Accelerated Rehabilitation Centers Success Story

Raintree Systems, Inc. has a proven track record of building long-term partnerships with healthcare organizations that are driven to succeed on three levels. We believe there is an important distinction between the words “customer” and “partner”. At Raintree, we don’t aspire to develop customer-vendor relationships. Our company’s mission is to build partnerships with every organization that uses our applications. Our primary objective is to align our company’s efforts with the strategic objectives of our partners.

Over the course of our 25+ years within the healthcare software solutions industry we have discovered that most medical providers desire to achieve three primary objectives. Simply put, they want to first provide excellent customers service, second to grow and third to maintain profitability throughout their organization. Accomplishing all three of these mission critical goals is often easier said than done. It is next to impossible to concurrently achieve each of these objectives absent a feature rich, flexible and scalable business management application. There is fundamental truth to the point that vision cannot become reality without the right systems. Below you will see an example of how Raintree developed a partnership that has enabled both companies to attain more than they could have imagined when their relationship began.

Accelerated Rehabilitation Centers (ARC) is a leading multi-site, multi-state outpatient physical therapy (occupational therapy, and speech therapy) provider. The partnership between ARC and Raintree started in the summer of 2000 under challenging circumstances that were outside of the control of each organization. ARC was at the time an established healthcare provider with just over 30 clinics across multiple states in the Midwest United States. They were growing to a level that exceeded both the functionality and scalability of their existing software management application. ARC recognized the limitations of their existing software management application and began a market search for a replacement solution. After reviewing many industry software products and completing due diligence, ARC had determined Raintree was the ideal solution provider for their organization.

As Accelerated Rehabilitation Centers and Raintree Systems, Inc. were in the final application procurement stages, ARC’s existing practice management application crashed. ARC had to shift from a methodical approach to system replacement over several months to one that would take only weeks, without sacrificing quality and suffering cash flow emergencies. They hired their current Director of Information Technology, Chris Borse, to come in and manage the implementation. The project plan was rapidly adapted from a scheduled 3 month implementation process to a system go-live date that was less than 3 weeks out from the start date.  The implementation project leads realized the wisdom of the saying “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”. Two practice management systems had to be converted; one that was on a time sharing system without direct access to the data tables, and the other on a system that was no longer functioning and could not be restored. Much of that data was actually converted from paper through an optical character recognition (OCR) project.

In spite of these very large challenges, the project team successfully implemented Raintree’s Patient Registration, Scheduling, Account Receivables Management and Reporting Modules within the 3 week period. Raintree was deployed within all 30 clinics with minimized negative productivity and reimbursement impact.

“The key to our successful deployment was exceptional teamwork and flexibility. Raintree dedicated expert resources and helped resolve critical implementation issues very rapidly and with impressive ingenuity,” said Chris Borse.

ARC management and administration teams were comprised of a relatively small but efficient staff. In fact, Borse was the single IT resource within their organization. This made the installation of an easy to deploy and maintain application a primary critical success factor.

“With conversion, training, and go-live so compressed, a less flexible system or less capable team of engineers and project managers would have caused long and expensive delays,” according to Borse.

Raintree’s ultra-thin client Internet based architecture was an ideal solution to this challenge. It was equally important that their users were trained and supported via the phone and Internet as flying to many of their remote locations would have been time consuming and costly. Raintree’s built-in user shadowing solutions enabled ARC to train and monitor their employees in the use of the application. Other available technologies were not an option as they were both not HIPAA compliant and not easily deployed over low bandwidth Internet connections.

One of the other principle objectives of ARC’s implementation of Raintree was to ensure that the solution would meet their current and future reimbursement management needs. Borse’s background in the practice management software industry and experience in the direction of healthcare IT and reimbursement departments gave him a strong set of tools that he expects to find in a good practice management system. It is not enough to simply record data for scheduling, billing, and documentation purposes.

Borse summed this up well: “A good system helps the company produce cleaner bills with less intervention, timely reports showing key trends, and flexible tools for data analysis – all leading to better management and reimbursement.”

Raintree’s fully integrated solution ensured that patient workflow was seamless from initial registration to scheduling to encounter to billing/collections and finally to completed treatment with a balance paid in full.

Accelerated Rehabilitation Centers final critical success factor was implementing a software application that could scale to the desired growth level in terms of both management reporting and payer compliance. They had the dual responsibility to grow with profit at every level and to maintain financial and clinical compliance objectives that would meet tough state and federal standards. Raintree rules based patient management tools and reporting functionality enabled ARC to accomplish both global objectives without the need for lengthy month-end manual processes. They were able to view reports at the clinic, region and corporate levels with the ability to roll reports up to the appropriate management resources.

Today Accelerated Rehabilitations is roughly 4 times as large as they were during the summer of 2000. They have a centralized billing staff that is among the most efficient in the industry in terms of employee to site measurement metrics. ARC has an exceptional payer compliance record and is continuing to expand in terms of size and service offerings.  They deploy new product features in their use of Raintree Therapy Manager and produce clinical outcomes that are significantly above physical therapy market norms. One thing has remained constant at ARC over the past 8 years. Chris Borse and Raintree work together very closely to ensure that all ARC’s practice management needs are met quickly and cost-effectively, which is part of why they now have more than 100 sites across the Midwest. Together ARC and Raintree have established a working partnership that has aligned their strategic objectives. This has enabled both organizations to realize mutually beneficial and profitable growth within their respective industries. This is the type of relationship Raintree desires to foster with each of its strategic alliance partners.

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