billion characters expanded
• 141,080 fills
• 16,747 shortcuts

And we’re just getting started.

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